OtherEric

This is one of the only line drawn pieces I’ve ever seen by him. The only other I recall is his story in Fight the Enemy #2. Yes, it’s paperback size.

I need to track down the original version of that ad, I'm 99.9% certain it was for MAD or PANIC (or just possibly EC in general) originally and it looks bizarre advertising a book from PRIZE.

I think I forgot to post this a couple weeks ago when I got it:

What an awesome find!

It’s all Ian Levine’s fault. And he hasn’t been on these boards in years that I’ve seen.

Those images from you on pg. 1... or at least some of them... never showed for me even at first, just the link line.

I was late too. The holiday weekend messed lots of people up a bit, I suspect.

Creepy #7 thoughts: Cover: A Frazetta masterpiece, although I always slightly question the color choices on the werewolf's fur. Frontispiece: A nice Torres ad for Eerie. The Duel of the Monsters: A nice piece by Goodwin & Torres, with a very strong twist. Image of Bluebeard: No real change in my impression of the story from the Eerie Ashcan. Contrary to Axe Elf's guess, the Werebeasts page is completely different than the Werewolves page. The character in the upper left corner looks a bit like a first draft of Vampirella. I think this is the very last comic formatted page Frazetta ever did, although there are still a lot of covers, spot illustrations, and even story illustrations to come. (If anybody else has ever seen Frazetta's piece in Witzend #8, I would be curious to hear how you would describe it. Illustrated text story would be mine. It's the only later piece I'm aware of that might be called a comic story.) Rude Awakening!: The Toth stories continue to be an absolute highlight of the Warren magazines, and Goodwin provides a story tailor-made to work with Toth's style. I don't see this story working nearly as well with another artist, and I don't think some of the other stories would work nearly as well with Toth's art. Drink Deep!: A story very much in the classic EC tradition, by a couple of the classic EC creators. I enjoyed this much more than Binder's adaptations of his Adam Link stories. The Body-Snatcher!: I fear this is a story I can't really correctly assess, mostly due to accidents of name. Body-Snatchers, I tend to think of "Invasion of the...", and the first line introducing a major character as "Toddy MacFarlane" is just horribly distracting to a current comic fan reading it. Nice art by Crandall, though. Blood of Krylon: Not a super-strong story, I fear, but I think the biggest revelation so far in this reading group has been just how good Gray Morrow was, and how much his style was developing and evolving during the run. This looks magnificent, and the story is at least strong enough to give a framework for the art. Hot Spell: A decent conclusion to the issue, I particularly like the wash tones on the first page flashback prologue.

I was trying to be funny; Return is notoriously harder to find than the other two but my numbers were meant to be ridiculous. Dead serious about wanting to find my copies in storage, I do have two sets.

I really need to find my second set of these... So what do people figure the actual value for the books sold individually would be? $20 for Fellowship, $30 for Two Towers, $412 for ROTK?

I need to sit down and finish reading that…

I decided the TPB cover looked different enough from the original to grab it as well... the effect is completely different. And, of course, there's writing on my copy of Harley & Ivy Meet Betty & Veronica, but I'm good with it:

And finding the above cover convinced me I really should get the full set. (I've got the Sabrina cover somewhere as well, but no idea which box it's in at the moment.)

And the first Midwood in my collection... which is, in fact the first Midwood, before they discovered the genre that would make them famous:

Two very different books from my local store today. I've been looking for the Hyperborea collection for a while now, it's easier to find than Zothique (which I'm still looking for) but it's still pretty scarce:

I think it is fairly seriously sought after as far as it goes; the problem is the original newspaper sections tend to be scarce. They've been continually reprinted since the Warren run in any number of formats and from multiple publishers, and even before then they had more reprints than just about any other comic in the 40's-60's. With tons of various reprints and the original printings tending to not come up often enough to get the high churn to drive prices, the market is not reacting in the way you might expect such a high profile title to normally act.

If I had to guess, it's because it's the fifth reprint series, not even counting Police Comics or bootlegs, and unlike some of the others it doesn't have any new material beyond some covers.

The first Warren run I ever completed was The Spirit, then I went ahead and got the Kitchen Sink issues as well. Somewhere along the line I even got a half-dozen or so original Spirit sections.

Thank you for your review, Axe! In most cases, there's a separate person doing the lettering. But from at least the 60's on, Toth normally did his own lettering, and he has a very distinct style. I actually mentioned it in my look at "The Stalkers" in Creepy #6, because in places it looked a bit atypical for him, possibly as a deliberate effect.

I wonder if part of that is the fact the Spirit section just reprints the color sections from the first 10 issues of the magazine... there's nothing new, unlike the Vampi special where the stories are colored for the first time. I doubt that makes much difference at this point, but I suspect it could have mattered in the past.

I'm not sure where I heard the 5000 number, so take it with a grain of salt. It may be less, I would be deeply surprised if it was more.

Having finished off the Fantasy Readers, now I'm done with the SF readers as well. Wollheim really outdid himself with the cover copy on #2...

It was a MCS 6.0, so a normal grader's 7.5 or so.

I can't say I'm familiar with Simon's work, unlike his father and brother. What did he work on? Also, my apologies to anybody who saw my reaction to the previous post the first few minutes it was there. I intended "sad" but the boards decided to put up the laughing face for some reason.

A couple additions to the underground collection today: