OtherEric

At this point I'm prepared to say that it is a Lovecraft cover, unless somebody can present a counterargument: 1) The Lovecraft poem is the most prominently named piece on the cover. 2) Both the cover and the interior illustration are by the same artist, in this case Finlay. 3) There are at least two passages in the poem that could have inspired the cover. 4) The cover does not appear to illustrate another piece in the issue, and Weird Tales covers at this point were based on contents more often than not. 5) They changed how they handled verse in the Table of Contents in this issue from the system they had been using for over a decade, to allow the poem to be at the top of the ToC. None of the points are conclusive in themselves, but they add up to a pretty solid case, I think. The only real argument I can find against so far is that it hasn't been recognized as a Lovecraft cover for 70 years, and I'm prepared to put that down to it being a poem, not a story, so people didn't look at it as closely.

Just because this is the Eerie 23 Club doesn’t mean you need to beat us over the head with said club.

No idea where my LCS found the one they had. Quite happy with the $50 they charged me for it, though:

Agreed that that was a very strong price right now. But, given how some other Warrens are jumping at the moment (thinking Vampi #1 specifically), I could see that looking like a reasonable price in six months. Particularly since Eerie #23 seems to have been chosen as the must-have cover from the Warrens these days. It's a good choice, as this club proves.

While I don't think the WT covers of the time necessarily tied to the stories 100% of the time, I think they did more often than not still, particularly if they named a specific story on the cover. One thing they changed with this specific issue (and then continued with going forward) was listing the verse in the table of contents mixed in with the stories, rather than listing the verse at the end of the ToC. So "Hallowe'en in a Suburb" was at the top of the contents, not the bottom where it would have been in the previous issue. For that matter, having a poem as the lead item wasn't typical either, although it wasn't unknown through the magazine's history either. A quick check of tables of contents suggests that putting verse at the bottom of the ToC started in 1941, so they changed a pattern of over a decade standing here.

More interesting is this one. I think the cover actually illustrates the Lovecraft poem, and is a previously unnoticed Lovecraft pulp cover- and the only one on Weird Tales under his own name on the US edition. My argument is over in the Lovecraft thread, but I would love to hear more people chime in, either for or against. I would particularly appreciate the opinion of @Bookeryand @RedFury, but the more the merrier.

A couple in today. The list of Lovecraft pulps I don't have that I can afford is rapidly diminishing... but it's not zero yet. This has a four page poem, Alethia Phrikodes.

I've always preferred On the Campaign Trail to In Las Vegas, personally... although I get why Vegas is the more famous of the two. Great books in any case!

I have the impression you’re talking about #3 and Wombat is talking about #17, but I could be completely wrong. As to the #3 cover, the white doorway is what sells me on it. That doorway isn’t going where you think it should, it’s connected to somewhere else.

That issue has always been an outlier because of Barks, I'm not sure how much it tells us about the Looney Tunes characters in general. Still an impressive result.

https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v44n06_1952-09 Issue is here if somebody wants to dig in and see if the cover obviously goes to a different story, my quick skim suggests it doesn't belong to either the St. Clair story (mentioned on the cover) or the Derleth story (the other interior piece with a Finlay illo.)

I suppose I should be glad they went with the partial photo cover on this one... if they had gotten the interior artist to do the front cover I never would have been able to afford a copy these days.

Today's book, an upgrade for my very beat up previous copy. Still not super high grade, but it looks vastly better than my previous copy and the gloss is just blinding.

Today's topic for discussion: is the September 1952 Weird Tales a Lovecraft cover we've been ignoring for ages? It's the more prominent of two pieces mentioned on the cover, somewhat unusually for a poem. The cover and illustration for the poem are both by Finlay, and the cover seems to be a reasonable match to the poem. "And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,/ Sprung out of the tomb's black maw/ To shake all the world with awe." Disclosure: I've got a copy on the way, so I may be biased at this point. The images are taken from online, not my scans:

This is still one of my all-time favorite pulp covers. Inhuman mythos creatures who are also librarians. Glorious!

He was pretty cool. There was still a sense of "we need to keep the line moving", so no more than basic pleasantries; but certainly not a sense of "I don't want to be here except for the money" or anything.

Bought at the LCS when it came out, signed when there was no fee beyond the $5 to get into the show. Just had to wait in line with a 3 book limit each time. I only went through once:

The Torch page is obviously not Simon-Kirby, but I figured people would still find it interesting.

My oldest Kirby book. Not actually a comic, even if there is a 1 page Human Torch story in it. Simon & Kirby did the interior illustrations other than the Torch page:

There's always the Grand Comics Database; but any individual issue depends on a) has somebody indexed it and b) how good they were at tracking down sources. Here's the Marvel UK publisher page: https://www.comics.org/publisher/3174/

I would love to find a copy of that.

I found a copy of the Sunday Newspaper parody a few years ago... it's luckily complete, but it's fragile. It really was brilliantly designed... which is true for a LOT of the Lampoon parodies.

My store let the first two people who pre-ordered the book to buy the two copies they got at cover price. I was lucky enough to be one of those. I'll be making a donation to the Hero Initiative as well. Flip it? Furthest thing from my mind. For all that I desperately wish they could have made more, I'm glad they were able to clear the rights to do the book at all, in time for George to see it. I won't lie, I teared up when I first started flipping through it.

I paid $20 for just one at the local retro store earlier today.

Nice! The three I quoted were the issues I had the most trouble hunting down from this part of the run. The first two issues might have taken me a while to finally grab, but that was more an issue of what I wanted to pay rather than an inability to locate them. The Mona Gorilla cover in particular seems to be tricky to locate, it's not quite the classic the Death issue is but it's definitely in demand compared to the others.