OtherEric

Today's book:

November 1943 Weird Tales, with part 6 of "Herbert West: Reanimator". This is the last time Weird Tales (or at least the original run) prints a Lovecraft story that hadn't previously appeared in the magazine.

September 1943 Weird Tales, with part 5 of Herbert West: Reanimator finally showing up nearly a year after part 4. Reanimator holds a weird place in Lovecraft's body of work: It's generally regarded as one of his least successful stories by Lovecraft fans, but because of the movies it's one of his best known ones by people who haven't read that much by him.

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser first appeared in the August 1939 issue of UNKNOWN, I don't believe they ever had any Weird Tales appearances.

It’s how they did the shading on the cover. I would elaborate, but I can’t remember which method is zip-a-tone and which is BenDay dots, and I don’t want to give the wrong explanation

You did most of it, I just checked a couple details

Thank you; "regionally distributed" makes a lot more sense than anything else I've ever heard about the title. Today's book: Weird Tales from November 1942, with part four of "Herbert West: Reanimator"; I don't have part three yet. This book is something of a passing of the torch. As Weird Tales runs out of Lovecraft to publish, this issue introduces their great discovery of the 1940's: This has the first story by Ray Bradbury in the series, only his second professional publication and the first credited just to him. (Apparently Henry Kuttner provided some uncredited assistance on the story.)

That is exactly what I meant. So it looks like FC 918 may have actually come out before Vacation Funnies, but so close it's hard to be sure at this late date... and the story in Vacation Funnies is definitely first in story terms. This is a good catch, and we'll see what the market picks if anybody other than our very small group decides to actually care about Road Runner comics. But I think the Four Color was probably printed a few days earlier at this point, even if distribution was such that it may not have first on the racks everywhere.

Question: What's the code on the inside of the FC 918, @sagii? Vacation funnies is 588, indicating August 1958. So until I'm sure the dates are being sourced in the same manner I'm leaning towards the Giant being first still, because... The three eggs hatch in the Vacation Funnies, so it's indisputably the first appearance of the Road Runner kids in continuity terms. With that said, Mike's Amazing World has the Vacation Funnies out on June 19, and the FC 918 On June 10, so the actual release date order may actually be Beep Beep first.

Today's book. As with so many Frazetta covers, you don't fully appreciate the art until you see a copy in your own hands.

He’s enormously fun to talk to, we actually mostly discussed EC’s when I saw him at ECCC a few years ago. The ducks did come up, of course:

My copy, like most of my collection, is just a reader. But it was a very well spent $15 at ECCC 4 or 5 years ago:

July 1942 Weird Tales, with part 2 of "Herbert West: Reanimator". I've always thought this was one of the better 40's Brundage covers.

You couldn't even get MY copy for that:

A couple pickups today for my PKD collection. Book Club Editions, both are 1st Book Club printings and therefore 1st HC editions. I've got the 1st printing PB on The Preserving Machine, not sure what edition PB I have on Galactic Pot-Healer but it isn't a 1st.

With the March 1942 Weird Tales, they start reprinting "Herbert West: Reanimator". I don't quite want to call how they do it serialization... It takes them almost two years to get through the six parts of the story. They were really just throwing it in when they had room, as near as I can tell. I'm not sure if this counts as the first professional publication of the story, because I'm still very fuzzy on what exactly "Home Brew" was. I've seen it called an amateur publication, but I've also heard Lovecraft wrote the story to demand for the editor. But the payment was supposedly only $5 a chapter, which seems low even for short chapters in 1922. The few covers I've seen look far more professional than most amateur publications of the era. I suspect it was what we would now call a semi-prozine. Anybody here have a copy they could share?

I'll never be able to join this particular club. I'm happy with this as my consolation prize, though: (Some sources still list #12 as the 1st Thor, but he actually shows up in 1 panel in #11 as well.)

Swiped from the internet. Not my copy.

Starting with #217 the title might be mostly reprints, but they did go out with some very nice covers:

Starting from issue #140 I have all the issues going forward, unless you count 2nd print variants from the 2020 revival series:

My scanner is finally replaced, so as promised a bunch of covers. A couple may be repeated from photos, but I don't think I've show most of these before: