OtherEric

Five more. I really should track down a better copy of Piracy #6, it's a beautiful, inexpensive cover:

Not terribly so. After the first issue got banned in Boston I think the title in general played it a little safer than most of the EC's.

Part of why I love Venus is that, if you put together the run, you have almost every GA genre other than funny animal covered. Sadly, I'll never complete the run, I think... I don't have either 1 or 19, both of which are becoming impossible. I do have 7 & 8, although my 8 is super low grade, rescued from a bound volume. Paid under $50 for it, at least, if I recall correctly. And I actually like the painted covers and the issues; the weird "romance with a touch of supernatural and superhero" is not like a typical romance book at all.

It's actually so faint that I hadn't realized this was a Bonnetts book until just now... but now that I have noticed it, I can't unsee it:

Continuing the "repost everything I've got" project, even if it's no longer needed since they recovered the images. Panic went out with a couple of their better covers, and the Piracy covers are pretty uniformly great in my opinion:

I've only got a few of the books; I'm unlikely to get the rest in the current market. And how I got the ones I have is obvious; at least in both cases the actual image is pretty much undamaged. (I've got the Buster Crabbe 5 as well, but can't find the scan. That one has a damaged back cover but the front is pretty nice.)

The one I don't get is #7... patching torn tigers.

And now we get to the heart of the PANIC run, I really think a lot of Panic's reputation comes from the covers of issues 5-11. Jokes that fall flat, jokes that haven't aged well, 'jokes' that nobody has figured out in 65+ years since they were published, designs that make it impossible to remember which issue is which... With all that said, I do love the Comicfidential cover.

Nice ID'ing of the book with just the corner I showed in the picture. And agreed, it's a weird one. That's why I was so frustrated when I couldn't find it... It's enough of an oddball that I understand why people were skeptical about it without a picture.

In today:

The other example is less directly relevant but, I think, more heartwarming. About 15 years ago I had to sell some books to pay the rent; and for better or worse I wound up giving up almost all of my EC's, keeping only three. The one I should have also kept was the first EC I ever owned, though, even though it was in distinctly low grade. About a decade later, I was going through boxes at Emerald City Comic Con, and I stumbled across the book again... it was beat up enough that I recognized it as mine. It was a different dealer than the one from the store I sold it to, even if it was still in the same general geographic area. Super happy to have it back:

A couple. I had described an odd double cover book I owned over in the double cover thread, but I could not find it when I went to look. It finally turned up having fallen between a couple comic boxes when I was moving everything because of the fire in my apartment building... I'm describing finding that as one of the few good things to come out of the whole mess. (Everybody got out of the building safe, and the fire was at the far end, so while I had to move with no notice my stuff wasn't damaged.)

5 more covers from my collection. Panic remains one of the most underrated EC's, in my opinion. The humor might not be as brilliant as Kurtzman's best work on MAD... but it's consistently amusing, I think.

Have you considered scanning and sharing this before you give it away? We could use it at the Digital Comic Museum.

Paging @SOTIcollector

Is it newsstand or direct? if it's direct, I would think printing error; if it's newsstand, it might be an error when the distributor was marking the tops of the books or something... I would think long and hard before bothering to submit it; unless it's for your own collection. The eye appeal could drop any value on the book even if the technical grade is high.

And 5 more for today. My least favorite of the New Direction books... but the art is frequently amazing, still:

Probably.

More MADs, finishing off the comic book run. #20 was one of my earliest EC's, and probably the first comic book MAD I ever got. It's definitely the EC I've had continually in my collection longest; it was one of only three EC's I kept when I had to sell books to pay rent. "Sound Effects" is recognized as one of the best stories ever in the MAD comic, and I also think "Cowboy" is hilarious.

Three Dimensional Tales from the Crypt of Terror #2. It's one of the only New Trend books that has never been reprinted, it's an order of magnitude harder to find than #1, and it's the one book I need to complete the (admittedly very short) run.

And the Mad experimentation continues. I think 16 is probably the best cover of this lot, followed by the 14. 15 is, unfortunately, nearly the same joke as the 14, not as well done. 17 is a brilliant gag when you consider the whole book, but the cover on its own is pretty bland on its own terms. And the 18 is, in my opinion, another misfire... although not as bad as the 13 was. One of the reason MAD is so beloved is Kurtzman's willingness to try all sorts of crazy ideas out; but when you're wildly trying new things the fact is not everything is going to work. I also think Kurtzman was hurt by going monthly... he was forced to produce more content than he could really manage comfortably in the time frame. So there's a pretty high number of misses through the series... but the stuff that hits is just brilliant.

#10 was never published in the US. It did show up in a German comic, I believe. It's unfortunate that it was missed, since the story does lead out of #9 somewhat, and even more so it introduces characters who then appear in #11. If anybody is interested, the original lettered art sold on Heritage recently. So you can get B&W scans of the whole thing to read if you want; just search for "Buck Rogers #10". (I'm not sure of the propriety of providing a direct link or I would.) Here's the splash to #10, as I said grabbed from Heritage.

5 more. Here we get into the "wildly inventive" stage of Mad covers under Kurtzman. 11 is of course a classic, I find 12 hilarious in its own way even though I know others aren't fans, and I've never seen anybody with a kind word for #13. I'm still unclear on exactly what the joke is.

I would call these my big three books this year. The Shock Suspenstories #6 speaks for itself. The Mad #5 was one of the last issues I needed to finish my run of the comic book issues of MAD, it wasn't the last I got in but it's the hardest comic issue of the title to find, the rest of the issues filled in quickly. The Adventure #151 is far and away the hardest of the books Frazetta did for DC to find, for some reason.

In today, stealing the image from the eBay listing because my scanner is down. Last issue I needed for the run; for some reason all the copies of #10 I saw were pricey and I have no idea why; it took me a while to find a copy that didn't feel crazily overpriced: