OtherEric

Nice! The 65c version pretty much has to be from EC, not DC; although I've never seen a definitive statement on which printings came from which publisher. We love seeing pretty much any EC's here; so welcome to the thread! I noticed your avatar; we would love to see the entire Cobweb House cover over in the Comics, Pulps, and Paperbacks thread; it's become the general paperback thread in the golden age forums.

Well said. The right material is still red-hot and getting hotter. You mention the sci-fi pulps; I think that may be a good example where people let what they know about comics confuse them about the market on pulps. I saw at least some Planet Stories issues go for frankly stupid prices a few places; I think people were equating it with Planet Comics on some level... and it just isn't remotely the same. It's a fun title with some great covers, but it's pretty common as pulps go and with a few exceptions there aren't a lot of high demand stories in there. (Although, now that I think about it, I can think of worse investments than finding a couple more copies of the July 1952 issue...)

Those weird page counts in 1952 lasted, in some cases, into 1954 on the more popular titles, assuming by 16 or 20 you mean both sides of the page. They're worth noting, but unlike the wartime cut wraps like in the original post, they were just normal wraps with an unusual total page count for the books.

You can count me out on the competition, as I already have a copy. But my suggestion for what the book is missing? Some Feldstein-edited New Trend EC stories. For all that I personally prefer the Kurtzman edited material, the book's 5 EC stories should not be four pieces by Kurtzman & crew and "Master Race" as the only story from the Feldstein side of the shop. Judgement Day and a couple of pieces from Shock Suspenstories would probably fit the bill perfectly.

It's most common on books dropping from 64 pages (+cover) to 56 pages (+cover) that I've seen. I have a few like this. Let us know exactly which book it is and we can help figure out what the count and content should be.

It presents better than my copy! A great pick-up on.what I think is the scarcest marvel treasury.

Keep it up, I’m definitely one of those nerds as well and posts like this are like pure catnip to me!

Quite true. I'll need to content myself with the first appearance of Valeria, then. Pretty sure her first marvel appearance would be Savage Tales #2, so I'm good both ways:

ISFDB says it's by Arthur Renshaw, who I had never heard of before I just looked him up. It looks like this might be his only paperback cover, or at least his only SF paperback cover.

We really want to get picky, the character actually first showed up in unauthorized Mexican comics... that actually have pretty awesome covers, from what I've seen: https://www.comics.org/series/61837/covers/ I'll just do things the simple way, and have copies of both the GSC 1 and Conan #58... and I agree, the GSC 1 shouldn't really count.

I really do need to get all of mine scanned one of these years, but lots are in storage right now. Here's a couple I have handy, I think these are the only books H. Beam Piper had in the Ace D series. I've got a couple of others from the F series by him, as well. Apparently due to an editor not liking the story, Crisis in 2140 (also known as Null-ABC) wasn't reprinted when Ace finally sorted out the rights to Piper's books in the 70's; it only came back into print when people figured out that most of Piper's work was never correctly copyright renewed.

Nothing wrong with that. For me it's Ace D-Series books that I just can't resist. Avons, I figure I've got a nice little collection that at least shows good examples of the run.

That's the cover I have on my copy; it's the interior list of titles that only goes to 12. Thank you for the info on 2nd printing of 1-12; almost every reference I can find says that if it has globe endpapers, it's a first print. Given that the interior list only goes to 12, it's possible that they had extra interiors they added a latter run of covers to. (I know from collecting Oz books that a book with mixed states of covers and interiors is not uncommon.)

That back cover matches perfectly the book I picked up today; although the interior only goes up to 12, which is in fact the number of the book. It does have the Globe endpapers as well:

So, I grabbed a copy of Black Widow #2 (Adam Hughes standard cover) at a LCS yesterday. When I got home, I discovered it was missing the sticker for the digital copy. When I took it back to get a replacement, we discovered that all their copies of the Hughes cover were missing the digital code sticker. It worked out well, they offered to trade it for a copy of the Campbell cover, which did have the code. I actually wanted the Hughes cover more, though; so after some brief dickering they sold me a copy of the Campbell cover at half price. I'm more than happy with the store on this one, and happy to have both versions. What I'm wondering is, has anybody else seen that problem with the digital code in this issue?

I found it a few years ago at Emerald City Comic Con; I think I paid under $30. I was amazed that I found that particular issue; it's my personal favorite of all the Spirit stories.

I suspect part of the reason Spirit Sections are so cheap is they're so hard to find, particularly the post-war issues. I've gotten very few over the years, they just never show up. And the no copies for sale means the prices don't go up much. The war-time, non Eisner issues, are what I see most often... and, while they do have people like Fine and Cole working on them, they're not nearly as good. So the ones that do show sales are lower value, and the market looks weird. (My copy, but the image is heavily cropped because it was meant for the DCM. The nature of how they were published means copies are often rough around the edges... the top of my copy literally has a line saying cut here:

I'm not aware of any general purpose "best of EC" collections more recent than the early 70's, although they may exist. The idea that they're all good enough that you can pick up pretty much any New Trend issue other than perhaps PANIC and it will be better than 99% of all comics ever has been fairly widely accepted for several decades, and even if you disagree with that enough people seem to agree that wholesale collections or individual issue reprints have been the release method since the East Coast Comix reprints in the 70's.

Fascinating is the exact right word for Marston's Wonder Woman. Scribbly is brilliant and underrated; but my fondness Mayer is made pretty clear by my profile pic!

Because advertisers get annoyed when you don't sell them the full page?

I keep meaning to read some of these books I've picked up inexpensively over the past year or so. The only Woolrich I've tracked down is a few Argosy's with his stories, though; and I think the only Hammett I've ever read was The Maltese Falcon back in high school. Where did you find the list of crime writers, and who else was on it?

Walt Kelly is normally thought of as an artist.... But he wrote most of the stuff he drew, as well, and he was every bit as great an author as he was an illustrator. His work on Peter Wheat is amazing.

I feel your pain. One of these years I am going to get books out of storage and go through every single one and find my All-Star Western #10; I know I have it. On the up side, I know exactly where my Eternals run is!

Just decided to follow up with this comparing the Overstreet prices (from 2019, the most recent copy of the guide I have) with Bookery's pulp guide at 2.0/ 4.0/ 8.0, since those are the price points Bookery provides. Bookery has both at $20/60/180. Overstreet has #1 at $94/188/597 and #2 at $60/120/381. Bookery is much closer to reality.

Animal comics is really a very eclectic title; as you point out even Pogo misses 3 issues. I'm happy I got my run put together several years ago.