OtherEric

Did the story use some element from later Fu Manchu stories? The first few are in the Public Domain, so the core elements should be safely usable.

Given the general quality of that selection, I guess I should consider myself lucky that I have any of them. What is the book to the right of the Defense book? I feel like I should know it but I've got no clue...

Always wonderful when you can turn up something like that... in my limited experience, it's fairly easy still to find Argosies... but it can be quite tricky to find any specific issue.

Correct. A lot of them are available at : https://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?cid=683 Most of the scans are mine, with a few placeholders taken from auction listings, and one issue from another scanner. The book is frustratingly rare and I haven't filled a hole in well over a year. In my opinion, the best work Kelly ever did in comic books. (Comic STRIPS are a different matter.)

Welcome to the club! How long did it take you to track down a copy, or was it a target of opportunity?

I would be happy to get a copy like that; a very structurally sound book which, while damaged, still has the interesting part of the cover image quite clearly. It would make a wonderful reader copy... and a reader set of the EC's is all my budget will allow. With that said, while I might defend the 4.0 technical grade if it's a production error- which I think it probably is, that cut is too neat and makes too little sense otherwise- I wouldn't pay a 4.0 price for it. Buy the book, not the grade, as others have said. But it's a defect that I would happily take to get an otherwise nice copy cheaply. It baffles me that the book was slabbed at all, though.

IF the book is otherwise almost perfect, and that slice is considered some sort of manufacturing defect rather than after the fact damage, I could just about see the 4.0... but it's fundamentally the sort of book that the numeric scale doesn't handle worth a darn at all. That's a perfect example of something I would want a qualified label on.

I would get rid of it for no other reason than it's pointless. Listing the artist? Sure, they're not always credited or obvious. First appearances? Possibly not visible on the cover? Classic Cover? That's a separate category that isn't always obvious just from the cover, depending on what you know about the book. But "Bondage Cover"? You can just look at the cover right under the annotation! It's not giving any useful information at all.

I showed the Collier's where it first appeared, but the splash page for the adaptation of "There Will Come Soft Rains..." in Weird Fantasy:

Bradbury was such an incredible writer. The Super Science Stories is his first professionally published story. The first Weird Tales is his first publication in that title (a letter) and the second is his first story in the title.

I didn't think the condition would mean anything on its own, I just thought it might help if CGC was on the edge of recognizing it based on the Metro notation. Not "All books in this condition are GFC's", but "Most GFC's are in this condition." Necessary but not sufficient is the phrase, I think. I should really go on the Ask CGC thread and see what they can tell me; I'm also looking at slabbing a National Lampoon that MCS had as a John G. Fantucchio book. The Panic #6 should be easier; it has a COA and printout of the original sales listing. First, though, I need to track down reading copies of all three books before I put the peds into slabs.

The only verification is the label on the bag, which has the Metropolis logo and states Gaines File Copy along with the issue details. I'm not sure if that's enough proof for CGC, although the fact it just feels brand new might help as well. I'm not sure if it's worth pressing, there's a super small tear you can see at the top of the front cover (between Flashdance and Matt Houston) that couldn't be fixed. The other ding, a very light corner crease on the back cover (non color breaking) could be. But with that tiny tear, the value of the book will be entirely in the GFC designation.

You're welcome. I think Help! is, in many ways, a vital book in the history of pop culture, as you mentioned. At a bare minimum, it draws the line directly from MAD to Monty Python and Underground Comix and from there to tons of other stuff. It's also important as an early Warren magazine. The catch is, it never really had a classic of its own. The closest it got was the Goodman Beaver stories. It's not always an easy book to read, and the page count is often horribly padded making it harder to find the good stuff. As I hinted earlier, I think the reason that particular issue is so hard to track down (and it's one of the last ones I found for my set) is because Woody Allen is in the Fumetti story, and his fans have a lot of the copies. It also came out at a point where the schedule on the book was extremely irregular, so distribution could have been spotty.

Help! is very much a mixed bag, to be sure. For a lot of its run, it was way too much content a month for Kurtzman to do his best work. Around issue #11, when it went to the less frequent schedule, the quality improved. I think the last 5 issues, with the lower page count but on a regular schedule, really are quite good. It's a much more focused and funny book, with a lot of work by Crumb and Shelton and other underground cartoonists, shortly before the undergrounds really became a thing.

End of the run. #22 has the first appearance of Fritz the Cat by Robert Crumb, #24 features John Cleese in the Fumetti. It was while working on the story that he met Terry Gilliam, who was the assistant editor at the time. Gilliam is also one of the actors in the hoods on the #26.

#19 features Woody Allen in the Fumetti story.

13 has the infamous "Goodman Goes Playboy" story that Archie Comics objected to.

The Help #6 cover actually features Gloria Steinem as one of the cover girls... she was the assistant editor on the book at this point.

Might as well show the whole run of HELP! at this point...

Hefner at least tried to support Kurtzman; Little Annie Fanny ran for decades. But I've always loved the supposed quote from Hefner regarding Kurtzman's work on Trump: "I gave him an unlimited budget and he blew through it instantly." It shows, though; the two issues were beautiful.

Not so much a knock-off as a follow-up: The book Kurtzman did when he left MAD.

Nice! My options were either spend $20 for a raw copy from a good dealer (Metro) or $200 for a slabbed book. I figure it was cheaper to get the raw and then slab it. AND get the pedigree label as well. Plus, I like the cover on mine being by one of the original Madmen...

You can't go wrong with the EC reprints of Tales from the Crypt/ Vault of Horror/ Haunt of Fear. I personally would go for the EC archives, several are available on Comixology if digital is good. Atlas is a bit trickier, I would start with the MENACE Marvel Masterworks edition... I think it had a much higher hit ratio than most of the atlas horror books. Once again, available both in digital or print. If you don't mind digital, a LOT of the rest is at https://digitalcomicmuseum.com/ A good starting place there is Harvey, most of the Harvey Horror has been scanned. And everything at the DCM is public domain and free. Hope that helps some!