OtherEric

I was a latecomer to the thread... I didn't show up until page 6, four days after it started.

Not my copy, but:

It depends. If he sells the book unslabbed, claiming that he grades it as 9.4 despite what CGC had it at, that would be legal because grading is subjective to some degree. If he claims in some fashion that CGC graded it 9.4, then yeah, it's fraud.

Throwing in the Reading Library reprint of #6 for comparison, as well.

Monarch books are essentially the book division of Charlton. To this day, I don't think I've ever had one simple fact explain so much in so few words.

Which one? "Peter Reed" is a pseudonym for MacDonald as well. Sadly, I find that generally (not always) Super Science Stories tends to mostly have stories that weren't good enough to sell to other markets, and that's certainly true of MacDonald's work on the title. There's a few exceptions.

#5 seems to be incredibly common for some reason.

Another one for the crosshairs collection.

So, quite a few of these have already been shared here. But, in honor of my having completed the King/ Charlton/ Gold Key/ Whitman run, I'm going to post them all here in order, a couple a day, to get this thread bumped for a little bit.

Pickup from my local store, new this week. Maybe we had discussed this was coming as a magazine but if we did I had forgotten until I saw it:

1928 was clearly a stunning year in pop culture. Just those two August issues are huge, and that’s before we add Cthulhu, Tigger, and Mickey Mouse

The thing is, no less an authority than Isaac Asimov identified the book as one of the three times in SF where a new writer appeared and suddenly they were clearly the best SF writer and all the others were trying to catch up. (The other two were Stanley G. Weinbaum and Robert Heinlein.) The first E. E. "Doc" Smith story and classic cover would probably make this one of the top 10 SF pulps even if the Nowlan story wasn't there.

Welcome back!

One more from ECCC today:

One last King from ECCC today:

A couple covers from ECCC today that I didn't have. It's an interesting idea, having an artist recreate their earlier cover decades later:

Two more from Harley today:

So, as promised, I went to the Oni Press panel at ECCC today, and did ask a couple questions. They're serious about presenting these as EC books, the issues won't even have an Oni logo on them. They're consciously trying to position themselves as "what sort of comics would EC be doing in 2024 if they hadn't disappeared", which is part of why they're doing new titles rather than just revivals of old ones. They weren't quite ready to announce the third title, but they did say it's in a genre that classic EC never exactly did, but it's adjacent. They are planning to do books that aren't anthologies as they go on. They said the books were going to be definitely R rated, which I didn't consider totally reassuring- more because saying something is R rated can mean too many different things, not all of them good. The elaborated by saying they felt current comics were too often playing it safe, looking for how can this become a movie or TV show or something else other than a comic, and that they wanted to feel a bit dangerous. I can get behind that idea a lot more. They are going to be using a font based directly on the Leroy Lettering, which is good... although I did tell them to make sure to switch to something else if they did wind up doing a war comic. Overall, I came away feeling like the project is being run by people who have a clear idea of what they want to do and a strong urge to be true to the spirit of the EC's, while not doing a simple homage. I'm not sure if they'll succeed, or even if success is possible 70 years later, but I do have the impression that they're coming at the project from a good angle, rather than just relying on people recognizing the names of the books.

How I would love a Haunt 15 to complete the first issues…

I still say, story for story, Frontline Combat is EC’s most consistently excellent book. Nothing less than excellent across the entire run. Every other EC series had at least a few stinkers.

Which brings up the point that what works on the rack isn't always the same as what looks good as a standalone piece of art. I could see Annual cover grabbing somebody's attention on the rack pretty well, actually.

I've got to assume that marketing was at least part of the motive. I'm not saying it won't wind up the winner on personal all time worst cover list. I'm saying that, until we hit EERIE #75, we need to keep the topic open.

So, I'm going to try to get to the Oni Press panel at ECCC tomorrow. If they say anything about the EC revival I'll make sure to let everybody here know.