OtherEric

Let me clarify part of that one for people: A nice issue, with two stories by Walt Kelly.

It very well could be, I don't remember seeing Pepe in the Bugs Giants or the Looney Tunes title itself off the top of my head. But then again, on an awful lot of those books the only story I've read is the Mary Jane & Sniffles, with the rest of the book getting a quick flip-through at best. But comics.org is rather spotty on indexing of the Warner Bros. books still, last I checked.

And here's Four Color #402; Mary Jane actually never appeared in the cartoons but it's her team-up with Sniffles in the comics that Sniffles is probably best remembered for, with his cartoons being a bit of an afterthought. That's the best copy I've found in years of looking, though. I let a VG go when it went over 50 on the bay; and at this point I'm kicking myself since I haven't seen one in any shape in forever. But 4x guide for a low grade copy seemed high back then.

Most of the 1st appearances are in Looney Tunes/ Merry Melodies #1, which is probably not an optimal choice for the wall of a child's room. Bugs Bunny Vacation Funnies 8 has the 1st appearance of the Road Runner in comics, but he's not on the cover.

The Unknown Worlds was a bedsheet as well. They both went bedsheet for 1942 and part of 1943, then went briefly back to pulp size for about half a year before Astounding went to digest size and Unknown went away. Supposedly it was a choice between taking Astounding bi-monthly or getting rid of Unknown due to wartime paper rationing. I think there were 16 bedsheet issues, Jan 42- April 43. But I'm not 100% sure.

Really like that cover - who is the artist? Rogers. I think Hubert Rogers, to be more exact, but the book itself only credits "Rogers".

Got this one today. You really can't like the later issues of Unknown/ Unknown Fantasy Fiction/ Unknown Worlds for their covers. But the contents... that's another story. Not 100% sure why Heinlein and/ or Campbell had this one go out under the otherwise unused "John Riverside" alias. I suspect it's because over in Astounding, Campbell had already reported that both Heinlein and "Anson MacDonald" had turned in their last stories before heading off to aid the war effort. This was, I believe, Heinlein's last story until after the war. What the heck, let's throw this one I got about a month ago up as well: A bit more interesting cover. I love the bedsheet pulps, even if the Unknowns could have used better cover art.

Awesome shot! I've got one, far right side, 5th row down: I wonder how many of the books there we could pull together... Note that some titles repeat, I see 2 different issues of the Shadow (which makes some sense since it was 2x a month.)

The covers make them a bit higher demand, and to be honest there's relatively few writers I'm trying to track down in them. So I don't have any, and they're not really on my radar other than "I wouldn't mind getting one or two just to have a sample of them in the collection." If I were to ever get one, I would post it here, just like I posted the Weird Tales I got a few days ago. Any shame I might feel over the subject matter disappears completely when the book came out decades before I was born; it's a collector's item at this point.

Just for you, since you asked nice:

And, fresh out of the mail today, my second pulp with Lovecraft in it: Front cover is loose, back cover is missing, but the book itself is otherwise nice page quality and structure. And the list of items where I wanted at least a sample in my collection it ticks off is pretty impressive: a) I now have a Brundage cover in my collection. b) I now have a Robert E. Howard story in my collection. c) I now have a H. P. Lovecraft story in Weird Tales in my collection. Then, as just plain bonuses, it's also got a 2nd story by Lovecraft, ghost-written for Hazel Heald, and a Hyperborea story by Clark Ashton Smith, before we even get out of the Mythos. I might wish for the Howard story to have been one of his famous characters rather than a random little story, but otherwise it's hard to imagine a better representative issue of the 30's Weird Tales to have in my collection.

As others have said, this is more "what are my favorites currently in the bucket", but here's some of my favorites: (I know it's a hair on the wrong side of the GA line, but I can't not include it .) (Others have mixed in a few pulps, so I will too)

Of course, now that I have the June issue I need to start looking for a February... Did I mention this is my first pulp with a Lovecraft story at all?

Normally, I wouldn't bother posting this, since sacentaur just showed a copy that's been quoted and reshown several times the past couple weeks. But this isn't just another pulp. This... this is a grail book. And unlike a lot of my pulps, this one is in extremely nice shape: The stress lines along the spine are far less obtrusive on the actual book in hand. A couple of the photos from the seller, to show the condition of the spine and the page quality: Grail acquired. What more need I say?

As far as I'm concerned, there are two main reasons to collect Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies: The early Walt Kelly stories, and Mary Jane & Sniffles. The Kelly material is minor in his body of work, but still interesting and charming. Mary Jane & Sniffles is the one consistently excellent feature in LT&MM, with amazingly fun stories; Roger Armstrong's art was good on the early issues and Al Hubbard was even better when he took over. Only about 50 issues to go including the Dell Giants to complete my set; although I don't know if I'll ever get issues 1-4. (And my Four Color 402 is in desperate need of an upgrade, both of the MJ & S issues of Four Color are extremely hard to find.)

March, April, and May/June/July 1924 Weird Tales ghostwriting for Houdini. Ooh, good catch on the May/June/July 1924 issue. Did Lovecraft do the ghostwriting for Houdini on the March and April issues, though? I don't recall ever seeing that attributed to him... which doesn't mean it wasn't his work. And Redfury's sig line shows why Lovecraft only got the cover once on Weird Tales, despite being one of their superstars... his stories just don't lend themselves to images of scantily clad females.

A quick question for the pulp experts out there: What pulps have covers illustrating Lovecraft stories? Is it just the Feb and June Astoundings, or are there others? As far as I know, for some reason he never got the cover art on Weird Tales.

He used to say he had never paid more than $20 for a comic so that makes his achievement all the more remarkable. He is one of a handful of top indexers in the volume of story and creator credits that he has identified and that have been used by Overstreet, GCD, Atlas Tales etc. I think he said he paid more for one book... his Mad #1 was $40 or $50. But still! Over the past few years, he's also been loaning public domain books to scanners for the DCM & CBP; there are thousands of books that are scanned because he let people borrow them.

Nice one. I've only got a couple of the 1st run of Super Science, but that one is pretty high on my want list. I'm not sure I've ever even seen one for sale. One of these days I should finish off the 2nd run of Super Science, I think I'm only missing 3 issues from that end.

Any idea what happened to the lower right corner? I'm assuming that's what caused such a sharp looking book to grade so low. Just in general, I love books like that when I hit them... Sharp books with one minor flaw that drops the cost way down but are otherwise great. I've got a Venus 11 with about a 3 inch tear in the back cover that would probably otherwise be a 7.0 or so... that I paid a 2.0 price for.

My other two pickups from last week, and one that showed in the mail today: Clearly just readers, but they were $18 the pair. I'm quite good with that price for John Carter stories, I think... Now I just need to find the June 1941 issue, I've got the other four issues with JC stories from that year. ________________________________________________ In addition to the cover story, this one has "The Million Year Picnic" from The Martian Chronicles. I think I now have every major story from that that first appeared in the sci-fi magazines. (I'm missing a couple of the super-short chapters in pulps and all the longer stories that showed in the slicks.) I've never read the cover story, really looking forward to seeing what happened when Brackett couldn't finish a story and handed it to Bradbury to complete.

And a couple more of my pick-ups: Cover's a bit beat-up even by my standards, but page quality is good and there's some good reading in this one; in addition to the cover story there's a Bradbury and a Sturgeon story _________________________________ Well, you can see the contents on this one. The Heinlein story is, of course better known as Magic, Inc. But I prefer the original title, myself.

I'll have to look for the other two issues. Just in general I'm getting really close to the threshold on Planet Stories from "Let's grab a few issues" to "I'm trying to put together the run".

http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?dlid=10778 If you can't stand to crack it- or for everybody else- I was able to scan JVJ's copy of this a few years ago, along with the 25 and 27. Frazetta's work is absolutely stunning on these.

I wasn't at San Diego, but as far as pulps go I had a pretty good weekend. Here's the first half of my finds, I'll share the others in a day or two: This one has Ray Bradbury's "Mars Is Heaven", from the Martian Chronicles and one of his best known stories. _____________________ I already had a copy of this one in even worse shape; it's noteworthy for the Fredric Brown (they spell it right inside, at least) story and the only story John D. MacDonald did for Planet. _____________________ The dealer had this marked as an early Philip K. story. (Insert brief filter rant here.) Which is correct, as far as it goes. It actually has his first ever published story. ______________________ This one isn't as impressive on the writing front, although it does have a John Jakes story for those who like his stuff. The impressive bit is who drew an illustration for the Jakes story. Sorry about the scan quality, it was as flat as I could get it without risking damage to the book. I know Wally did a fair number of illos for the digests, Galaxy in particular; but this is the only time I've seen him in a full-size pulp. ________________________ And that's the Planets I got this weekend.