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Congratulations, BB-Gun. You have a great collection. --- Here's a Barks cover I like a lot. It's one of the few for which the original art still exists.

Although I consider "Poor Old Man" to be the best story Barks ever wrote, my own favorite stories are "Frozen Gold" (long story) and "Snow Fun" (10 pager). Being a geek with an interest in both math and history, the maximum gradient of the quality of the stories is far more interesting to me than the maximum quality itself.

I keep getting amazed every time I go back and read "Only a Poor Old Man". Not only is it completely timeless, holding up just as well today as it did in the cold war era, but I also find myself enjoying it at a different level as an adult than I did as a child. Whether you have your savings in a piggy bank, a 401K, or a money bin, it is a brilliant metaphor for worrying about protecting your hard earned savings against life's uncertainties, whether it be the Beagle Boys, Wall Street bankers, or credit default swaps. The other stories are great in their own right, but "Poor Old Man" is just an ingenious, off-the-charts masterpiece. The legacy of an artist is in large part determined by the quality of the very best individual works he/she ever produced, and by that standard Four Color 386 carries a lot of weight for Barks.

Man, your grading standards are the strictest I've ever seen. This book is clearly better than 1.0.

I hope I'll beat you to it with my own little quest of a high grade run of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories 1-30. I think I'm 60% there after about the same time.

You must have so many wonderful memories embedded in these books. Thanks for giving us the chance to imagine what it might have been like to pick them up at the newsstand or grocery store back then.

This and RHG's Detective group shots are some of the most impressive and aspirational I've ever seen posted here. I've never been able to fathom why the market can value a single key book (Action 1, Tec' 27, Marvel 1) 30-50 times as highly as any other book in the run. A deep, high grade run like this, which takes at least a decade to put together, is so much cooler and more impressive to me than a single #1, which might have been acquired with no more effort than it takes to write a check. It takes so much more passion and dedication to build a collection like Timely's.

Wow, you have been posting some very nice books lately.

Always wonderful to see your treasures, MM. Here's an issue from the same era that just came back from CGC. Does not have the charm of belonging to an orignal owner but really hard to find in this shape.

Very cool - thanks for sharing this. It would be fun if someone might have the ad that appeared in Amazing Stories. You'd think it would have mentioned Superman(?).

Very cool and impressive project once again, Scrooge. You don't post many updates, but it's always spectacular when you do.

It is always nice when professionals chime in with their perspective. Speaking from my own collector's heart, the more I've learned about the evolution of the medium, the more disenchanted I've become with definitions. My own real passion is exploring the spectrum of formats and narrative techniques, the gradient of which eventually led to the publications that all of us enjoy talking about. It's that fascinating and never ending journey through pulps, books, magazines, movies, historical events etc. that keeps my own interest alive. When I dislike definitions so much, it's because they tend to compartmentalize the discussion, culling away all the wonderful blurring and context that I see as the life blood of the hobby.

That must be William Blake, right? I remember some beautiful originals from Abel Berland's collection that sold a few years back. And Bob, my thoughts and prayers are with your daughter. --- Edit: After looking up the Christie's catalog for the Abel Berland collection, the item I referred to was actually a copy of "Songs of Innocence" in green ink that was listed with an estimate of $1-1,5 million.

Very interesting to hear your comments about Piedmont. I've lived in Berkeley and sure have a hard time connecting the dots between San Francisco and Piedmont - yikes. Do you have any recollections about whether there were Disney or funny animal books in the "San Francisco" collection? It sounds like a a considerable fraction of the collection could have been locked up by the original buyers and never seen daylight since then? In any case, thanks a lot for sharing your recollections in such detail.

I just cannot believe that a raw copy of this issue survived in this shape: I would have thought that all existing high grade copies had been bought by Barks collectors and stored away in mylars long ago.

I recall the story! It‘s one of those weird time-travel stories where Scrooge and/or the Beagles find other versions of themselves in different times and places. A sort of Fantastic Four #5 without Doctor Doom's time platform. I can’t see the advantages, besides of course the fact we don’t have a horde of US collectors all after our original art… Here's a link to the Bottaro page. Do you know if it actually was published? I remember many of these wonderful stories with Witch Hazel, Scrooge, Goofy etc. meeting each other, but not this particular one. I must have read hundreds of great stories by Italian artists like Scarpa, Campi, and even the tie-together stories by Perego (who I understand was quite a character with a highly unusual background?) bring back fond memories when I see them. ---- Re. the "Trick or Treat" splash panel mentioned in another post: The organizers of the upcoming pan-European Carl Barks exhibition have approached me and asked to loan the original art for this page, along with my other Barks comic book pages. I really hope the project, which is very ambitious, pans out so a new generation of European fans will be able to see his comic book art in person. Since the early Barks originals are so rare, part of my motivation behind collecting them has always been to make a sampling of them available to museum exhibitions. Paradoxically, the oil paintings are more accessible and certainly more common than the comic book pages from Barks' peak years. And, to be completely honest, I find the latter more impressive and certainly more historically interesting.

Thanks for posting these, vaillant. Like just about anyone who grew up in Germany or Scandinavia in the 1970s I was a big fan of Bottaro's stories. I suspect we did not get to see the most esoteric Italian stories as they probably were censored. A few years ago, I got to meet a collector who befriended Bottaro and - after years of trying - eventually got him to sell some of his original artwork, including an incredible page from the late 1950s where Scrooge is chopping off the nose of one of the Beagle Boys with a sword. It's unbelievable to me that all the treasures of Italian Disney art art completely unknown to US collectors, but, then again, it has some advantages, too.

On October 14, 2003, I posted this in the "Have a Cigar" thread: "If I were to point to a single GA Disney comic to get someone excited about these, it would have be to a nice reading copy of Four Color 62." Still feel the same. Your copy is beautiful - I don't think I could resist breaking it out of the slab.

Yes, I think that's right. The story was also reprinted (beautifully) in the Another rainbow 'Mickey Mouse in Color' book. I read it the night before last, and it's a lot of fun. I always thought of it as two independent stories that were stitched together like other adventures by Gottfredson. The first part, which is just outstanding, is has the feel of a mid-30's short. Gottfredson was clearly inspired by "Mickey's Garden", but he transferred the idea brilliantly to the newspaper format. It may well be my own favorite Gottfredson sequence of all time and it totally overshadows the so-so Robin Hood part.

That's a great looking copy, AJD. Even Geppi's copy of this issue was only a CGC 7.5 which says something about how difficult it is. I was lucky to out-snipe him for my own NM-range copy 10 years ago.

That's another great book. I didn't realize they did those give aways then. Fun and Fancy Free is an underappreciated Disney movie. That's incredible, Mr. Mann. I never connected the "Mickey and the Beanstalk" cover with the movie, but I was enjoying it on YouTube after your post. Now I'll always think of your anecdote when I see this cover. Barks' "Snow Fun" story in that issue of Comics and Stories has always been my favorite among his early 10 pagers. I bought at CGC graded copy last year and, although I hardly ever take books out of their slabs, I am really tempted to making an exception with this one.

With CBG shutting down this week, I thought I'd post this book which I bought from Harley Yee in 1992. I was living in Denmark at the time and remember how exciting it was to receive the thick CBG issue each week and go through the ads. It is the only book I have left from the collection that I assembled in the early 1990s before I left to study and eventually work in the US.

In general, I prefer to focus on comics rather than their values in my posts. However, when you collect rare books, it is necessary to educate yourself about the market. Some Disney collectors sold their collections at huge losses after the financial crisis and I'd like to share some observations in the interest of learning from our past mistakes. For some time, I've been thinking about how to visualize what happened to the market. This afternoon, I spent a few hours going through GPAnalysis and gathered statistics on slabbed books with identical certification numbers and a value over $100. For each such book, I listed the buying and selling prices as well as the year it was bought and sold. I went through Walt Disney's Comics and Stories 1-170, Uncle Scrooge 1-50, and Barks Four Colors between 9 and 422 where I found around 460 books that matched the above criteria. I then listed these samples in the two tables below. The first table shows how many slabs were found for each pair of buying and selling years. For example, 13 slabs were bough in 2007 and resold in 2009. This table is then used to color code the second table of average returns (percent) based on how many samples were available. I.e. red means low confidence and green means more reliable numbers. The interesting part is the negative vs. positive percentages in the second table. There was a major bubble in the market in 2006-2008 which can be seen as the negative numbers in the columns for 2007 and 2008. For example, the 13 slabs that were purchased in 2007 and resold in 2009 realized an average return of -41%. Likewise, the 18 slabs purchased in 2008 and resold in 2010 realized -31% before inflation and auction house fees. I only spent a few hours on this, but, with more samples, I think this would be a useful technique for analyzing the comics market in general. You could do the same for any publisher and analyze based on grade ranges etc. I hope that such improved tools will help visualize market trends better so that we can reduce the risk of bubbles in the future.

That's hilarious: I can hardly imagine a more fitting story for a Caltech student (except perhaps "The Mad Chemist"). I went to MIT and we always admired the Caltech students as even more geeky than ourselves. Here's a nice Barks cover that I got from a friend recently. PS: the geotag on this photo corresponds to the address of the Copenhagen Marriott.

Thanks, but it's still in the early stages. The Mickey Mouse Magazines were a piece of cake in comparison.