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Another purchase from earlier this year. Regarding the popularity of Disney comics in the US, I think the days of leaning back and slowly watching the value of your collection go up are over. Just a few lurkers can make a huge difference towards keeping the hobby alive if they are willing to share their knowledge, enthusiasm, and photos online.

Wanted to share this photo with the rest of you.

I turned that around for you and added a few. This is an OT, geeky sidenote with a little background on iPhone photos. The problem with innocuous' photo is that it uses the JPEG-EXIF tag for specifying a rotation. Macs will show such images as intended but PC's will not. The best solution is always to remember holding the iPhone/iPad with the button to the right when taking the photo (which I often forget). Another issue with iPhones is that you have to remember to turn "location services" off in the settings, otherwise it is easy to see from their geotags exactly where they were taken. You can download plug-ins to your browser that will show the geotags when you click on any photo. You can then copy-paste the tags into Google maps and see the home. Quite a few photos posted on these boards have geotags. If you are not interested in all this, one particular scenario to be aware of is if you are nice enough to allow guests to take pictures of your collectibles in your home and they later post them online. If their camera had geotags enabled, any thief who sees the photos online will know the exact address where the items are located. Anyway, just trying to help.

Thanks for sharing the photos. It hurts a little to see that last one and think back at what that display used to be like. I can't imagine what Mr. Geppi must have been through, but I hope he will soon be back and do other great things for our hobby.

That's a beautiful book with a great, well composed cover. I like how the perspective appears to have been drawn a little off in order to make the wall panels line up with the logo: it gives a nice flow overall. Bad perspective can be really clever and thought through. At other times * red cough raven cough 1 * it is just really bad perspective.

Memories like that are priceless. Some of my own earliest memories from my childhood are about getting Disney comics as gifts, reading a Barks story for the first time, going through bargain bins dreaming about finding an early comic from the late 1960s, ... --- The coloring of that cover is wonderful and makes for a beautiful copy. The artwork looks very unusual for Barks, though. The editors at Western had a long list of requests for cover art, including that the ducks be drawn as large as possible, their heads be disproportionally large relative to their bodies, facing the reader etc. All of these rules seem to have been broken in this layout for some reason and I think that's why it appears "different".

Thanks, AJD. Re. Mickey Mouse Magazine, I bought this because it was a beautiful example of one of the best known covers. But I have to admit that it's fun to see longer streaks of CGC 9.X copies developing as a side effect, especially for the earliest years. I also ended up with the WDCS 40 below. It has a wonderful "Snow Fun" story by Barks which has always been my favorite among the earlier 10-pagers. I don't plan to collect Barks WDCS, but these two were surprisingly inexpensive and pretty copies.

I normally stick to the early WDCS, but prices have dropped so much that I couldn't resist this cover. I got to see a CGC 9.4 copy during a Heritage preview a few years ago. It was stunning and only my own strong rule about not buying anything outside my focus kept me from bidding on it. The 9.6 sold for over 40% less than the 9.4 (which actually sold well after the Duck-bubble).

Here's the latest upgrade to my run. Edit: Now that I have copies that I like of all the issues, I've started to aim for streaks of books with consistent CGC grades for fun. With this book, I got a kick out of completing the last 6 months of 1937 in at least CGC 9.4.

When folks like you, moondog, and Yellow Kid are willing to travel out in the middle of the desert to see my books, it feels like it hasn't been a complete waste of time. And getting an intensive 3 1/2 day course from you was pretty amazing(!).

Congratulations, BitterOldMan. I'd love to see more of your collection. Here's another nice copy of the 199 - looks like it's been 7 years since I posted this:

+1 (I think) Barks' penmanship is just unreal sometimes. I have the original art for a couple of his WDC&S covers and the perfection of his lines really do make an impression when you hold the art in your hands. It's impossible to communicate the impact through a photo or a scan. I have never experienced the original art to a strong Kelly WDC&S cover myself, but it's on my bucket list. Just like high grade comics, original art should really be seen in person. At least in the case of Barks, I've come to admire comics like the one above even more after getting acquainted with the originals.

As usual, you have a good eye for beautiful copies, AJD. Have you considered letting your turtle run a little longer to include the great Barks covers between 100 and 110 or so? To me, those are some of the most attractive issues in the entire run. After that, there is a longer period with so-so covers that could be skipped with less of a loss.

The prettiest copy of this superb cover I've ever seen. It's been hidden away for many years but I thought you should see it.

Glad the rehashed group shots were popular. . It was 114 degrees (46C) outside on Sunday so I had to get the books in and out very quickly: no time being picky about the setup.

That's a pretty #13. I used to have a #7 with the same beautiful handwriting which must have been from the same collection, but I can't find a scan. I bought it from "Tomorrow's Treasures" around 10-12 years ago and remember that he had several issues from the same owner back then. I use eBay, coffee beans, GPA, tarot cards, and the Heritage archives in no particular order. Researching certified books is a lot easier. comixpriceguide (with "x") was an awesome service, but they stopped updating their database last fall.

Still some way to go but slowly making progress. Not recommended for impatient collectors. Usually, all my books of any value are in safety deposit, but I had these out today and thought I'd share a group shot. I think I have half a dozen more, but they were in storage somewhere else.

Very interesting, BZ. I've read a lot of Poe as well and I had never heard of this one either. Very cool. Thanks for sharing this. It actually made me so curious that I read the first half of the original Hans Pfaall story this morning. It was obviously intended to be humorous, but it has some elements that clearly are very early science fiction. A quick search revealed that the story indeed is considered among the earliest in the genre as it was published just 17 years after "Frankenstein". I was surprised by how different this lighthearted yarn is from Poe's later horror stories and his personal tragedies. If anyone knows more about this, I'd be very interested in your thoughts.

Congratulations, Scrooge. That's fantastic news.

The latest addition to my WDC&S run. I had tried to order this copy multiple times from ComicLink before a friend finally managed to buy it for me. If anyone should happen to come across a VF-range copy of #9 that would complete my run of the first 10 issues.

I wish I could read Italian as he looks like quite an interesting storyteller. +1 What little Italian I can understand only makes it look more interesting. If I could be granted one wish to go back and change comic book history, I would go back to around 1950 and give Carl Barks the artistic freedom to write whatever Duck stories he wanted. It's amazing he was still able to write great classics with all the restrictions, but I would have loved to see him explore more gothic storylines, proceeding where "Old Castle's Secret" left off. Thanks for posting this, vaillant.

That's a fun story with a cool historical context. Thanks a lot for posting it, bangzoom.

Although I know that you weren't being critical of Ryan's work, I have to say that, in some cases, I've found Ryan's recreations to be so good that they were even better than recreations by the original artists themselves. Both pieces are spectacular. The only thing I would have done differently would have been to include Ryan's trademark little drips, scratches, and other tiny imperfections. I can understand if they're not everyone's cup of tea, but to me they made the paintings more interesting and personal, challenging the viewer to think about why they were put there and immediately giving away the artist's identity. When I look at these paintings, they show beautiful imagery, but it's a bit like looking at a Thomas Kinkade painting in that there's nothing left to think about.

Those covers are fun, vaillant. Thanks for posting the links. Do these books have puzzles, text stories etc. like the US do? Did the contents evolve over time to become more focused on comics, like Mickey Mouse Magazine turned into Walt Disney's Comics and Stories? > Ah, with these you must forget, once for all, things like 9.2, 9.4, 9.6 etc… I actually bought the majority of my US Mickey Mouse Magazines raw and it is only in the last year I've had the nicest ones slabbed. When I look back, the people who sold them to me generally didn't assign any grades, their condition was just pretty obvious from pictures. I avoided submitting my books to CGC for years because I thought that they were just as nice raw, but eventually I did it after buying a considerable number of slabbed high grade copies at auction, just in case my own copies would end up grading lower. The US market is so focused on CGC grades today, and one downside of assembling a super high grade complete run is that one purple label or "incomplete"/"brittle pages" 0.5 sticks out like a sore thumb if you have beautiful blue label copies of the other 59 issues. So, I felt like I had to buy every nice copy that came up for sale. To me, the substance of collecting high grade will always be the thrill that I feel when I look at a beautiful book, regardless of the CGC score. I'll never forget those fundamentals, but, now that the books have been certified, I have to admit that the competitive geek in me thinks it adds a little extra spice to try improve the average grade of my run (my goal is 9.1 for the magazines).

I don't think there's a closely related Silly Symphony(?). There is one early SS with flies fighting a spider, but I don't recall that one having much to do with this story. My InDucks searches did not turn up much additional information. This indeed very interesting. Is it in the Sunday newspaper format with text balloons as shown in my scans or does it have black and white illustrations with text underneath? Parts of the story were reprinted in a paint book (#660) from 1934 and that had the latter format. I browsed through a beautiful file copy (from the Don Vernon collection) a couple of years ago but unfortunately don't have one myself. After reflecting more on the story, I really do see it is an overlooked (at least by me) early gem. It may well be the strangest and most ambitious piece of Disney storytelling I have ever come across. Mickey Mouse was doing wild stuff back in the early 1930s, but that was always just for gags. This Bucky Bug story goes far deeper, using the funny animal genre to deal with difficult issues like war and recession in a unique (at least for 1932) and rather clever way. ---- Unrelated, thanks to bangzoom for pointing out that WDC&S 24 does not have additional pages. It's funny that the story only appears in WDC&S 23 and 25.