Brock

8.0

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Sure, I’m in. I intend to continue my unbroken string of two rounds where I absolutely crush the grading, and two where the entire CGC board community - and all their children and grandchildren, dogs and cats - get a good laugh at my expense.

Canadian price variant, too.

I’m small time, but December (contrary to most years) has been very strong for me, especially for Bronze and Copper. Sales include Bizarre Adventures, Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, Devil Dinosaur, Fast Willie Jackson, Ghost Rider, Ms. marvel, lots of Archie’s and a Marvel Super Special. perhaps it’s just luck, but the market seems to be improving a bit…

The World’s Finest issue? Or do you mean the DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #20 (Dark Mansions) pictured in the thread? I have always struggled to find high grade Best of DC #58 (Super Jrs).

Micronauts 1-12

It's a small hobby, and I don't have an axe to grind with anyone. From my perspective, he's an enthusiast whose suppositions sometimes get ahead of his evidence. There are some who feel he can be a little self-aggrandizing, claiming "discoveries" of things that he perhaps could be more properly said to have helped popularize (e.g., Marvel 35 cent variants). He may or may not have helped contribute to some of the hype around certain kinds of variants (Canadian price variants, for example) where information about things like print runs and survival rates is presented as gospel with only hearsay to back it up. Sometimes, all of this just muddies the waters for people interested in comics history. In the Whitman context, he has written (for example) that DC Whitman books are reprints.

My goal is to just help set the record straight.

Yeah, but the thread title says “ratio” so we did the math.

Funny, my first reaction was Holy Terror.

Big cities are good, too… I travel pretty much all the time for my work, and pretty much everywhere. In most places, big or small, there’s usually a couple of honey holes. You just have to find them, and keep going back. Used bookstores, junk shops, larger LCSes in big towns or forgotten LCSes in smaller towns, antique shops, etc. are all good. A lot of places will have a section for “kid’s comics”, which are typically overlooked by most comic hunters. Dealers who know their superheroes but nothing else are great. i don’t have near as much luck as @bellrules but I do pretty well…

When I first saw this, I wondered if the March of Comics issues might also be scarce, falling into this period. After watching for a bit on places like eBay, though, they seem to be relatively plentiful. As these made their way into the marketplace differently, this is another piece of (circumstantial) evidence that Whitman's internal distribution system collapsed in 1980 - distribution by others (in this case) seems to have continued normally. It does raise an interesting question, though... If these scarce books were printed but just not distributed, where are they now? Perhaps they were eventually pulped, but if they were being shipped to and bagged in Coffeyville, Kansas, is there an outside possibility of a warehouse find? Coffeyville is about 75 miles north of Tulsa, OK - I wonder what the antique malls and bookstores of that region might yield?

Thanks for all of these… there’s more buried in these issues as well. In that first one (April 1980) there’s a lengthy discussion in the letter column that might be described as “what if DC took over distribution of the Whitman books?” if anybody else comes across anything in other sources, please share! I’m working on an article/essay to pull some of these things together in a documented way… the only in-depth article on this stuff that I’m really aware of is John McClure’s piece in Comic Book Marketplace 85 and 86, and it’s full of errors and undocumented assumptions.

Go west, young man… I find that places like antique malls are better than LCSes for these kind of books. Think of Waterloo, Stratford, Woodstock, London…

Scalped, Sheriff of Babylon, Ex Machina, Losers, Y the Last Man, Strange Adventures

Issues 128, 150 and 282 also sell for larger premiums.

Hmmm... not sure why those lines have strikethrough, but I can't change it... hopefully, it's still legible.

It sounds to me like it could have been this one? Marvel Saga was a series that retold the history of the Marvel Universe through "little bit of the stories too" - basically, excerpted highlights reprinted from the original books. Marvel Saga #4 was the first one to focus on the X-Men, though they were prominent after that. It ran for 25 issues in the late 1980s, so a little earlier than your suggested timeline.

Everybody vs. everybody? Check! Seriously... Captain Canuck vs. Gumby vs. E-Man vs. Milk & Cheese vs. Shi vs. Zippy the Pinhead vs. Badger vs. Too Much Coffee Man vs. Captain Action vs. Usagi Yojimbo vs. Flaming Carrot vs. the Tick vs. Bone vs. the Maxx vs. Cerebus... etc., etc., etc.

Superman vs. Popeye? Check!

How'd this get to page 3? I go off to the Middle East for a few days, and one of my favourite threads goes dark. Here's a few you haven't seen, as I try to get us back on track. Teen Titans in an Archie digest? Check!

So I'm working my way through some old Comic Reader magazine issues doing some research to see what news is coming out of Western/Gold Key/Whitman, and I cam across an interesting piece today. Basically, each issue of Comic Reader had a news roundup organized by publisher. The April 1980 issue (p. 6) has the following to say about Whitman: Official word is that those titles missing from the past few Whitman schedules have been "delayed." These include all three science fiction books, and the other two King Features books as well as Western's own LITTLE LULU. It looks as if BEETLE BAILEY is probably cancelled, though the others may continue. Confusion still reigns concerning the distribution of the bagged comics printed in January through March, none of which seemed to have appeared anywhere. If each book is to get its own separate bag, this might be explained, since only WALT DISNEY's COMICS AND STORIES is a monthly, though UNCLE SCROOGE and DONALD DUCK each have had three issues printed so far. If anyone finds any, please tell us. This gives us a confirmation that distribution was not happening in mid-1980, but that the books did exist and had been printed. The issue then lists the Whitman books expected to be released that month, including titles Uncle Scrooge #178. That's the July 1980 issue, so we're just on the cusp of the scarce issue period. The writer suggests that "Confusion still reigns concerning the distribution of the bagged comics printed in January through March" which seems to indicate that some industry knowledge of what's going on is fairly widespread. Hopefully we can eventually find someone who happened to write it down...