PopKulture

Amazing that it's down to so few! I thought I had the Bozo, too...

Sacentaur - Congrats on the fifty Bakers in ONE year!! That's insane. I'd be happy adding one nice example per year.

Funtastic fourth issue.

Gotta love a Prairie Kid appearance!

Thanks everyone for the encouraging comments! I'm having fun digging through some boxes I haven't opened for awhile. So many of my books are readers, but I'm still happy to have 'em. Funny, though, how your mind can romanticize books from memory 'til you lay eyes upon them again. Damn reality check. Most of these I got as a teenager at the LCShow so the choice was somewhat limited, especially on my grass-cutting budget!

That's a real stunner, podboy66! Congratulations.

When I was in eighth grade, I went through my friend's dad's comic collection from when he was a kid and graded and sorted the books for sale (I was the kid with an Overstreet and a geeky reputation). He gave me four comics outright for sorting them and allowed me to buy maybe another dozen. Some of the books I can recall getting were things like Adventure no. 168 (Superboy) and Battle no. 1 (which I still own) as well as this noteworthy photo cover featuring Stan Lee (stretching the whole Atlas thing here I know):

Thanks for the kind encouragement. Here are a few more scans from my old Flickr days:

Thanks! And, wow - those are all winners, especially the World's Fair badge. Great finds. Bigger shelves, and more of them. That's a good plan for 2017.

Great pencil cases, Robot Man! The favorite one I own features Frank "Bring 'em back alive" Buck. Like other "seeds" this caused me to grab other Frank Buck items. Sadly, I just packed away all that junque or else I'd post a pic. The shelf that formerly housed the Frank goodness now features old cigar boxes. Finite shelf space - what a curse!

Wow, there are some really great ones here that I've never seen. Thanks for posting them again! I have the Many A Murder, which has always been a fave, but I NEED a copy of Shadows of Lust! Great stuff.

I've been looking for this one! Nice copy too! Where'd ya snag it? I have a few Wit & Wisdom's and a handful of his other paperback covers. I've posted them like dozens of pages ago in this thread. There's still more I NEED though, of course. I picked this up at a postcard show, of all places, along with maybe two dozen more mystery digests. Before I posted this, I looked maybe thirty pages back to see if I was posting a recent duplicate. Do you know how far back the other covers you posted are? This one is listed as a Cole in the paperback guides, but it is unsigned. What say the experts here?

Very cool! I've never run across this one. Of course, I don't pour thru stacks and stacks of paperbacks at exchanges and the like anymore, so how would I??

Not a comic, but a paperback digest:

My thoughts exactly, and pretty much the example I share with a collector friend of mine who drifts between comics and coins, with marbles and paperbacks getting the nod now and then. Once touched by the comic bug, I don't know how anyone can stay away. There's definitely something for everyone and at every price level, be it a nice painted cover later Four Color for a ten-spot or that high grade All Star 8 on everyone's radar!

Thanks Robot Man. Your signature has so much awesome goodness in it! It inspired me to finally get off my @$$ and craft one of my one, sadly lacking the stupefying pinbacks and premiums of yours however...

Sparkle Plenty's sister in a heap of trouble:

Yeah, so. About that... here's an infamous cover from the dawn of the genre. Imagine seeing this on the newsstand that fine May in 1888:The villains there aren't who they might seem to be at first glance. The Indiana Whitecaps were a vigilante group whose aim was enforcing their own concept of justice and morality in their area of that state.This is little discussed, as the one well-remembered horrible and infamous group dominates this aspect of the history, but there were other groups with varying aims that were not implicitly motivated by race -- as you can see in this case with the punishment of the white girl of "loose moral character".The arc of this stuff is familiar to those of us who read comics -- the perception of weak federal and local govts which gave rise to the terrible racial struggles in the reconstruction era also gave rise to this. Some particular groups were started with the specific intent of stopping particular outlaw gangs when law enforcement was not equipped to do so. The predecessor to these guys on the cover here was known as the Vigilance Committee of Southern Indiana, which was described by Allan Pinkerton as a group of about 50 men who wore Scotch caps and black cloth masks, and called their leader "Number 1". They were formed to deal specifically with the notorious Reno gang.While many might've looked the other way while groups like this captured and hanged murderous outlaw gangs that the real law couldn't stop, before you know it...inevitably... participants got that I AM THE LAW notion in their heads, and were tying girls to trees and whipping them, and so on.Which brings us to Ricksneatstuff's point about the hero. As the vigilantes started going too far, others rose up to oppose them. In one mind-boggling instance, the masked and costumed Missouri Bald Knobbers gave rise to the Anti-Bald Knobbers, to stop them.That eventually gets us to hero saves girl, and the larger point is that masked vigilantes with various purposes were operating all over the place in this era, scarcely a generation before the foundational golden age creators were born. More than you were looking for in a thread about comic book bondage, probably, but I think it's interesting... Stunning periodical! Your copy? I never see paper like this roaming Central Illinois...

What a savvy pick-up. Truly rare, and under the radar.

There have been quite a few amazing books posted recently. I'm really rekindling my appreciation for Atlas books (not that it ever waned all that much). Here's a Journey Into Unknown Worlds I picked up recently: