PopKulture

Wow, that's some scathing and entertaining analysis, and he's not wrong.

Additionally, there is effectively zero* ethical grey area here: if you paid a dollar for a comic that you want - or get - $2,500 for, then it's your good fortune. The previous seller had every opportunity to maximize their net and somehow did not. If you choose to go rearward along this transaction trail and offer the original seller more money, then that is on you and your good conscience, and will in turn be their good fortune. * (I'm sure someone here will however concoct a scenario where you ripped off a little old lady (harder to do on the Bay), so I'll then default to that "effectively zero" hedge...)

For me, it would have no bearing on my decision on whether to buy it from you or not. All that matters is the price you're asking at that point and the price I'm willing to pay (and how far apart we are). The only thing I'll never do is buy on the Bay from dealers who outbid me directly on other auctions (usually group lots). In that case, I will not support and underpin my direct competition. The latter has happened to me at least a dozen times the past few years, often on lots of books that are each in the $3 to $20 value range: things like Dells, Gold Keys, Charltons, etc. They are not high-demand books, but if a dealer can get them at the right price and stick them in their eBay store for $9.99 to $24.99, enough of them eventually sell to reinforce that business model. Often these auctions originate with non-comics sellers like a family member or friend with some knowledge and common sense listing books in similar lots of perhaps a dozen or more. It seems for a few weeks, you can win a few of these auctions before a few fairly decent-sized dealers become your competition and then, well, the fun gets sucked out of the room pretty quickly...

Take Western Comics 14 for $25

Those are some seldom encountered, really cool books!

If I'm reading it correctly, it looks like one of the dealers was from Boswell, Indiana, which is a fairly sleepy town now in central Indiana along old US Route 41 - the Dixie Highway. I used to hunt antiques there some moons ago, notably at Nern's, which was housed in a great old, three-story Odd Fellows' building on the west edge of town. I still prefer the mostly-divided Highway 41 to its harrowing counterpart Interstate 65. Every time I'm foolish enough to revisit the idea of I-65, I am quickly disavowed of the notion by at least one if not two or three major back-ups due to construction work or accidents. I'd rather drive through a few small towns and one big, bad Terre Haute than sit for 45 minutes on I-65 and move maybe a mile...

The background machinery on this cover is awe-inspiring!!

Is Lost in Toys a Boardie here? He always has some decent stock, but I’m able to find better deals elsewhere in the room. I have bought the oddball item from him in the past, such as a “what the heck” Roy Rogers coloring book from a magazine box full of $20-ish coloring books, but all pretty cool titles like Tom Corbett or Bullwinkle (ie. better stuff).

I wish I knew about this announcement. I think it’s a coincidence I saw it just now, as I don’t think I’ve ever been in the “Comic Events” section before. I would’ve made an effort to introduce myself. I was there early and got some nice deals from John H. and Ray as well as Steve who made the trip to our humble burbs. I saw a couple Boardies briefly but everybody was busy box-diving. Pulling out $5 or 3/$10 books is so enjoyable in person as these are the same books that people on the Bay ask (and get) $9.99 or 12.99 for and then there’s postage on top of that. I’m pretty much done with my Marvel buying as the prices have just left me behind on the books I never got around to buying when I had the chance. At cons like this, you can pull Dells, ACG, Gold Keys, Charltons, etc. and scratch that itch without that nasty postage mentioned above. Cons are definitely the way to go! I always swear off buying books online after a local con, but then boredom forces you back online to take a look… especially in the grey winter months.

Boy, that’s a nice 200! That’s one I’ve never found in hand, and as I’m sure you know, it’s been tough to win books like this on the Bay these past few years. I should’ve been more dedicated just six or seven years ago to finding my favorite Four Colors.

Take Forbidden Worlds 48 for $23

Man, that is a really nice looking 4.5 you have there! And since when did they drop the “classic cover” designation on this book?? This had been known as a classic since before the term was invented, along with Superman 14, More Fun 54, and Target 7.

Wow, that write-up for his obituary paints an amazing picture of what seems like an amazing man!

Since we have handy little devices that make it so easy now, I’ve taken to occasionally spreading out and photographing my stuff as I acquire it, usually from comic shows or flea markets, but also from the Bay and MCS. I haven’t been doing it that long, but I already enjoy looking at the pictures from just a few years ago. And as the last few pics show, it bleeds into other areas as well.

Well, like many here, re-bagging books is cathartic. I’ve still got boxes of books in the old polyethylene bags that I’ve tried upgrading to at least polypropylene bags (and boards). These can be anything from old Harveys or Charltons to lower grade Atlas and Dells. I’m in no hurry, so I flip through a lot of books looking for interesting house ads and read a few stories. I'm just glad you can actually BUY bags and especially backer boards again! Those were frustrating days during the lockdowns when you couldn’t find them anywhere but the Bay at extravagant a la carte prices. It’s a disconcerting feeling being down to your last few bags or boards….

That's very interesting! Some of the early science fiction is indeed a bit of a trudge, but there are other genres from the same period I've found a bit more engrossing, if not more for the novelty than the literary flourishes. One niche area I'd like to dive deeper into is the once-popular "lost civilization" genre. ERB is the most enduring of those authors, but there were many long-forgotten writers and series. That this occurred during the West's colonization and exploration of the African continent isn't all that surprising of a backdrop.

We'd get that a few decades later in the "sweats" or men's adventure magazines. There the sadism was split just a little more evenly... https://boards.cgccomics.com/topic/461135-men’s-adventure-mags/#comments

And to conclude, a trio of women who are outright saving the day!! To be fair, the costume on the last woman could be considered suspect* in a similar vein to all those "artsy" and ogled portrayals of Power Girl, but at least she doesn't need someone rocketing to her rescue... ( * I have to maintain my Sarah Lawrence rep, after all.)

Here are a pair of heroines every bit the equal of their male counterparts:

I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to include a few non-shudder pulps from my collection that might be appreciated for presenting a more flattering view of women in the pulps. Here's someone that doesn't need saving:

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and conclude that your ad hominem hyperbole is chiefly an attempt to be light-hearted, but flippantly dismissing an entire practicum of academics overwhelmingly populated by females seeking empowerment and new perspectives on ages-old morays doesn't really serve much to dispel any whiff of misogyny. No, everybody does not know that. Had you asserted instead that the majority of golden age comics were geared to a male audience, you'd have better footing. The beginnings of the golden age coincided with the dominance of the successful strip reprint books like Ace, Popular, King, Magic, Popular, and Super Comics, not to mention Famous Funnies. These were geared towards younger audiences - period. That means boys and girls alike. Admittedly, during the height of the golden age, superheroes came to dominate more and more, but publishers astutely sought to attract more female readers with features girls could better relate to, like Wonder Woman and Mary Marvel. Ironically, in the case of the former, William Marston couldn't help himself by infusing Wonder Woman stories with his predilections for what's that? Oh yeah, more bondage - surely the very antithesis of misogyny, yes?? Of course there were titles like Animal Comics and New Funnies, and the wildly-successful titles Four Color, Looney Tunes and Walt Disney's Comics and Stories came into their own during the war years and would go on to outsell even the capes. Archie and his brood, too, for that matter. And then if you allow for the somewhat murky demarcations of the golden age to include the near-postwar era, you're soon to see the romance boom, but before that Millie, Hedy, Rusty, Tessie and other working women would vie for space on America's comic racks. I confess: it's with a palpable distaste that I find myself now replying seemingly point-by-point to your missive, because I could honestly argue the pulps most in question are worth collecting, for a wide variety of reasons, but a simple nostalgia for a bygone era doesn't pass the smell test - especially regarding the shudder pulps (which is tragically the hottest area of pulp collecting currently). I'll propose a collecting parallel: it's an easy enough excursion into a different sort of -ism. I collect a lot of stuff. Take sheet music for example. Decades ago, one of the hottest areas in sheet music collecting was "politely" termed black Americana. Of course, there were less polite terms for it just in my adulthood. I would no more feel blameless or ambivalent nor in any way nostalgic to show my wife's co-workers a stack of prized sheet music which included copies of Turkey in the Straw or Warmin' Up In Dixie. "Oh, don't worry, these are charming. They harken back to a simpler time. Look at the artwork. Isn't it quaint and innocent?" I think a more scholarly position would be to ask what in the world was going on in America in the 1930's?! Why was there even a market for multiple magazines where women are routinely being tortured and imperiled book after book, story after story?? Was there some pervasive psychosis lingering across the land during those bleak Depression years, fueled by the utter and stark destruction of our national naivete or the persistent traumas from the First World War that returning soldiers unwittingly brought back stateside with them? That seems a tad more enlightened than "Oh look, she's somebody's daughter or sister, and she's being slowly exsanguinated, but isn't she painted marvelously?" This is the easiest of your counterpoints to ignore. Who are you to police any thread as to what sincere tangents are and are not pursued? That's just - to borrow a word of yours - a ridiculous overreach. Most of us here pay attention to people and what they post. I've gotten the impression over the years that you and I would share many of the same views and, in areas where the overlap is not as pronounced, likely cast a better light on some of those contradictory views. I just think you rather hastily and perhaps reflexively defended a position that requires a bit more nuance.

It does drive the stratospheric segment of the hobby, but dozens of times a week, I get outbid on comics on the Bay, and they’re mostly western, romance, war, teen, funny animal, etc. I can’t recall the last time I even bid on a superhero comic. Try buying a nice mid-grade Four Color at a steal these days: you can’t. Clearly there are others hunting these books besides me. If tomorrow a fine copy of Action 1 fell from $1,000,000 to $100,000, I still couldn’t afford it. Truth be told, if in this dystopian future where the whole comic market crashes, it fell another 90% to $10,000, I honestly still might not buy it, as no comic is really worth that to me. It just isn’t. I know I’m in the overwhelming minority here - perhaps singularly so! I held it to be true in 1973, and still hold, in part, that view in 2023. But… I’d still be buying and collecting comics, because it’s the artform I love, not the dizzying heights. Sincerely, x infinity

What has been the driving force for so many recent converts to pulps, many of them from comics themselves? That’s easy, but people might feel uneasy with the answer: Misogyny. Pulps aren’t collected for their insides as much as they used to be: they’re collected these days for their covers. And so very many of the recent top sales of pulps feature two classes of women: those as adornment, and those in dire peril. Not all, but way more than you’d imagine. These beleaguered women are either being herded into tubes or ice baths… entombed in gold... about to have their heads chopped off… receiving some strange, deadly transfusion… all while bound in accordance with the sadistic whims of their captors. Those women not imperiled too often have peacock wings or bat-costumes, like the ladies on Weird Tales. Once in a while, they have a cat-o-nine-tails, and they’re about to whip another woman - see again, Weird Tales. This trend has been similarly obvious in comics, and what we consider those oft-discussed “classic” covers, like Shock Suspense Stories 6, Terrific 5, Suspense 3, Startling 49, and so on. Do we more often gravitate to covers where women are self-determined and fully-actualized, or portrayed as equal to men, or downright heroic in their own right?? The answer is pretty obvious: no - no we don’t. Now, I’m not suggesting that this is the only reason people are casting a second glance at pulp magazines, as they are thoroughly engrossing artifacts for a multitude of additional reasons, nor am I asserting that this is happening consciously as so many new collectors are drawn to this whole class of covers, but there’s something going on at or beneath the surface worth considering.

Except a clear majority of comics ever published weren’t superhero comics… Comics go way beyond the capes for some of us.

Hey, I like both of those guys!! They’ll no more be collected than 95% of the people already mentioned however.