markseifert

GREAT cover! Wow.

Yeah. Wow.

Killer cover. Love that and Bat 47, WW 45.

If you like the origin expanded / origin retold books, Action 158 (1951) is an underappreciated one. In addition to the usual origin elements, it syncs up Superboy and Superman continuity for the first time -- by connecting them with the now-famous 'Jonathan Kent's dying moments' scene, with Jonathan telling Clark he's ready to go forth and be Superman now, basically. It's a nifty stepping stone from the Golden Age to the more continuity-minded days of the Silver Age.

Oh sure, Cornjerkers. We played them in sports from time to time (not me of course, being a card-carrying trumpet-carrying nerd). But yeah, Cropsey was and is a grain elevator, a spur off the Illinois Central line, and a few houses. I knew RC fairly well in the 90s, I'd gone to Champaign to attend U of I, worked at a storefront shop for awhile where he was a customer. Sparta area was picked over by earliest dealers by the late 70s, so say the local fish tales around here -- so too bad you didn't have the chance to take a shot! I did speak to the fellow who was selling the also-nearby Rockford collection a couple of times -- Rockford is near Mt Morris, which was the home of the major midwest-centric distributor of that day, Kable News, and probably accounts for that collection and some others. World Color was in St Louis before Sparta, and a short rail trip to Mt Morris. We like Enoch Bolles around here too!

The Major holding forth on the sort of subject matter that he understood well. , I should get some reading copies of this some day...

Starting to converge on the pulp era from both ends via my golden age and dime novel interests... Not much of a cover, but I still love it as a key. A couple years after Lowell captured the world's imagination with his interpretations of what he saw through his telescope at the Flagstaff, AZ observatory which still bears his name, one particular of those imaginations came up with this:

Whoa. That is gorgeous.

That is awesome.

Brilliant! Great catch, and thanks for posting those interiors. I've always appreciated your eye for cool rare stuff. It's amazing how much undiscovered territory is still out there...

I was born by then! Just barely... crawling around the prairie and such. There's one or two other members who read this section from time to time who are from the area. As you lived in Hoopeston, you might remember at least hearing of the tiny little farming community, Cropsey, where I grew up. It was a little better by the 80s, I think, when the "comics can be valulable!" hype had built to the point that people knew. There was actually a pretty great little hole-in-the-wall back issue shop in Rantoul in the '80s. I think another great hole-in-the-wall shop in Champaign, the Book Nook, was around in the late 70s when you'd have still been in the area. If you can remember a place that had a FF #1 and a Supes #2 that looked like they'd been on the wall collecting dust since the day they came out, that's the one. I actually did pretty well in this area finding stuff in the day, in that decade. My mom dragged me to every flea market and garage sale in Central IL. Found decent stuff pretty often, I mean, not Supes 1 decent, but plenty of Silver Age in the countryside. As I say, people had a vague idea that it might be worth cleaning out the attic and tossing a stack on the table for a quarter or a buck each by then. edit to add -- I would also note that I always thought that being a farm kid gives you a different perspective on finding vintage. Lots of old farmhouses passed down through generations (that's largely over now due to land value, but I caught the end of it)... I grew up in a house built by my great grandfather 125 yrs+ earlier, and read my way through several of my neighbors' attic stashes in the literal sense of that -- they have much more room on the prairie, and throw out less stuff as a result.

Rather funny coincidence, isn't it? The "helmet", the boots, the stance... a little similar! Even the cover blurb seems to echo the caption text there, in a way: HE LIVES! HE WALKS! ("...exultingly striding up and down...") HE CONQUERS! ("...Indian-Exterminating, Hunting...") But still! Just kind of a general similarity, though a few of them. And we comic fans tend to reach for those connections. Then the other shoe dropped on my head. A couple issues prior, in the same series: 1852 Satirical image, A.J.H. Duganne. America's first Iron Man did not possess mechanized armor, though it seems he was sometimes drawn as if he did. In reality, he was a creator of widely varied talents -- an author, poet, musician, and political activist. Far as I can tell, he came by the Iron Man nickname for a lengthy and challenging musical performance he gave using a variety of instruments of his own design. The name stuck throughout his life and was widely used by the press, and he even briefly launched a weekly paper (as noted in the caption there) called "The Iron Man". Duganne was a founder of the Know-Nothing political party, and an associate of the far more famous Ned Buntline. Buntline was himself a promotional force of nature, sort of a prior-era Stan Lee Face Front True Believers type, whose claim to fame is fictionalizing the Buffalo Bill legend and turning Bill and many other foundational American heroic figures into the icons we know today. As for Duganne, in one of history's amusing little coincidences, his first dime novel work was critically reviewed in 1864 by none other than William Everett -- a great uncle of a certain familiar name who gave a fictional smackdown to his own generation's Iron Man (at least once) a century later. Perhaps it all means little, except... history whispers to us, always.

Ah, man... that is a great strip.

Ok! And here's the historical inspiration for the strip. It's about George Hudson, known as the "Railway King" (hence the crown here). The clue is the "York You're Wanted!" on the cover, part of Hudson's machinations involved the York and Midland Railway. Wiki tells us: Edit -- haha... and as you say, "Railway Raillery" an early reference that eventually evolved to "Getting Railroaded", "Getting Railed".

The things I've studied just to understand comics (and dime novels & story papers)... I've proven my grade school teachers so very wrong.

Here are some pages... "He explains thus !!!" Thanks for the pages. So, it is as the cover suggested a swipe at railroad owners, here one day and gone the next with their profits. Do you get the same reading of this? This would be the dawn of the robber baron era. (a little earlier in UK than here) "He sees how a great deal of the Railway business may be kept in the dark." (Meaning, he sees that the ways the railroads are raising money to build out and acquire can be exploited) Then... he's doing well, he has respect, even the moment with the Queen. "He does an extraordinary number of lines!" (Could be building, more likely acquiring various rail lines to combine them -- because that can mean stock transaction rather than, you know, building assets. I know less about UK, that's what would have been done here, often) Then... he's getting wealthy (probably via financial manipulations and shell games of various sorts) . His board starts to notice things are amiss. And... he's gone rather than face the fury of (stockholders, the public, etc).

1852, Yankee Notions #4, probably written by Thomas Strong, a few possibilities for artist (not Strong in this case) which I need to do some research on. But I think Strong would have been comfortable with giving artists some sort of instruction from his penny valentine experience, and a lot of the material in YN feels like it's from one mind to me. America's first comic super 'hero' character? (he calls himself hero, though if you read it close, you'd probably be more inclined towards villain. Of course we could say that for many icons of the era) That aside, this is pretty clearly a comic super-character origin moment. Jeremiah Oldpot seeks out an inventor who is expert in "Electro-Galvanic-Vulcanized India-rubber." He combines several of the inventions to create an outfit with highly unique abilities. He is then "delighted at the prospect of achieving a world-wide reputation for courage and prowess." It's clearly a comic sequence, and the origin moment generally fits any number of comic characters created since. Is this the first one?

Almost forgot it was that day. Punch, 1850.

I collect a lot of pre-WWI stuff these days... dime novels, nickel weeklies, etc. There exists a dime novel price guide from 1929 which uses good-fine-mint terminology and associated price spreads, discusses the impact of restoration on price, discusses the impact of character, genre, and creator on future potential, discusses speculation, and on and on. It is dead on how we think of this stuff to this day. The more you look, the more you realize that what we do spins out of deeply embedded human nature stuff, and has been going on for ages.

We tend to think of the transformation of "collecting" from niche pastime to obsessive money-centric mania which occasionally makes the news as a recent development, but no -- here's Frederick Opper in 1891 to tell us otherwise. If you're a collector or know collectors, you can see that Opper has nailed many of the basic types of mania that can take hold: - Obsessive autograph seeking - Strange alliances built around hoping to get a chance at buying a particular collectible. - Amassing a great collection making you famous and esteemed among your peers - Collecting unusual stuff that you'd think that no one will ever, ever care about - The joy of finding something good for under fair market value. And of course, the mask collection is a great visual that has been used in numerous different ways over the decades. I keep meaning to make a large print of this for myself, as I... am familiar with one or two of these concepts.

Wow. So very cool.

I realized after I posted it that putting it side by side with the most famous example of the Golden Age makes for a pretty amazing comparison, with the hero entering the picture completing the arc of history. I actually kind of love this as a snapshot explanation of the theme... And from there it plays forward with Wonder Woman.

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...

Nice. GREAT cover.

Enoch!