markseifert

That's the stuff. Brilliant.

Awesome.

Great display.

They seem to be spinning the licensing gears back up -- Issue #1 of a new Buck Rogers series drawn by Howard Chaykin hit stores yesterday.

Wow, very nice.

And with a single pic, you make a pretty good case for the value of old paper. Would you rather have this: Or this: I am a big consumer of digital on my kindle and ipad, but that's a pretty concise illustration of the difference.

Yeah, hard to believe that Corman FF was in the mid-90s... seems lightyears ago now. Steven Massarsky, the business guy behind Valiant had plans to do the Marvel Studios type of thing in the 90s, raising the money and controlling it yourself, before things went awry there. Could have been interesting if he'd have had a couple more years to put it together.

Well, Marvel simply was not its own movie studio when they made these other deals. They had to get into business with a movie studio to get stuff made. Selling movie studios the rights to make 'em is the way you do that unless you are incredibly well financed (hence the half a billion dollar loan). To this day, any Image, Oni, Top Shelf, etc rights holder (again, with the exception of DC/WB. I'm not sure how Richardson's deals work, DH may be another exception) who has gotten a movie made has sold an option to some studio entity. Movie studios have the cash fire hose and they use it to maintain control of the projects they are developing (understandably). Hard to remember this now, but there was a time not very long ago at all when this wasn't considered a big deal because with few exceptions (Batman '89), people really didn't understand how to make comic book movies anyway. Remember the ridiculous aborted Roger Corman Fantastic Four movie? That was 1994! Hence this stuff was sold off to major studios without much care. Then Sony Spider-Man changed everything (again).

I'd put the blame on Marvel's bankruptcy rather squarely on Perelman's shoulders. The comic sales woes of the time make for interesting mainstream news article fodder, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to Perelman's attempted business maneuvers.

Marvel Studios as the film production entity that we now know didn't really get started until 2004. They borrowed like half a billion dollars (seriously) from Merrill Lynch to start putting the first several films into motion that they could do completely on their own. Iron Man I was the first true Marvel Studios / "Marvel Cinematic Universe" film. Before then, it was SOP to sell film options to other movie studios or otherwise take on production partners (which is how everybody else in comics besides WB still does it), and many of the previous deals are still in place. And yeah, the Marvel bankruptcy messed things up for awhile. The Sony Spider-Man franchise was delayed by that for quite some time.

Wonderful stuff about Leary's. I've been getting interested in the development of the culture of collecting recently, and ran across a scan of this 1852 broadside advertising a new collection of antiquities for sale, including rare books, and inviting members of Congress to stop by. Better known as Carusi's Saloon to google, the place sounds like quite a center of culture in Washington of the 1800s.

This will probably be clarified soon as real info starts emerging about the X-Force film, but it's probably Fox.

Thanks for staying on this Fuelman, great info.

The king of early-50s DC does it again!

I attribute this to them working so fast they just grabbed the old logo and didn't realize it! My very first post in this forum (back in 2005!) was asking this same question -- why the Superman logo jumped back and forth between different hand-drawn versions across the #1-10 run. I could buy the logo on #9 as just a near miss of the 'regular' logo, but the crude logo drawn for #4 and #5 is particularly weird... It's still kind of a mystery to me. Longtime letterer Todd Klein, who has done a bunch of research on comic logos from the historical perspective on his blog, has partially addressed this subject: So, that doesn't necessarily address the back-and-forth, but if Shuster was hand-drawing the logo on some of those covers, it's possible that they didn't use the covers in the order in which they were drawn, I'd say. http://kleinletters.com/Blog/logo-study-action-comicssuperman-part-2/ Klein has a whole series on the development of the Superman and Action logos, as well as tons of other stuff of this nature from a historical perspective. Very highly recommended. http://kleinletters.com/Blog/logo-links/

Here's a fun one I don't recall seeing before: Couple of pretty high grade looking copies there. Here's the blurb accompanying the photo: Don Phelps Don Phelps Holds Up Rare Comic Books (1974) Press Photo “Don Phelps Of Boston Holds Up Two Of The Most Expensive Comics In His Collection. His Action Comics Has Been Sold For $4,000 And His Captain America Sold For $2,000.” http://browsethestacks.tumblr.com/post/27900274429/don-phelps-don-phelps-holds-up-rare-comic-books

Considering the Church and possibly a Larson or Lost Valley, pedigree copies on this book are obviously very rare. Your copy is amazing. For reference, here is the Church copy: This forum is just ridiculous sometimes. It took... 30 minutes for 3 high grade examples of this very rare 1939 book to show up.

Great info, walclark, thanks very much for posting.

Wow. Great pics, thanks for posting.

Fascinating observation.

I'll scan this later, but I see from that section on promo flyers in Overstreets Gold & Silver Quarterly #1 that there was a flyer/letter for Superman #4 that also mentions the "Remember Superman is in every issue of Action!" kind of line. So it's obviously something they were focused on for quite a while. Interesting stuff.

Actually... huh. Action 10 -- March '39 Superman 1 -- Summer '39 Action 13 -- June [NY World's Fair '39] Action 15 -- August Superman 2 -- Fall Action 17 -- Oct Superman #3 -- Winter Action 19 -- Dec This is quick and dirty, but the Action covers are pretty neatly staggered with the other Superman comic appearances. So it almost looks like they were deliberately pacing his exposure throughout 1939, and then in 1940 cranked it up another notch with monthly Action covers and moving Superman to bi-monthly (from quarterly).

I was wondering about this as well... I wonder if they were initially worried that having the Superman comic AND regular Superman-covered Action would be too much...? But thinking about it further... look at what happened around Jan-Mar 1939: The newspaper strip launched, they moved to squash the competition with DC v Bruns, and they were prepping for the Superman comic -- and of course, by the end of the year there were monthly Superman Action covers. So that fits with the all sail and no anchor quote for fall '38. They were preparing to blow things up in '39, and they did.

It's been awhile since I looked at my copies of this, but looking at it now this is pretty fun. The June 21, 1941 Saturday Evening Post contains a relatively detailed account of what they call "The Rise Of Superman Inc". An excerpt pertinent to this discussion: So... presuming that this is a condensed version of underlying facts, He had a very good idea that the Action #7 (Dec 1938) cover was going to work, and probably started prepping for Superman #1 (hit in May 1939, according to this Sat Evening Post article) right after Action #7 hit and they knew it did well. (and they absolutely knew they were onto something by early '39, because DC v Bruns was in motion by then) The article would seem to confirm the fact that they were sold on it even as they were prepping the Action #7 cover, as it says "From the fall of '38 on, it was all sale and no anchor." edit to add -- that sure does look like the #17 cover on there, so I guess that goes a long ways towards placing it in the timeline. I would have guessed much sooner based on what they knew and when!

That is spectacular. (thumbs u