markseifert

So based on the appearance of the other comics and the April 1943 issue of Esquire magazine pictured, here is evidence that Gift #3 was published in 1943 and not in 1949 as indicated in the Overstreet guide and the Grand Comics Database. You read it here first.

That's the stuff. Brilliant.

Awesome.

here is a great book! happy to have this one in the ole box

 

Great display.

couple new additions to the Schomburg family

John P Dille's grandson or great grandson has come to Howard Days the last two years. The family still owns the rights. I had some of my Buck Roger comics there and he got a kick out that. They are still hoping to do a new a movie or TV show at some point.

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.

Happy to add this into the "Keeper" collection

 

Just a stunner of a book, thanks to Filter for the transaction (thumbs u

 

Man, I love old books.

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.

Man, you are not kidding. And that Batman movie - I didn't have high hopes when they announced the cast. But when I saw it - WOW!

 

Comic book movies were tough "back in the day".

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.

I'm not sure we can say it was just SOP to hand off the film rights to their top titles, though you are right in that Marvel Studios was not around at the time to drive the film and TV direction. Marvel found itself in a very tough situation at a time in its business lifecycle that could have made or broken the business.

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).

So the 1990s greed of the comic book speculator and Ronald Perelman really is still costing Marvel long-term.

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.

I'd like to ask a basic question. All of these characters are Marvel created. So what happened? How did Fox and others grab the rights away from Marvel? Did Marvel just have a firesale and piece meal characters for cash?

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.

UNCONFIRMED:

[*] Cable

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 was delighted when this book came back from CGC. I think I bought it in the 1980s.

 

Group shot!

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:

After they had received a few of these, his editors must have given Joe a call and suggested that they have their staff logo man, Ira Schnapp, do a version that could be photostatted and put on every cover. It would save Joe time, it was the way things were usually done, and though they might not have said so, Joe’s variable logos didn’t make the book look good.

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

i have no idea what condition the pedigree copies are, but i'm very happy to have a copy in well better than 7.0. it seems like it hardly pops up in any grade.

 

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.

 

1969 me going thru the stacks of stuff that JERRY WEIST had in his collection. Jerry is holding the adzine..FANDOMS' AGENT.

Wow. Great pics, thanks for posting.

The machinations are fascinating, but looking at DC titles by month and year, it shows that Action wasn't the only title with alternating hero covers. January 1940 is the defining month where all titles switched to superhero covers with Detective 35, Adventure 46, and Action 20 starting that trend. If the Spectre had already been created, we would include the More Fun title, but his first appearance wasn't till Feb 1940. At any rate, there were no alternating covers on More Fun after 51. Same with Green Lantern as he simply didn't exist till July 1940 (although there was Ultra Man before him, but not technically a costumed hero). The last pre-hero cover or last gasp might well have been More Fun 51 or even Double Action 2, unless we consider an All American before #16. So it seems like an intentional effort for DC to go all hero, regardless of title, starting with Jan 1940.

 

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).

Quite possible from these findings and comments from you all that this ad might as well had its infancy beginnings as far as Action 7 and could have been out in a drug store as early as Action 11 (April 1939) or Action 13 (June 1939) to cross market the new Supe title and continuing appearances in Action Comics...still curious if the popularity was a hit in late 38, why the supe consecutive covers didn't start til 19--even with slow gathering of sales data. Fun stuff to investigate. Would be cool if anyone could find a real drug store pic with this ad next to the comics

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.

looks like a flyer made specifically for and sent only to newsstands advising them on how to increase sales with kids looking for the hot new Superman, even tho he wasnt on the cover.. which would place this specifically in the time period where DC knew sales were up, and were JUST making plans to increase Supermans visibility on all subsequent Action covers. That would make it 2-3 months before Action 19, right?

 

sales returns sure were slow back then..

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:

Superman appeared in the first issue of Action Comics, June, 1938. Nothing happened. Nor the second issue, for which the partners received another $130. Nor the third. But with the fourth, Action Comics spurted mysteriously ahead of its fellow publication. Donenfeld heard the rumble of distant drums. We better have a newsstand survey," said he.

 

The survey quickened his brightest hopes. Children were clamoring, not for Action Comics, but for "that magazine with Superman in it." Quivering with excitement, Donenfeld ordered Superman splashed all over the cover of succeeding issues. They sold out.

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