Mark Sielski

Hey all, I rarely post but I am an avid reader of all your comic magazine posts. Special shout out to famousmonstersforryever! He sometimes posts as Elroy Jetson. New to CGC, he did me a absolutely huge favor in reuniting me with my FM #221 Subscription Variant. I inadvertently had "sold it" a few years back thinking it was a duplicate:) What were my chances of finding a 9.8 copy again. This one made it thru the mail postal system, aka subscriber copy, and survived as a 9.8! I saw it posted in CGC Registry sets, reached out to him, and we did a fair exchange. He's got a website, sometimes selling mid range copies of FM. I know a lot of you prefer the comics, but without Famous Monsters, there would be no Creepy and Eerie. Without Creepy and Eerie, there would be no Vampirella. Without the Warren mags, Skywald would have never emerged. Without Famous Monsters, the B&W comic mag market would never existed for Marvel to explore. See, we owe it all to Famous Monsters of Filmland! So visit the famousmonstersforryever website and browse the classics. One last hurrah with this #221 Subsrciption Variant, it finally pushed me over the long elusive 300,000 registry point level for Famous Monsters of Filmland. These boards are great! Here's the website: Famous Monsters Forryever Where we are "dying to keep the memory of Famous Monsters of Filmland alive!" http://www.famousmonstersforryever.com

Locally, we referred to the "inventory copies" as WARREN WAREHOUSE copies. A few large dealers - that had the capacity to store thousands of copies of an issue - gobbled up much of the Warren Back Issue stock at the Bankruptcy auction. As I recall, dealers like Joe Koch, and Dolgoff had a big chunk. The big dealers would in turn sell off slices/or strips to smaller dealers. The Warehouse copies would show up at conventions. True, these copies weren't of the best high grade caliber. But they did feel like firm, new, books. In an era before Ebay, many of us Warren fans were thrilled to be able to buy "Back Issue" stock. Most very nice Warren Warehouse copies could probably only fetch a CGC 8.0 today, and those were the nicest ones. Storage was an issue, large stacks of mags compressing, some in stacks that were neither vertical or horizonal, hot warehouses, humidity etc. The warehouse copies were very available in the 1980s and 1990s, but by the early 2000s, I felt they were pretty much dried up and gone. If you were a favored customer of the warehouse dealers, my understanding is they would let you spend hours cherry picking their inventory, as long as you walked out with a sizeable amount. They really didn't care back then. There was no CGC. I was told at time of purchase, that my - then raw copy - of BLAZING COMBAT #1 - came out of the Koch/or Dolgoff Warehouse. It was hand picked out of dozens of copies of Blazing Combat #1 - yes, more copies than what you typically think there are. Years later, that raw copy ended up being a CGC 9.4 after I had it graded. So there were some gems in the Warehouse Warehouse Copies. Cheers.

Still collecting. Healthy and Happy!

It's one of those things that I will never forget either! Cheers, Mark