Hepcat

How deep is your Adventures of Rex the Wonder Dog run?

The second Suicide Squad and the second Adventures of the Jaguar are impressive enough, but the second Rex the Wonder Dog! That issue is beyond scarce in reasonable condition! I'm in absolute awe.

Three cheers for Streaky! Streaky has always been way up high on my list of favourite superheroes.

Great cover! Smash those evil Toad Men I say! The Toad Men would of course return less than a generation later to menace Bucky O'Hare and his heroic crew.

A noble project to be sure!

Will those complete your run?

Those were all very bad people.

Oh yeah! Now that's a second appearances issue!

Grogg should have gotten a magazine of his own! Had that been so I'd still be a confirmed Marvel zombie today. And Circe deserved a title of her own even more so than Rip Hunter!

Okay. Here are scans of some of the second character or group appearances from the Silver Age in my collection:

Second appearances are also much tougher to find in the marketplace!

That is correct. Quality control during the printing process was negligible in those days. There's all kinds of colour variance evident in any issue of a Silver Age or older comic. If you stop looking at scans and just hold up two copies of the same comic, it's very obvious.

Oh man, RICK! Those Detective Comics of yours rom the mid-fifties are so tough to find with that high a number on the label, and those comics all look better than the number!

Here's a better scan of Adventure 340 than the one I posted on page 50 of this thread:

Mohawk Valley copies can sometimes (often?) have dust shadows on the front covers as well.

Why be concerned about either?

Here are scans of five of my Our Army at War comics:

Is it all right if I start with just my small price ten cent ones? Dallas Stephens copy Cleveland copy

Thank you!

So fifty years ago this month I was in ninth grade at a Franciscan Fathers operated boarding school in Kennebunkport, Maine named St. Anthony's. Normally we St. Anthony's students were not permitted off the monastery grounds and because of this we weren't supposed to have any spending money. All we had was the weekly allowance set out by our parents that was kept in trust by the monks. This could only be applied at the school store (a glorified closet) once a week early Saturday evenings for school supplies and candy (Mmmmm, Sugar Daddys!). I think my weekly allowance was a whopping $0.50 or $0.75. No comics let alone men's mags were available in the school store though. Cigarettes though could be bought with one's allowance given written parental permission. I recall one time our 275(?) pound shot-putter, a local boy named Chester, had gotten his cigarettes. One of the other upper classmen, another local boy, put his arm around Chester with the words "Chester old buddy, have I ever told you what a great friend you are?" To which Chester replied "Why is it that everybody turns queer on me whenever I have cigarettes?" To which his affectionate buddy replied "That's because you've got such f...ing big tits, Chester!" The memory of that exchange still makes me smile every time. But fifty years ago on a Saturday around Thanksgiving we the students of St. Anthony's were released onto the streets of Portland, Maine for the day! We reached Portland in mid-morning and were to gather at the assembly point around 6:30 PM for the trip back to Kennebunkport. This was quite the treat since we were given $2 each (Wow!) to finance our meals and other activities. I believe this was done to give the couple who worked as cooks for the school the day off to spend with their families. So there I was at the age of thirteen let loose on the streets of a big exotic U.S. city! Well it had to be big, didn't it? There were warships in the harbour. Try to find those in Canada! (Actually my home town of London's population of 162,000 was substantially larger than Portland's.) The first thing I did was track down a hobby shop. It was on the second or third floor of an old building and had an elevator with an honest-to-goodness elevator operator! The fellow made a snarky remark to me about hurrying up, as if he was pressed for time or something. Clearly he just hated what his job involved. The hobby shop had the most impressive selection of model kits I'd ever seen to that point. This of course cemented my impression that this was a big sophisticated U.S. city. The staff in the store was no more gracious than the elevator operator though. Despite their stock, the store didn't have the Monogram Super Fuzz kit I was trying to find. I'd seen a compelling ad for the Monogram Fred Flypogger kits in DC comics a few months previously: There was a hobby room at St. Anthony's where that school year I built and painted three other model kits that were advertised in the pages of DC comics or Boys' Life magazine, an Aurora Mummy, an Aurora Bride of Frankenstein and a Revell "Big Daddy" Roth Angel Fink. Leaving the hobby shop empty handed, I decided to get some lunch. Lo and behold I discovered a spanking new fast food pizza parlour that served not just individual sized pizzas but Pepsi! There was no pop sold at the St. Anthony's store and we got a bottle of Coke just once or twice a month with hamburgers on Sunday evenings after a supplemental rosary service or something in the chapel. (We always had some sort of fun meal on Sunday evenings.) I was a Pepsi loyalist at the time though so this pizza parlour was just the ticket! Now I think I'd only sampled pizza once or twice before in my life, probably just a mushroom slice for $0.20 at Cicero's Pizza stand at the Western Fair in London: I of course had never had enough money for pizzas in grade school and my traditional old-country parents would never have ordered out for such a thing . By the time I was in college of course my father would happily participate in any pizza I brought home! I ended up ordering the $0.55 or so individual cheese pizza plus a Pepsi in the restaurant. It was delicious, but small, so I ordered a second one! I spent the rest of the day exploring downtown Portland and the back streets that might have interesting cigar stores with newsstands. You see I'd been very much impressed by those ads trumpeting the return of the Spectre and I wanted to find one of those issues of Showcase! I failed. Nor did I stumble across the current Green Lantern or Flash issue because I don't remember buying even a single comic. I probably saw only Superman, Batman, Marvel, Harvey, Archie and Gold Key titles, none of which caught my fancy. I would have scanned the stands for the latest Creepy and Drag Cartoons magazines as well but I remember only returning empty handed. What I do remember is a convenience store/cigar store on a side street had some interesting lighters with pictures of bare breasted women on them. Another example of U.S. big city sophistication not found in my home town of London of course! By this point I probably didn't have sufficient remaining funds to buy a lighter, which of course I didn't need anyway since I didn't smoke. Pity. It would have been a nice memento of that trip to a sophisticated U.S. big city though. I'd undoubtedly still treasure that lighter today.

Well with the Grey Cup Game being held in Winnipeg on Sunday, this is as good a time as any to review the career accomplishments of Bud Grant, the man to whom a bronze statue was unveiled outside Winnipeg's Investors Group Field in October 2014. Here are some excerpts from Bud's simply phenomenal career: 1. He had poliomyelitis as a kid. He accordingly took up sports to help strengthen his leg muscles! 2. He lettered in three sports at the University of Minnesota - football, basketball and baseball! Twice he was All Big-Ten in football. 3. He was drafted in the first round by the Philadelphia Eagles in 1950. But he was also drafted in the fourth round by the Minneapolis Lakers though! He chose basketball and played 35 games for the Lakers in the latter part of the 1949-50 season. He stayed with the Lakers for one more season in 1950-51. 4. He then realized he would never achieve much in the NBA. He elected to switch to football and joined the Philadelphia Eagles for the 1951 season. He played defensive end that season leading the Eagles in sacks. 5. He switched to wide receiver for the 1952 season and was second in the NFL in receiving yards with 997! He then thought he merited a healthy salary increase. The Eagles disagreed and told Grant to take it or leave it. He opted to leave it, and instead signed with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers for more money. 6. He played both defensive back and offensive end for the Blue Bombers for the next four seasons leading the W.I.F.U. in pass receptions and being named an all-star in 1953, 1954 and 1956. 7. In 1957 he was named the head coach of the Blue Bombers at the age of 29! When later asked how long it took his former teammates to realize that he was now the boss, he replied "About five minutes." 8. He coached the Blue Bombers to a Grey Cup berth that very first year in 1957 and then again in 1958, 1959, 1961, 1962 and 1965 with the Blue Bombers emerging triumphant in 1958, 1959, 1961 and 1962. Ironically all six of those Blue Bomber Grey Cup games were against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. 9. The custom of Blue Bomber linemen playing games in sub-zero November temperatures with bare arms against their similarly bare armed rivals with the Edmonton Eskimos may have originated during Bud Grant's tenure in the fifties. Simple intimidation "What, you call this cold?" Those were the days when the Western final was a best of three game affair played over the course of eight days. Football players were tough in those days. 10. He was offered the job of head coach of the Minnesota Vikings in 1961. He turned it down at the time, but relented and accepted the position in 1967. 11. He then engineered a very rare trade between teams in the separate leagues when he acquired QB Joe Kapp from the British Columbia Lions in exchange for Canadian WR Jim Young. Young would go on to earn the appellate "Dirty Thirty" with the Lions and was inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame after retirement. 12. He wouldn't allow heaters along the Viking sidelines during games. He wanted his players to stay focused on winning the game and not warming up by the heaters. When you saw the Vikings standing like ice giants along the sideline in their purple cloaks while the other team huddled miserably by their heaters, it was pretty obvious which team would win the game! 13. When many players took to celebrating TDs with outlandish antics in the end zone in the late seventies, Viking players did not. When a reporter asked Bud whether there was a team rule prohibiting such celebrations, his reply was "No, there's no such rule. They just better not." 14. Bud Grant didn't like to see players fidgeting during the national anthem. He thought that standing respectfully at attention would earn not just the respect of the fans but also of the players on the other team. He accordingly had giant defensive end and former National Guardsmen Carl Eller lead his Viking teammates in national anthem practices. 15. The player Bud Grant considered to be the best he ever coached in either league was Leo Lewis who played halfback for the Blue Bombers between the years 1955 and 1966. Leo had rushed for 8861 yards with a remarkable average of 6.6 yards per carry. You can therefore imagine Bud's astonishment in 1981 when he was told that a fellow named Leo Lewis had walked into the Vikings' training camp asking for a tryout. The applicant was the son (nephew?) of the Leo Lewis Bud had coached in Winnipeg. Leo Lewis III not only made the roster that year but played for the Vikings as a WR and PR until 1991. 16. Bud Grant had a fear of flying. His Blue Bombers (and of course Vikings) always flew to their games though. "The players sleep more restfully in a hotel than they do on a train. I don't matter." was his explanation. 'Nuff said. Here are some scans of CFL cards from my collection featuring Bud Grant: 1954 Blue Ribbon 1963 CFL Coins 1964 Nalley's CFL Coins

So the 103rd Grey Cup Game will be played between the Edmonton Eskimos and the Ottawa RedBlacks this Sunday with the kickoff scheduled shortly after 6:30 PM Eastern Standard Time in that most quintessentially Canadian city of them all, Winnipeg: We of course have our own unique brand of football in Canada. In fact, it's one of the very few games worldwide that are exclusively played within one country's borders. And we've been doing it a long time here in Canada. The Toronto Argonauts date back to 1873, the Hamilton Tigers (now Tiger-Cats) date back to 1883 and the Regina (now Saskatchewan) Roughriders date back to 1910. (In comparison the NFL's origins date back to only 1920.) We've been playing it so long that our football is an ingrained part of our national identity. It's one of the things that makes our country unique. Meanwhile the Grey Cup itself was first awarded in 1909 and is one of the very oldest sports trophies in North America, older I believe than any American sports trophy. As a result the Grey Cup Game has earned its place as part of our cultural heritage. The Grey Cup Festival is a very Canadian tradition. As a Canadian I take pride in the unique aspects of our cultural heritage. In fact I'm very proud to be radically Canadian. That's why I've gotten a Radically Canadian patch sewn onto every single one of the 35 CFL jerseys I have in the house. Here are a few pictures: Montreal Alouettes Toronto Argonauts Winnipeg Blue Bombers Edmonton Eskimos British Columbia Lions Calgary Stampeders Hamilton Tiger-Cats Saskatchewan Roughriders

Here are scans of a baker's dozen of the top Gil Kane covers from my collection:

Here are my top twelve Carmine Infantino covers from my collection in alphabetical and then chronological order:

Yes, not bad at all! I took some time out from Halloweening to make a video. Please vote for my "I Get the Point" video presentation in the Ultimate CFL Fan Contest! I Get the Point!