Hepcat

Good write-up! (thumbs u

Interesting the way Lana and Lois were drawn in 1955! Lana and Lois attired in only fishnet stockings and Brazilian thongs wouldn't have gone over too well with the CCA in 1955 though....

They will remain raw indefinitely. Here are five more from my collection:

I had a card collecting epiphany around 1992. I'd been pecking away since 1980 at reassembling the cards and coins I'd either had or just admired but missed out on as a kid. I was so busy going after the cards I really liked that were issued from about the mid-fifties to the late-sixties that I hadn't made any effort to stay current with any of the hockey cards issued after 1972-73 though. My thinking was to just fill in the more recent stuff at some future date. It was plentiful enough that I figured it wouldn't present much of a problem when I finally got around to it. But with the explosion in cards in general and sportscards in particular that occurred after 1990, I came to the realization that I could never have everything. It was then that I decided to take another leaf from the book I had as a kid. I'd collect only the hockey cards I liked! There was no reason to even go after something from every year. I had four or five sets from the late seventies and early eighties that were still in bricks. I'd never bothered to unwrap them from their cellophane wrap and put them into sheets. When I asked myself why, the answer was clear. I didn't care for the cards. One of the reasons was that I had no nostalgia for these cards since I didn't remember them from the schoolyard. But then again the 1971-72 O-Pee-Chee cards also came out well after my time yet I really liked them. I realized that beginning in the 1973-74 year a fundamental change occurred in hockey cards. They'd gone from a player's picture superimposed on some type of art background to photographed action shots! Well I didn't like the action shots. They weren't like the hockey cards I collected as a kid. Accordingly, I took the four or five bricks to Sports Connection on Eglinton Avenue in Toronto and sold them for a good price. One of the bricks was the 1979-80 Wayne Gretzky rookie card set although the Wayne Gretzky card was so badly cut that it could hardly be classified as even VG. Ironically I'd bought all the bricks some twelve years previously at Comics Unlimited on Keewatin Strret before they moved to Eglinton Avenue and became Sports Connection! Moreover I didn't have to concern myself with filling in the 1969-70 O-Pee-Chee set which I thought was plain ugly either. I just took the dozen or so 1969-70 hockey cards I had out of their sheets and put them with my traders. But if I didn't have to collect any hockey cards I didn't like, I was still free to collect any I actually liked. But I could use a rifle shot approach on certain subsets and insert sets. I didn't necessarily have to collect all the other cards in that set if I considered them to be cruddy looking. If I bought one card from some certain subset though, I had to collect all the others in that subset. I've always considered going after only certain players like some fanboy to be too much like being a groupie. It's cards I collect, not hockey players. The 1993-94 Fleer Ultra Wave of the Future inserts may have been the first post-1990 hockey cards I added to my collection. Over the years I've amassed three binders of hockey cards from the nineties that appeal to me. Included in these are complete sets of the Leaf Limited and Fleer Metal cards, and almost all the 1997-98 Skybox Metal Universe minus the half dozen Super Powers inserts I still don't have. These all have gaudy enough backgrounds of artwork to strongly appeal to me. It was back in 2004 that I stumbled upon what's become the main thrust of my modern hockey card collecting efforts. I was delighted to see Pacific issuing a set of cards for the AHL in 2004. Imagine that, players who aren't paid $millions and actually play hockey as opposed to striking for higher wages! While looking to fill in the last few Gold Parallels and Jersey cards from this Pacific AHL set at a Hamilton Bulldogs game at the Copps Coliseum, I chanced upon a 2003-04 Titanium Patch Ryan Miller card. It was the one below with a portion of a white number against red backing: I was enthralled by the card! I hesitated about a minute before buying it though because I knew by buying the one card I'd be opening a real can of worms. After all, I'd need to buy all the others in the set and even defining what constituted a set would be a problem. Well I've been accumulating whatever different 2003-04 Titanium cards I can find at "reasonable" prices for the last nine years. Here's a scan of a sheet of some of the more limited Parallels from my collection: Then I decided the 2003-04 Black Diamond cards were cool enough looking to collect as well. But each of the 198 cards in the set also have Green, Red and Clarity Parallels and the Clarity Parallels are serial numbered to only ten! I've accumulated only a dozen of the Clarities but I have dozens of the Green and Red Parallels: Then of course there's the Jersey cards.... I'll never finish the "set", but the fun they say is in the chase.... Nonetheless, I've filled five binders full of these 21st century hockey card sets. Nor have I put aside my vintage card collecting either. I'm still pecking away at upgrading the last few hockey cards I want from the 1957 to 1965 period and driving myself crazy doing so. The 1964-65 Tall Boys have been a bit of a problem. So have the 1963-64 York Peanut Butter cards. I like the backs to be a bright white! And of course the Chex cards, Weekend Magazine photos and Bee Hives still beckon.... I love them all!

Cake we share! Those are gumballs on the cake, which we also share.

Mmmmmm, cake!

I bought a 9.2 copy of a #3 in a Hakes{?) auction just over ten years ago. I was surprised to get it because I didn't bid that much. I thought it was somewhat overgraded and I decided I wasn't ever going to collect a Two-Gun Kid run extending back to the very earliest issues so I ended up selling it three years later through another auction at a decent profit.

I had a subscription to The Beaver for a while! It was a good Canadian history magazine but unfortunately the Philistines renamed it.

Wow! I never knew about those! When were they published? In the seventies? How much of the Fantastic Four run did they reprint?

Is that bottle embossed with letters or does it have pyroglazed Applied Coloured Letters(ACL)?

Well then have you taken them to a RedBlacks game yet?

Oh man! Both those comics look great although the #342 looks to be the whiter one. Myself though I don't have either. I wish I could find the Adventure Comics I still need in that kind of grade.

Mmmmmm, red covers! They look great! (thumbs u

Here are scans of some of my 1963 Post Cereal CFL cards: And here are pictures of the Collector Album into which they can be glued:

Here are scans of five more of my Adventure Comics: Northland copy

Hot Wheels are cool!

That's a fabulous copy! (thumbs u

Here are scans of three more issues with Gil Kane inking his own pencils:

I'm always left wondering what their adventures were in such cases. My sister's cat Courtney disappeared after a few days when my sister moved about five miles away within the city of London, Ontario. Over six months later Courtney was found in the general vicinity of my sister's previous house. A huntress supreme, Courtney wasn't much worse for her adventure. She stayed put thereafter and lived another six years or so. My roommate Ace pulled a stunt similar to that of Ennis earlier this century. Rather than just hanging around the neighbourhood after being let outside one Friday morning, he somehow got to the Sears store at the downtown Eaton Centre some five miles away. He was discovered by store staff late in the afternoon wandering in the hallway between the parking garage elevators and the administration office! Sears left a message for The MAN at the office but he'd already gone home. A Sears employee therefore took Ace home for the weekend. The MAN received the message on Monday and duly picked up Ace back at the Sears store on Tuesday morning. Ace though has never revealed why he had to go downtown that day. The MAN suspects that Ace caught a ride by sneaking into the backseat of a neighbour's car but Ace hasn't divulged that information either. At the age of fifteen, Ace's wandering days are now a thing of the past. He's become a porch potato and prefers to wile away the hours in a comfy chair. Jack, an orange tabby whom The MAN had dumped on his sister in London, had a similar escapade himself about twelve years ago. Jack hitched a ride with the fellow next door and ended up in Port Bruce thirty miles southeast of London on Lake Erie. The neighbour fellow was quite surprised to see Jack in the backseat when he got to Port Bruce. He had absolutely no idea that Jack shared his interest in snorkeling. Jack was out of luck though since the neighbour had no snorkeling gear of his size. Nonetheless, Jack got to spend a pleasant few hours at the beach with the sweet smell of dead fish wafting in the air.

You bet he does! We make sure of that.

The one year old orange tabby Ennis who lived in the row of houses directly behind us disappeared a year ago on July 27th. Although he was chipped (but not collared) and the three humans with whom he lived launched a concerted campaign to find him, Ennis appeared to have well and truly vanished. While The MAN thought that Ennis might possibly have hitched a ride to parts unknown, The WOMAN feared that Ennis had fallen prey to a coyote because he liked to wander out through the kitty door during the night. Well it turned out that The MAN was correct. The family received word by phone in early January that Ennis had been turned over to the Keswick animal shelter on the shore of lovely Lake Simcoe 45 miles north of us. Ennis had evidently heard that Lake Simcoe was a splendid place in the summer, albeit somewhat less so in the winter. So Ennis has been back home and has settled in as if he'd been gone no more than overnight. He doesn't wander around the neighbourhood as far anymore though. I guess he learned how good he really had it where he lives. Here are some pictures of Ennis out in front of our house from the spring of 2013:

Absolutely! A comic just isn't a comic without ads for Tootsie Roll Pops, Charles Atlas courses, Sea Monkeys, Silly Putty and 132 Roman soldiers. And I love those early Strange Tales featuring the Human Torch where he doesn't take himself too seriously to battle costumed criminals like Paste-Pot Pete. Much appreciated! I see you've not yet completed your bowling pin collection though. Oh man! From what comic is that New York Comic Co-Op stamp? What year do you think the New York Comic Co-Op opened? Can you imagine walking into a comic shop that would have all the comics from the late fifties and early sixties in stock? Not just Marvel superheroes but Atlas, DC, Charlton, Archie, DELL, Harvey and ACG? And they'd all be relatively new? On the same note, what year did the first comic shop in New York open? Chicago, Detroit? Does anyone remember patronizing these places back in the day?

Here we are last week taking a breather after a hard day's work:

My own thread? Don't you like my "Hepcat will still be Hepcat" thread? http://boards.collectors-society.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=7799878&fpart=1

When it comes to trading card part of my collecting activities, I'm a completist, a set builder of the sharpest, whitest, brightest cards I can find. I'm tough on corners and toning but I'm easy on centering. I'll accept cards that are well off center so long as they are not miscut. I collect them raw and unslabbed for three reasons. The first is that I've always collected cards raw ever since I was a little kid. Secondly, they're too bulky to store or even handle when slabbed. Thirdly, my grading priorities are not the same as those of the grading companies. I'm very tough on toning which they seem to ignore, but I'm easy on centering while they penalize off-center cards heavily. My collection of non-sports cards ranges from the late forties to the mid-seventies - but the sets I most treasure are typically from the 1957-1965 period which coincides with those cards I remember accumulating as a kid. The first cards to which I was exposed were the 1957 Topps Hit Stars. My older sister had brought a few home. She was looking for Yul Brynner, a search doomed to frustration since there was no Yul Brynner card in the set. The first cards I ever owned though were four 1958-59 Topps hockey cards which I gathered off the street one December day in 1958. The first three were Detroit Red Wings, but the last was a Chicago Blackhawk. When I saw that big Indian head on the red uniform, I knew that was my favourite team - even though I couldn't read the name yet! I admired the 1959 baseball cards in the schoolyard: But the first cards I ever bought were the 1959 CFL cards: These first few cards to which I was exposed left a lifelong imprint upon me. I ended up collecting the CFL, hockey and baseball cards most years thereafter until I graduated from grade eight in 1965. I was well aware of the various non-sport sets such as TV Westerns, You'll Die Laughing, Funny Valentines and Flags of the World that O-Pee-Chee was marketing in my corner of London, Ontario at the time (the Flags were probably remainders from 1956 that OPC had decided to redistribute). The first non-sport cards I collected in a big way though were the 1961 Leaf Spook Stories. The 1962 Topps Civil War News cards came next: The summer of 1963 was when I went big time, however. One of my buddies Anthony proposed that we pool our efforts and collections and just collect any card we could get our hands on. This was initially to his benefit because the 1963 baseball cards I had lying around dwarfed his meager stock. Nonetheless, over the ensuing two years Anthony and I amassed close to 4500 different cards. Needless to say, sheer numbers as opposed to condition was our defining priority. Strangely enough though, we succeeded in gathering up most of the sports cards issued in our neck of the woods back to the 1960-1961 hockey cards. But any cards older than these were very tough to find and we only had a very few examples from even sets as large as the 1960 baseball. In fact, coming across any pre-1961 cards in the schoolyard was such an uncommon occurrence that it seemed to be an almost magical event. And even today I feel the same sense of wonder, the same sense of magic, perusing the pre-1961 cards that I have even if they number in the hundreds and fill a binder! Among the cards we managed to acquire was a wild but very curious one called Hairy Fiend which we got in a generic pack while trick or treating on Halloween. We'd never encountered any of this set before and somehow just weren't bright enough to read the caption on the back that would have identified the set. Nonetheless, it became our favourite card. When I went off to boarding school in grade nine, I just turned my half interest in the cards we'd accumulated over to Anthony who was a grade behind me. Bad mistake. Within six months or so he too lost interest in the cards which were approaching 6500 in number at the time and gave them to Billy, the snot-nosed kid across the street. Anthony's thinking was that Billy would carry the torch so to speak and continue to build on the collection. To Anthony's horror and dismay though, Billy went and scrambled the cards in front of his eyes! That's right, he tossed the contents of the whole box up into the air just to watch every other little kid on the street scramble to get as many as he could! Anthony still grouses about that to this very day some 48 years later. I also collected the premium coins that were issued in jelly desserts and potato chips up until I graduated from grade school. The plastic Shirriff/Salada hockey coins, the Shirriff plastic baseball coins, the Jell-O/Hostess Airplane Wheels, the Krun-Chee Warships and the Humpty Dumpty CFL coins were the ones that drew my most avid interest - and dimes. But you know the memory of these cards never left me. I'd often think back to my collecting days and wish I still had my cards even when I was in my late teens but I thought that there was no way I could ever reassemble what I'd had as a kid. Then came an article in the Canadian Magazine Saturday supplement to the newspaper. It featured Angelo Savelli of Hamilton, who was described as the world's biggest card collector. Angelo had evidently started buying sports cards in 1948 and never stopped. The article filled me with an incredible longing for the cards I'd once had, cards that I thought were now lost in the mists of time. Flash forward a few years to 1979. I had finished university and had been working in Toronto for a couple of years. I discovered that the big city had four comic shops. Two of them carried old gum cards as well! The first sets I bought at the comic shops were Man from UNCLE, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and the first two Funny Valentine sets. Shortly thereafter I discovered that the main comic shop in Hamilton also carried cards. When the proprietor Paul pulled out NM (or so I thought at the time) sets of the 1959, 1960, 1963 and 1964 CFL cards, I could not reach for my wallet quickly enough! Prizes beyond belief! As was the Civil War News set he had and the You'll Die Laughing set I picked up a few weeks later at a comic show. When I bought the first edition of Chris Benjamin's Non-Sport Price Guidein the mid-eighties, I realized that the Hairy Fiend card we'd had twenty years before belonged to the notorious Mars Attacks set. I've never stopped collecting. I now have a fabulous collection of non-sports, CFL and hockey cards and I've even made inroads into baseball cards from the 1954-1965 period as well. I've also amassed one of the better collections around of those premium coins to which I referred earlier e.g. Shirriff hockey and baseball, Warships, etc. I used to feel an incredible sense of longing whenever I saw the type of old variety store at which I used to buy my cards and comics as a kid. No more though. My collection now of most cards is so far beyond what I dreamed of having as a kid that I've shed that sense of loss. I eventually met Angelo Savelli in the mid-eighties at a collectibles show in Toronto where he had set up to sell card and he's now a friend of mine. It was at the big annual Toronto Sportcard and Memorabilia Expo in 2002 or so where I saved one of his binders full of expensive hockey cards from the thirties and forties from a thief. I noticed that a tall young fellow at the other end of Angie's table had scooped up what appeared to be one of Angie's binders and walked off briskly down the aisle. Angie himself was on the other side of the table and was in no position to give chase (besides I'm a lot fleeter of foot than Angie is nowadays) so I set off after the fellow myself. I caught him before he got to the door of the hall and said "Excuse me, but is that your binder?" Much to my surprise, the fellow just said "No!" and shoved the binder into my hands. While I stood there startled for a second or two, he swiftly made his exit through the door. Oh well. I'm not in the business of apprehending thieves anyway, but I'd managed the most important detail which was getting Angie's binder back for him. Since Angie sold almost all his cards other than the hockey and CFL around the turn of the century and I've accumulated so many cards myself in the last thirty years, I no longer envy Angie for his cards. How the circle turns!