Hepcat

A couple of DC comics: The Action above sports a double cover.

The Batman cover below is the most egregiously bad one from at least the first 45 years of the title. Artist Sheldon Moldoff, Editor Jack Schiff and the other middle-aged farts at DC with babies on their brains should have known that their particular affliction wasn't shared by ten year old boys. Bloody hell!

Five more from my Batman run: The above is the most egregiously bad Batman cover ever. Jack Schiff and the other middle-aged editors (e.g. Mort Weisinger and Robert Kanigher) with babies on their brains should have known that their particular affliction wasn't shared by ten year old boys. Bloody hell.

So you're building it yourself I take it. Are you good at building furniture or is this a first effort? And from what kind of wood and what kind of stains are you considering?

Hey! I just checked out a cover gallery of Wild Bill Pecos the Westerner and that's a run well worth pursuing!

Stocks pay dividends, and those of well managed companies deliver dividend growth. Collectibles are in no way comparable "investments". Appreciation in the price of collectibles is solely a function of an increase in the number of enthusiastic collectors or at least interested parties. And the party can come to an end at any time.

To label collectors they're fungible, but we comic collectors are interested in and buy the comic not the label. Meanwhile those numbers highlight the absolute insanity (actually inanity) of the prices those Hulk 181 comics fetch. Me I'd much rather track down and acquire a VF+ copy of Patsy and Hedy 1 or a NM copy of Strange Tales 89 with the intro of Fin Fang Foom (among many other much rarer comics).

Plastic? Alright then. I'll show you some vintage plastic. Now I've had this Bozo gumball machine for nearly twenty years: But when I saw this unused O-Pee-Chee warehouse stock one on Etsy a few months ago I couldn't resist snapping it up as well: There was one very much like it on the counter of Ken's Variety on Wharncliffe Road which was one of my go-to places for comics.

Mmmmmm! I love those Bizarro covers:

The Superbird is the Street Rod version of the kit a modeler could build. It could also be built as Stock or Super Stock (for the drag strip). I can't answer your second question because I didn't buy the kit as a collector. I bought it from Tuckey Hardware just around the corner in 1973-74 because I was fascinated by Plymouth Road Runners, Superbirds and Richard Petty's NASCAR Roadrunners and Dodge Chargers! My father bought us (actually me since he didn't drive) a red 1973 Charger at Glassford Motors in late 1973. I got a cassette car stereo with Pioneer 6x9 speakers for it in the summer of 1974. Then came B.F. Goodrich Radial T/A's a few years later. In 1981 I sunk thousands of dollars into it when I had Jesse at the Hemi Shop in east London drop a souped up 340 with T/A exhaust manifolds (halfway to headers) into it and got it painted candy apple red. (Very impractical paint job.) Sadly now I've grown old and I only dream of my days as a hot rodder. Maybe if I won a lottery I'd get several classic muscle cars and take them to cruise nights wearing one of my many "Big Daddy" Roth T-shirts and pretend I'm still a greaseball....

The first DC superhero comic I can specifically remember reading was Green Lantern 11 in April of 1962 which George a buddy of mine on a farm near Mount Brydges outside of London had: I still remember the sense of awe and wonder with which it left me at the time. This Green Lantern character was leagues more interesting than staid old Superman and Batman were! Now I know for a fact that it prompted me to check out comics at the newsstand of Les' Variety since I clearly remember looking at these ads in the DC comics of the time: I know for a fact that it was in the spring of 1962 that I first encountered that house ad for Atom 1 because when I saw basically the same ad reprinted for Atom 2 a couple of months later, I remember thinking that it was a pity I'd missed out on getting a copy of the Atom 1 with the cool Venus flytrap cover that I'd seen advertised earlier. But if anything the house ads on the inside front and back covers impressed me even more strongly: Wow, so cool and mysterious that Hawkman, and who were these Metal Men anyway? Since I very clearly remember knowing nothing about the Atom, Hawkman and Metal Men at the time, I must have viewed those ads for the first time in the spring of 1962. The "Tomorrow's Stars Appear Today" ad is still one of my very favourite DC ads of all time despite, or perhaps precisely because, I first saw it in B&W. But because these ads were so compelling, over the years I've periodically wondered why I didn't start looking for and buying some of the comics that must have been on other comic racks only a few blocks away. I mean how could I have resisted covers such as these? Northland copy Well quite simply I didn't search through other newsstands for more superhero comics in the early spring of 1962. The explanation lies in another ad from DC comics that I very clearly remember seeing at the time: Wow! Baseball Coins! Just like the Shirriff/Salada Hockey Coins that had been so popular with young boys in Canada over the previous two winters. Here are scans of a few of these coins from my present day set: I wondered immediately though whether they'd just be offered in the States, but within a week or so I found out that they'd not only showed up in bags of Shirriff Potato Chips on local store shelves, but that Mike M. from just down the street already had some! Mike being over a year older than me was always into the cool stuff first it seemed. Well I had to start collecting the Shirriff Baseball Coins and I did, but I didn't get beyond four or five before Hostess Potato Chips and Jell-O launched their own competing promotion (well they weren't just going to stand idly by while Shirriff carved into their market share), an absolutely fabulous set of 200 Aircraft Wheels! Here are scans from my present day set: But, but, but, I couldn't collect both! It cost a whole dime to get a bag of potato chips with one of these little treasures and my ability to accumulate these Coins/Wheels was severely limited by cash flow considerations. Since I was already collecting the 1962 Topps Baseball cards (mercifully limited that year to the first three series totalling 264 cards since O-Pee-Chee didn't seem very good at convincing retailers to order the higher numbered series once the end of spring approached): And eating Sugar Crisp cereal to collect the Canadian issue of the 1962 Post Baseball cards. Here are scans of a couple of the complete panels from my present day collection: I had enough baseball related collectibles on my plate and therefore chose to collect the Aircraft Wheels thus contributing to the profits of the Hostess Potato Chip Company even though Shirriff made slightly better chips. (Mmmmmm, so delicious as well as nutritious whatever the brand!) Going with the Hostess turned out to be a wise decision since the Hostess/Jell-O Aircraft Wheels I accumulated that spring and summer are among the very few items that somehow survived in my possession from my childhood to the present day. But of course I didn't have enough disposable income to collect comics as well - until July anyway.

To Superman Annual 2:

Is this the artwork of Neal Adams? Or perhaps that of D ick Giordano? Opinions?

"Will have"? Are you saying that you've not been displaying your model kits to this point?

I fully understand OCD. After all, I collect variants of a whole bunch of card sets: Bowman Red Menace with both beige card stock and grey card stock Topps Target Moon and Space Topps Space with both blue backs and pink/salmon/coral backs Topps Planes with both red and blue backs Topps Sports Cars with both beige card stock and grey card stock 1961 and 1966 Topps Giant Funny Valentines plus 1966 O-Pee-Chee Giant Funny Valentines 1961-62 Hockey Coins in both Shirriff and Salada backs Fightin' Warship Coins in Krun-Chee, Schuler's and Hunter's backs 1963 Space Orbit Coins in six different backs Dog Coins in both Humpty Dumpty and Hunter's backs 1963 CFL Coins in both bilingual and English only backs Sunbeam, Taystee and Langendorf DC Superheroes Plus whatever slipped my mind these past few minutes. But!!! That being said I can't imagine collecting model kits varying only by part of the model number in my lifetime. Quite simply there are hundreds of different model kits I still need/want. Moreover unlike my cards which require minimum storage space in binders, model kits take up substantial display space. This means additional kits take up display space that is then denied to other kits! Why then waste this space on essentially the same kit?

Scans of five more of my Detective Comics:

Nope. I actually think it's a common trait among collectors.

I realized that I didn't have any Canadian Whites in my collection despite being ardently nationalistic in certain ways (e.g. I sneer at American college "sports" and the sissy four down football played south of the border). So I bought this one a few weeks ago: I can always be tempted by Funny Animal comics anyway!

This one was at my local comic shop: I certainly wasn't looking for issues of this title, but it was there, in nice condition and very much affordable. So I bought it. That's how we collectors octopus into a whole smorgasbord of semi-related comics over time.

No. What collectors assemble first is what they cherish the most. They don't therefore switch from those most cherished items to other items to position themselves for anticipated price changes (which of course could be very wrong anyway). It's not collectors but those others who might behave in such a fashion. Moreover comics aren't nearly liquid enough for switching willy-nilly to be anything but a harebrained idea. Comics aren't fungible and consequently there's very limited market depth. The spread between the bid and the ask is much too great, transaction costs are egregious and there's next to no price continuity in comics. The middle man (dealers, auction houses, etc.) is the one who always profits from switching. Anybody else has the cards stacked against him.

Here are scans of my five oldest Superman comics:

One existed alright. Finding it though would now be a Sisyphean task. That's where I start it too.

One of my favourite Joker covers:

DC introduced the Comicpacs early in 1962: The header card was cardboard folded at the top and then stapled together and thus through the plastic bag between the two sides of the header card. If the motivation of DC was to provide kids with a real "value" six months or so after the infamous price increase to 12 cents, methinks they failed. Each Comicpak contained comics from a mix of genres from superheroes to adventure/mystery to war to romance and humour. I can't see any kid forking over a whopping 47 cents (plus sales tax) for four comics when only two or so would have been in his personal wheelhouse. I'm guessing the purpose of Comicpacs was to gain shelf space on newsstands that were becoming reluctant to stock 12 cent periodicals when their preference would have been to make a bigger sale. At the time, Life and Post cost 20 cents, Look, Time, Newsweek and Mad 25 cents and Playboy 60 cents. But the hole in the header card indicates that DC was also hoping that these Comicpacs would be displayed with rack pack toys in the checkout lines of supermarkets and suburban chains such as K-Mart, Woolco and Grants which might prompt impulse buying by frazzled mothers being pestered to get something, anything, by their kids. As a result, Comicpacs with pristine header cards are nigh impossible to find these days. So does anybody here have many (or even any) intact Comicpacs? Well post them here since we'd love to see them! And does anyone have a list of the individual comics contained in the various packs from 1962? Sadly I have none - yet. And of course now that I'm just a few years older, I wouldn't mind having a Fox and the Crow or a Romance comic visible on the outside of the pack. I'm still not big on Superboy, Jimmy Olsen or Sugar and Spike though....

No. I didn't ask.