Hepcat

Hmmmm. The link to my scan of Adventures of the Fly 1 seems to be broken. We'll try it again:

Here are scans of my earliest Metal Men books:

Here's one I've not yet posted:

Some interesting and useful information regarding the scarcity of the original Aurora monster model kits can be gleaned from this book published in 1996 by noted board game enthusiast Rick Polizzi: The book contains the following estimate of prices for boxed Aurora monster kits: Godzilla's Go-Cart $2700 King Kong's Thronester $1600 Lost in Space (Diorama) $1400 Gigantic Frankenstein $1350 Lost in Space $900 The Munsters $875 Lost in Space - The Robot $700 The Bride of Frankenstein $650 The Addams Family Haunted House $600 The Chamber of Horrors Guillotine $600 Mummy's Chariot $480 Godzilla $450 King Kong $400 The Creature $400 The Forgotten Prisoner of Castel-Maré $400 Wolf Man's Wagon $400 Land of the Giants $375 Dracula's Dragster $325 Frankenstein's Flivver $325 Dracula $300 Wolf Man $300 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Anthony Quinn) $275 The Phantom of the Opera $275 Dr. Jekyll as Mr. Hyde $250 The Frog $250 The Mummy $250 The Witch $250 Frankenstein $225 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (redrawn face) $175 The Vampire $175 Customizing Monster Kit - Vulture & Mad Dog $140 Customizing Monster Kit $120 Now we can argue from now until the cows come home about a current price list let alone one from 1996, but the fact is that Polizzi's estimates provide a very decent ranking of the relative scarcity of these kits. Here are pictures of some of mine:

Great stuff! I like to see a nice diverse selection.

Andru & Esposito have finally gotten Wonder Woman's face consistently right by this point, but they only get her body right on occasion. She's still too hippy and flat-chested in most panels. The panel below is a place where they do get her body right:

Great copy! And yes, God bless John Severin. I love his artwork.

Well I was there to the end of the 1956 thread. And I am going to hit this one so hard too that it'll make your head spin!

That's one of the all-time classic house ads by the old master Ira Schnapp! Ira continued to recycle the "Just One Second" motif in future ads:

That's a really good looking 6.0!

Flash collectors reassemble!

So now that we're back here's a more detailed account of the comic and magazine side of my collecting activities: The first comics I can remember reading were the Harvey Felix's Nephews Inky & Dinky. The first comics I can recall buying were the Dell Cicero's Cat 1 and 2 in the summer of 1959 - which I now have once again in pristine, near-mint condition! The first superhero comic I distinctly remember reading was the Archie Adventures of the Fly 12. I remember reading it at the local drugstore before they chased me out! The first DC superhero comic I can specifically remember reading was Green Lantern 11 in 1962 which a buddy on a farm outside of London, Ontario had. I still remember how it filled me with wonder at the time. A copy of Justice League of America 8 that I read at summer camp a couple of months later that same year clinched the deal. The first superhero comic I bought shortly thereafter was Justice League of America 14. These comics had a lifelong influence on me. But so did the bubble gum cards I collected and model kits I built as a kid. Despite the fact that my boyhood treasures all went by the wayside at some point in time, I never completely lost interest in these things. Throughout high school and university I always wished I still had my comics and cards.My first job after university was in 1977 and by 1979 I was back to collecting. Big time.I collect comics from 1945 to 1980. My concentration is Silver Age DC such as Justice League, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, Atom, Hawkman, Mystery in Space, Sea Devils, Challengers of the Unknown, Metal Men, Wonder Woman, Tales of the Unexpected, Teen Titans, Fox & the Crow etc. I'm just about solid in my main titles going back to 1962. For example, I have all the early Justice Leagues going back to 1960 with the exception of issues 5, 6 and 47. I also collect other titles like Fly, Jaguar, Black Cat, Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, Space Adventures, Gorgo, Herbie, Turok, Doctor Solar, Lone Ranger, Gold Key Phantom and many Atom Age Jungle and Adventure titles including Sheena, Jumbo, Space Western and Commander Battle & the Atomic Sub. I have a few Harveys such as Casper, Wendy, Spooky, Little Dot, Little Audrey and Hot Stuff and quite a few Dell Funny Animal comics.I also have a very good collection of the car humour mags such as Drag Cartoons, Hot Rod Cartoons and CARtoons. I also collect the Warren horror mags such as Creepy and Eerie and the Skywalds. I have a collection of several dozen Mad magazines from the late fifties and early sixties as well.Here are some pictures from a few years ago of my comic cabinet and the magazine cabinet beside it:My comics are all in Mylites/Arklites backed by Thin X-Tenders/Halfbacks. I've not yet Mylited my magazine collection though. It's in the third, half the fourth and the fifth row of the cabinet to the right of my comic cabinet. The top row and the second row of this cabinet are presenting false fronts. I've just put up a few high nostalgia comics from 1963 for display purposes. Behind them is just miscellaneous junk. The other half of the fourth row consists of comics waiting to be Mylited. I've run out of Halfbacks and need to put in an order for several hundred comic ones and probably a thousand magazine ones. Hopefully that will be sufficient for at least another ten years.

Different strokes for different folks! Have you ever tried to assemble one of the really large and complex ship kits such as an aircraft carrier or this frigate? Aurora, Revell, Monogram, Hawk, AMT, MPC and Lindberg were all commonly found lines of kits in Canada in the sixties. Airfix were also available but they weren't as common. Model kits by the big Japanese companies, Tamiya and Hasegawa, have also been widely sold in hobby shops here for decades. Frog I've never seen in Canada though.

Board games are of course particularly hard to find the way I collect them - MIB new old stock, i.e. in unplayed condition. I'm unwilling to relax my condition standards because there would then be far too great a potential to be overwhelmed with far too many games to display or even store. This Milton Bradley Casper board game was the first one I ever bought around 1990: The game with which I'm perhaps most delighted is this Deputy one because I had one as a kid that I'd received as a birthday(?) present from friends of the family: Anyone interested in board games might want to pick up these two books by Rick Polizzi: While not as comprehensive as some other books on board games, I found them more interesting because of their focus on the games of the baby boomer era. Polizzi was also the publisher of a short lived magazine on board games also entitled Spin Again which only ran for five issues in the early nineties. Here's a great picture of Rick Polizzi with his board game collection from his website: Rick Polizzi evidently started collecting board games after stumbling upon one in a thrift shop in the late eighties that he'd had as a kid. By late 1990 his collection had grown to over 400 and at last count he had approximately 1500! Have any of you California fellows met Rick at any of the toy shows in the Golden State? I've only spoken with him on the phone some fifteen years ago.

General is where most "situations" arise....

Here are scans of four more of my Green Lantern comics:

Great stuff!

The Dells go up to #263. He should go after them all!

How/where were those distributed anyway?

I be getting a box next time I be at de grocery store!

My entry pass:

Threatening: Well those preppies were out to unravel the mysteries of the Dark Continent.... Non-threatening: 122

Are you trying to complete runs of Four Color and Walt Disney's Comics and Stories? If so, that would be a noble, but egregiously difficult, endeavour.

But you don't look anything like your avatar!

I'd like to get a few more of the Strange Worlds myself. Some great covers in the run!