Hepcat

More Warren kitties:

Furry kitties aren't often pictured in the Batman title. Here though is one:

Can you imagine how big a winner a non-smoker (or non-drinker) would have been? Taking advantage of the addictions of others?

 

Five more:

Yeah, I kept wondering through the 1970's and 1980's whether my neck of the woods in southern Ontario was just a backwater for the Silver Age DC and Archie superhero comics I most wanted. Looking through Overstreet was really frustrating since I very rarely saw the comics I really wanted advertised in the Comics Buyer's Guide.

This kit gives me all six of the Frightening Lightening kits.  I have 3 sealed and 3 open but I doubt I will get all the kits sealed.

I was absolutely enthralled by this ad that ran in DC comic mags late in 1964:

The ad had the effect of leaving me a Mouse fan for life! Here are close-ups of the box art:


I didn't, however, chance upon any Monogram Fred Flypogger kits in my regular wanderings through my local haunts. 
Then within a year in September 1965 I was packed off to a boys' boarding school operated by Lithuanian Franciscan Fathers in Kennebunkport, Maine for ninth grade. On the Saturday before 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 sophisticated American 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 at the time 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 his job especially when it came to kids. 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. 
Despite their stock though, the store didn't have the Monogram Super Fuzz kit I was trying to find. In fact they'd never heard of it. And then I heard one of the employees asking where the "weird" kid was. I left the store without buying anything. (Don't you often wish you could go back now as an adult to royally chew out the adults who cavalierly disrespected you when you were a kid?) 
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 attending the University of Western Ontario of course my father would happily participate in any pizza I brought home.) In any event I bought an individual cheese pizza for something like $0.35-$0.40 that day and it was so good I bought another!
Another eventual happy ending to my tale though. I now have  M.I.B. specimens of all three kits in my collection:

To another Kid rendered by Joe Maneely:

I agree. CGC charges what the market will bear. Nobody is forcing you to buy their product/service so you can always just say "No!" if you don't like their price. Many savvy collectors have been doing precisely that.

Five more:

Some wall shots. These were the better dealers quality wise.

Another week, another show. Been a long time since I got two shows in two weeks. And, in two weeks another.
This was Near Mint Sundays. Happens periodically. A small local show. A decent size room. A lot of younger dollar box flipper guys. Hipster vibe. They even have a DJ pumping hip hop music. I see a lot of these guys prowling the flea markets and estate sales. Not much in the way of GA (my interest). I am kind of a unicorn fish out of water type of guy there. But you never know…
Been a while since the last show. Usually on a Sunday but this was Sat and later hours. 2:00-8:00 pm. Free admission and parking. Had a pretty good crowd. 

To another Kid Colt Outlaw (with a Joe Maneely cover):

To another Kid rendered by Joe Maneely:

CAPTAIN MARVEL ADVENTURES contains the first appearance of TAWKY TAWNY The Talking Tiger.
 

I agree. CGC charges what the market will bear. Nobody is forcing you to buy their product/service so you can always just say "No!" if you don't like their price. Many savvy collectors have been doing precisely that.

Walter Lantz!
122

215

237

vote with your wallet

I love the vest that the Silver Age Two-Gun Kid wore, but I don't like the fact that Matt Hawk was a tenderfoot and tinhorn from Boston.

Prices for anything including comics are a function of supply-and-demand. What's made the equation different for comics in comparison to stamps or coins is that certain individual comics, titles and genres are far more popular with comic fans/collectors and thus in much higher demand than are others. For example the horror and Marvel superhero genres are far more popular than most other genres. In contrast demand for any country's individual stamps doesn't vary that much across these individual stamps. A collector typically wants them all so scarcity is therefore the primary determinant of price for stamps.
But there's another factor that's become a major determinant of comic mag prices. Because comic prices have risen in the marketplace, they've attracted the attention of investors/speculators whose interest is profits not comics per se. This has added enormously to the demand for comic mags and has thus pushed their prices up exponentially. This has fed on itself as many/most comic investors have taken past price increases as the rationale for future price increases and thus extrapolated past price increases on into the future. In the investment world this type of technical investing is called trend following, i.e. "the trend is your friend".
But statistically nothing can grow to the sky. Such "follow the crowd" behaviour creates a bubble which eventually bursts when prices "hesitate" for whatever reason. (Read the investment literature on price bubbles throughout history including the Great Tulip Bulb Bubble.) When all the trend followers decide the game is up and try to get out (dump their "investment") at the same time, the quantity supplied to the market is enormous and the price crash is cataclysmic.
But the speculation in comics has not been evenly distributed across the board. It's not much impacted those titles collected by relatively few comic enthusiasts, e.g. Patsy and Hedy, Homer the Happy Ghost, Andy Panda, Jughead, Atomic Mouse, A Date with Judy, Flippity and Flop, Fox and the Crow, Submarine Attack, Hot Rod Racers, etc, etc.
Thankfully there's a quick and easy way to determine which comics have seen the greatest influx of speculative demand and are thus most vulnerable to a price crash without the necessity of painstakingly tracking and comparing prices over the decades. The comics for which there has been the most speculative investment demand have also been the ones most often slabbed to make them fungible, i.e. a commodity that can be exchanged for an identical commodity. So check the census data if you want a quick proxy for the comics whose prices have been most inflated by speculative demand. The comics with the largest census numbers are the ones most vulnerable to a cataclysmic drop in price.

Another great Harvey war title:

Recent show purchase.