Jesse-Lee

Picked up some Bat-books:

And got some fun stuff from @John R's recent sale - thanks!

On 8/22/2024 at 12:49 PM, Yorick said:

Sweet.  I haven't explored underground enough to know what's out there, and you've posted some I hadn't seen before.  I really love a couple of those covers! 

Thanks - I got lucky and found a seller with a bunch of underground books priced very low, and I went down a rabbit hole. I'll share a few details on a couple if anyone is interested. Some are probably better known than others:

Dorrgsheett Digest was created by Dave Gibson and Scott Shaw, and debuted at SDCC in (I believe) 1974. Scott Shaw had this to say about it in a Facebook post from a few years ago:

Quote

This was NOT “created at Comic-Con.” I helped Dave Gibson find contributors and have two stories in it. It DEBUTED at SDCC. It’s was intentionally printed on brown paper to literally look like s#!+. We all worked hard on it but Dave. He collated enough to sell at the show. Those are the only ones that got stapled. Dave never collated ‘em all because he was too lazy. The pages sat stacked in his garage until a heavy rainstorm when its roof leaked, destroying the majority of the print-run. That’s why copies are so rare.

Bakersfield Kountry Komics is by Larry Welz and Larry Sutherland from 1973 - there were about 40,000 copies made over three printings, but all three printings are indistinguishable from each other. It contains the first prototype of a Cherry Poptart story called "Bakersfield Blues" - it's not Cherry's first appearance (the Cherry character in this story is called Shirley), but the story would set the style and tone for the future Cherry stories and comics.

Real Pulp #1 from 1971 has a pretty depraved story by Maus creator Art Spiegelman called "Pop Goes the Poppa," featuring his character The Viper. The issue also included the first appearance of Bill Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead character in a story called "I Gave My Heart to a Pinhead and He Made a Fool Out of Me."

Atomic Comix #1 is from the Madison, Wisconsin area from 1975, and has parodies of super heroes like Batman and the Hulk. Reportedly, the author printed 10,000 copies, but after selling about 3,000 of them he decided he wasn't happy with the work and he destroyed the remaining print run.

I could go on and on, I've done a ton of research into these, which has been a lot of fun in itself. I found a great website with a bunch of recaps of underground books, which is where I got a fair amount of info, but for stuff like Dorrgsheett and Atomic, I had to dig a bit deeper. Here's the site for anyone interested: https://comixjoint.com/underground.html

One of the artists/writers who worked on the 1979 issue of Gamut was kind enough to share a copy with me, so I've finally obtained this elusive issue - really excited about this one!

The 1977 issue of Gamut pops up every once in a great while for sale (which is how I got my copy a couple of weeks ago). The 1979 issue on the other hand I've never seen for sale anywhere, and according to anecdotal evidence there probably aren't that many that were printed or are still floating around out there. I finally got my hands on a copy, courtesy of one of the artists/writers who actually worked on the issue:

One more sweet underground haul today:

$4 find!

Excited that McFarlane is bringing some different stuff to market - from Captain Carrot and Ambush Bug to now this Jonah Hex/General set. Was an instant pre-order for me.

Mail day:

Picked up a few books recently:

And maybe not quite an "underground," this copy of Lethargic Lad, Weakly #49 - the photocopied version Greg Hyland was making as a student, a year or two before launching the independent Lethargic Lad comics.

Big thanks to @Ryan. - I was abke to add these guys to my collection:

And he threw in a sweet card pack too - thanks!

These are already known copies, but cool to find them in this sealed 2-pack for $1 today: