jools&jim

I grew up on, and still love, Jack's '70s work for both Marvel and DC. FINGERS LIKE SHOVELS! At Marvel from '75 on, Kirby generally eschewed Stan's patented "soap opera" super-heroics and Marvel's complex (convoluted?) sub-plotting and often turgid character development in favor of animated action and breakneck, bare-knuckled plotting. No, his stories weren't "realistic", and many of them were often silly or just plain weird. And his dialogue--especially by today's standards--is an acquired taste at best. But...his '70s stuff was largely unfettered, and NEVER less than gloriously imaginative. That's what kept me coming back for more, and keeps me in his corner today. It's not everyone's cuppa, I know. The upside, of course, is that because his '70s work is not widely appreciated, the books themselves tend to be relatively cheap in higher grades. I own precisely TWO 9.8 slabs, both of which are '70s Kirby books. So bring 'em on, I say!!!

Really great to hear this from another '70s Keystone Stater! I'm sure that "Mom and Pop" stores and discount chains all over the state sold THOUSANDS of these two-packs: when a single new comic book cost 25-cents, two of them (albeit mutilated) for that price was clearly a winner for budget-conscious parents of ravenous, comic book-addicted kids. I know for a fact that my friends and I didn't really care about the missing covers -- to us, a comic book was a comic book, just so long as the stories were complete. Somewhere in the back of a dusty old warehouse, you still might be able to find a skid or two of these things. What I'd really like to know is who was responsible for them. Given the volume involved, it seems to me that it would have had to start at the distributor level...

...and that's the stuff that dreams are made of, my friend!

Thanks, my mistake. I tend to refer to any of these re-sold "black-market" comics from the '70s as "affidavit returns". But there's clearly a difference between stripped logo/cover copies (under the old system) which weren't pulped and then re-sold, and in-tact copies with their covers which were declared as unsold, and then hoarded & trafficked for re-sale. The common denominator, of course, is that it was all shady. Here's how Jim Shooter explains the system, and how it was gamed, back then: http://www.jimshooter.com/2011/11/comic-book-distribution.html What's interesting to me is that the traffic in these "illegal" copies was in many cases being conducted in broad daylight. Just more evidence, I guess, that the comic book business was still relatively small potatoes back then, and that it would have cost more than it was worth in time and legal fees to crack down on the violators...

We had the same thing in Chicago when I was a kid Cool, and very interesting. Were the bags identical to the one picture in my first post? And do you recall where, exactly, they were sold?

I'm now wondering if these were unique to Pennsylvania. I grew up in the Harrisburg area, and the sealed pack I just got came from Johnstown...

Anybody else got any home-brewed goodness to share?

Been looking for a sealed, "two-for-25¢" pack of coverless (and illegal!) affidavit returns copies for many, many years now, and I finally lucked into one: Does anyone else remember these? Nearly all of the comic books I owned and read between 1972 and 1976 or so were purchased in exactly these sealed bags, mostly from a chain of "Handy Market" convenience stores in central PA. The monetary value is zilch, I know, but the sentimental/nostalgic value of seeing one of these unopened packs is off the charts for me. So many great memories of my dad buying me a pack or two when he stopped at the market for cigarettes, or my mom doing the same thing when I was dragged along with her to buy milk, etc. A buddy and I also sometimes hiked a mile or more form his house in a rural area to a Handy Market next to a gas station, and closer to Interstate 83. We'd carefully inspect each two-pack (the comics inside were packaged back-to-back), and would scoop up as many of the best ones (usually Marvels) that we could afford. Btw...the "back" book in this pack is an Omac #8, also from 1975. What a weird feeling to see this again after 40+ years!

Revenues have been in decline for years at the USPS -- there was grousing about this when I was working there back in the pre-internet early '90s. And it's only getting worse. So, anyone care to guess who would get stuck with the tab if the USPS wasn't forced to work ahead and go the pre-funding route, and instead defaulted on its benefit promises...?

Here are the results of a fun, cheap lunch break @ my LCS while working from home today... Nuthin' fancy, but lotsa stuff I like and collect...!

Any love for late '70s Modern Charlton reprints? Here's what they look like... …and here's why I bother to accumulate them... -------------------------------------------------------------------- When I was in middle school, the local Woolworth's store in the small town we had just moved to after my dad had been transferred to a new job was closing up shop on Main Street and moving to bigger digs in a brand-new shopping mall a few miles away. This was late 1978 or so: I was a new kid in town and didn't have many friends yet, and was also (slowly) starting to become aware of the adolescent world which lay ahead -- beyond comics and toys and parents and baseball and trading cards and sugary cereals and my favorite TV shows and everything else I held dear at the time...a terra incognito of girls and cars and music and all sorts of other scarier things whose siren call I was only then just beginning to hear. But...I still liked comic books, and the Woolworth's was blowing-out these Modern reprints at half of their 35-cent cover price. So one day after school, I rode my bike into town, determined to buy as many as I could afford and could carry home. The comics were stacked 10-20 copies deep on large wooden tables right inside the front doors -- there were hundreds and hundreds of them, all minty-fresh. A cornucopia of garish delight! I was strictly a Marvel fan at the time (with a weakness for DC's Superman titles), but some of the Ditko stories looked really cool (especially the Blue Beetle and Captain Atom -- characters I'd never heard of before!), and a few of the other titles even had art by John "Uncanny X-Men" Byrne…a real shocker! I think I may have had three or four bucks on me at the time, and must have bought 15 or 20 different issues. I paid the cashier, stuffed them into the pleather pouch strapped to the handlebars on my bike, and rolled home. When I got there, I dumped the comics onto the floor in my tiny corner bedroom, and started to flip through them in earnest. What a haul! The first thing that hit me was the smell -- these were some seriously pungent comic books! What was Charlton putting in their inks back then? I managed to read two or three of them before dinner, homework, and other distractions, and probably read at least one more before bedtime that night. Not bad…not bad at all! And getting them at half price didn't hurt! I was onto something here... Fast-forward to the next day, after school again. The bus dumped me at the same old spot, and I walked the same old block back to our same old rancher down the same old street with the same old kids talking about the same old cr@p that, long since forgotten now, was oh so important then. Shoes off. Books on my desk. Cookies in my mouth, and a comic book in my hand. My time. Comics time! And now we come to the denouement--the big reveal, and a moment I'll never forget as long as I live. I was poring through the reprint of Captain Atom #83 (Ditko) and really getting into it, when suddenly I hit a major snag. A story page was missing! What the hell? I double-checked. Yep…definitely a page missing. And then it dawned on me to check the other comics I'd bought in the same batch. My heart sank…all of them had at least one page missing -- sometimes it was just an ad page; sometimes it was a story page, too. But they were all light some paper. Sonuvab!tch! No wonder they were selling these for 17-cents! Ah, well. Sadder but wiser and all that. I read what I could, and chalked it all up as a learning experience. I have no idea what happened to the comics after that. I probably threw them out. Fast forward again: years later, I learned from my older sister that it was my mom who had torn out the pages. She was very zealous about her faith back then, and certain ads and story pages were not to her liking, so out the door they went. Don't even get me started on her opinion of KISS! But…time has a way of taming us all, and healing wounds both large and small. My mom mellowed out considerably over the years after that, and became a trusted friend, confidante, and tireless advocate to my sister and I in ways that we didn't deserve, and can't possibly repay. We lost her last year, and miss her and think about her (and my dad -- another flawed sweetheart who died in 2010) every single day. It's funny how a bad memory can become a good one, depending upon your point of view. So now, of course, I want ALL of the Modern reprints, and the smellier the better (seriously!). They remind me of so many things I've lost, and of a few much more valuable things I've managed to learn along the way. Not bad for 17-cents, eh? --------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's a quick Friday vid of my ROM action figure (with some fresh batteries installed!) doing his "electronic lights & sounds" thing... I know it might be hard for the kiddies to believe these days, but back in 1979, mess like this was a VERY big deal...

My LCS was having a pre-Thanksgiving sale today, so I walked out with a few cheap "want-list" wonders and other odds and ends... Anybody out there have a copy of Phantom Stranger #23 for sale? I remember reading parts of Wolfman & Kaluta's "Spawn of Frankenstein" back in the '70s, but this lot was missing the first installment...

Agreed. And the "Golden Press" Flash Gordon ("The Movie") hardcover is still shrinkwrapped w/a $4.95 price sticker on the front cover. Does anyone remember if it actually retailed that way back in the day?

And now, we return you to our regularly scheduled programming: a few recent non-key, not-for-sale, non-spectacular, non-VCC, non-slabbable, highly pedestrian acquisitions -- just good readin' and good collectin' for light $$, 'cause that's how we roll in this thread... :

Outstanding! I love bound volumes. More? Any from the BA?

Arak, Son of Thunder is going to be huge, too -- start stockpiling those VG/F copies of Warlord #48 NOW!!! Remember: EVERY silly, derivative character EVER created is the NEXT BIG THING in comics!!! Bad is good. Good is bad. Up is down. Tomorrow is today. Gigli is Lawrence of Arabia! Heaven's Gate is The Godfather! Toe cheese is spun gold! It's all true if we want it to be! Whoopee, we're all gonna get rich!!!

Here's a small stack of cheap, fun reading I brought home from an end-of-summer family road trip last weekend: The complete Firestorm run was a nice surprise for five bucks, and the Batman book is the much less common softcover British edition (published in 1979) of the original hardcover "Bonanza" book first published here in the States in the early '70s...

I found weed (more like seeds & stems) and rolling papers in a Humble Pie album once...

And, for my 10,000th post ( ), I give you a fairly unremarkable sextet of dollar box picks from my LCS on Weds when my daughter and I dropped in to grab the 2nd issue of the new Archie series... I'm a serious Kirby fan, but these "Kirbyverse" titles didn't thrill me--or anyone else, apparently--when they were first published back in the '90s. But the Kirby-drawn covers (from old concept sketches) on the one-shots, and the Kirby-drawn trading cards polybagged with all of them, reeled me in this time. The McFarlane inked Kirby cover on "Satan's Six" in particular was a revelation -- shades of Barry Smith!

I've argued for years now that going the "period piece" route for many of these mid-20th century comic book characters has significant advantages over the "modernized/homogenized" approach. In the right hands, it could yield a colorful, quirky, visually arresting, and unironically fun movie. And--if handled lightly and deftly--it could also evoke at least some of the cultural innocence of the era which produced the source material, and which made so many of us care about so much of it, even into adulthood, in the first place. Think of it this way: "Romeo and Juliet" has been tweaked, re-imagined, and re-staged in hundreds of different ways. But are any of those productions really all that much better off for "modernizing" Shakespeare's language, and/or for NOT being set in Verona during the 15th century or so...?

A sentimental favorite from Kirby's under-appreciated (misunderstood?) BA Cap run...

And yet, DC has the raw material for (potentially) the greatest cinematic "cosmic comic book" saga ever: Jack Kirby's "Fourth World". Not that they wouldn't screw it up and release a bunch of homogenized, focused-group, CGI-bloated tat in the end. But the resources are there: big ideas, epic scope, iconic/archetypal heroes (and villains!), Blakean vision, Shakespearean pathos and intrigue. And ACTION, ACTION, ACTION! Done right, it would destroy the competition, and make the "cosmic" GotG look like just another bog standard cartoon punch-up.