jools&jim

It really is fun seeing collections being purchased from all sorts of wholesale sources. But the purpose of this thread, at least as I understood it, was to showcase comics and related items "found in the wild" at garage sales, flea markets, antique malls, estate sales, etc. Such finds are serendipitous and surprising, which makes them fun to hear about ("I was rooting through a stack of 1930s license plates, and lo and behold I found this copy of Four Color #74!!"), whereas Craigslist scores, responses to "want to buy comics" ads, buying a collection from the friend of a co-worker's friend who knows you buy comics, etc., etc. are of a different nature entirely. Not bad...just different. Of course, it's not a big deal, really, either way. And I'm always amazed by what people are still able to unearth these days. But at some point, maybe we should consider splitting off the want ad/CL/big collection type scores into their own thread, and leave this one clear for the true junk sale surprises...

Great buyer, fast payment, very easy to deal with. Thanks!

Quick question: can modern reprints (trades, HCs, etc.) of SA and BA material be listed in the "Golden/Silver/Bronze Age Only" sales forum? Or are they doomed to languish and disappear in "Mixed"...?

Thanks, Claudio. Much appreciated. It wasn't unexpected, and she wasn't in any pain, so we were all very thankful for that at least. My mom was a lifelong movie and science fiction fan, starting in the mid 1930s, and loved comic books, too. She was raised by her Italian grandparents (from Cirò) after her mother died very young, and grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood where she was best friends with a kid whose dad was the local fruttivendolo and owned a small neighborhood store. There was a magazine rack full of comics in the shop, and the kid and my mom would get their pick to read (and sometimes to keep) for free from each new batch. She was barely 12 years-old when Action Comics #1 hit the stands, but distinctly remembered reading it and most of the subsequent DC hero titles at least through 1940...

Long story short: due to some not-so-happy circumstances (the death of my mother), I recently--and very happily--reconnected with a childhood buddy whom I hadn't seen in quite a few years. Shooting the breeze led to shooting some e-mails back and forth, and eventually we got around to talking about the homemade comic books we wrote and drew as kids, ca. 1976 - 1979. Turns out that he actually saved most of his work. So...he shot a few quickie iPhone snaps, and here they are -- not the best quality, but hopefully you get the idea (i.e., that we were shameless and slavish Marvel Junkies! -- please feel free to identify the Adams-Steranko-Starlin-Gulacy-et al. swipes...'cause we already have!). I remember most of these very well and very fondly. I may have helped with the dialogue and maybe some lettering on a (very) few of them (if any), but (mercifully...because I sucked as an artist!) the ideas, artwork, and storytelling are all his. Even now, 35+ years later, I still think that this is exciting, exuberant, and promising work from a talented kid who was just 10-13 years old when these were drawn in the mid/late '70s! To me at least, it looks like he was forming an embryonic version of the crude and violent but also hyper-kinetic & posed/pin-up oriented Image/"modern" house-style (minus the manga influences) 10-15 years ahead of schedule. Ah...to have that much time on our hands again. All the time in the world to make our own comics, or to do nothing at all...

More like "This Month" in my collection, but here they are... The 'Tec and SSoSV have always been favorites of mine, and both feel at least a little bit like sleepers to me these days. The Darkseid/Fourth World tie-in & Captain Comet re-boot in SSoSV #2 are also very cool...

Watching that video reminds me of the time I tried to make a robot out of cardboard boxes when I was 9 or 10 years old, and was able to sneak a box cutter out of my dad's toolbox. It didn't end well. • Inadequate adult supervision & laissez-faire parenting in the 1970s... • Blood, stitches, and getting yelled at...

My daughter and I set out early this morning for our annual Father's Day trek to the flea markets and antique malls in central PA -- it's always a lot of fun, if only for the time we get to spend together, and for the grilled hot dogs, which are first rate. We generally manage to find a few treasures, but my haul this year was especially good: Both of the vintage hand-held games (Mattel baseball from 1978 and Tomy tennis from 1980) work perfectly; I had been looking for that particular Harry Nilsson album for a long time; and finding a decent, traditional Frisbee (this one is still in the bag, dated 1978) is harder than you might imagine these days. I was particularly excited about the Rush fabric concert sticker from 1980, commemorating the first rock concert ever to be held in Detroit's Joe Louis arena, sponsored by the legendary WABX radio, on February 19, 1980: After I took the picture, I promptly peeled off the paper backing, and stuck it on my guitar case. ROCK! But the real winner of the day was this little gem: My kid and I have been (slowly) piecing together a Josie collection for the past 5 years or so, and we hope to complete it through #106 (the final issue published in 1982). We have a few of the early ones, including #1 (purchased here on the boards!), but they're not super easy to find, and tend to be pricey when we do turn them up. This copy basically found us: we split the cost, and read it together when we finally got home late this afternoon. We never thought we'd find an affordable copy of Josie's first appearance, and certainly not "in the wild", so it made for a very memorable day for both of us. Needless to say, a good time was had by all!

I grew up with the Swanderson-era Supes and Actions, and still love them. 419 is definitely a winner!

A little more food for thought... "The Fourth Way" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Way_%28book%29'>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Way_%28book%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Way We all know that Jack read voraciously, and was interested in pseudo-science, mythology, spirituality/mysticisim and other topics, some of which occupied the fringes of various "legitimate" disciplines (astronomy, theology, philosophy, etc.). So could something like this (published in 1957, so the mid-century period is correct) have intrigued him, too, and found its way onto his bookshelf somehow?

The original cover is very much of its time, which is to me at least what makes it desirable. I'm guessing that the only reason it was "cleaned up" is because the reprint was packaged with modern "Luke Cage" action figures, some of which would have been displayed in mass market retail toy aisles frequented by the kiddies, where even comparatively tame (and mostly oblique) visual intimations of booze, gambling, strippers/prostitution, and police brutality may have offended...somebody. Who knows? Anyway, yeah...gimme that "old, beat up read issue" any day!

Here's this weekend's haul from the local public library book sale, a toy show, and a flea market:

Just bought some VERY nice BA Marvel mags from Gregory -- expertly packed, and shipped super fast! Buy with confidence! (thumbs u

Just completed a sale to Kaspar -- he's 100% top-notch and A-OK in my book. Very easy to get in touch with, fast pay, no hassles. Thanks man! -Mikey

Every year for the past three years during February (or so), my wife and I have taken our daughter and her best friend (whose birthdays are only a few weeks apart) to the Tysons Corner Mall (just north of Washington, DC in VA) for a daytrip/shopping spree. Back in the '90s, I regularly attended shows in northern Virginia. This year, I decided that I'd had enough of sitting on benches outside of stores favored by teenage girls, and, on a whim, went on-line before we left this morning to see if there were still any comics shows in the area, and, maybe, if there was one scheduled for today. Turns out there was! -- a small show, but very cool. In the end, I spent more than I should have, but it was a great way to pass the time, and I managed to take home these cool goodies in the process: • Been looking for a 9.2 or better copy of Cap 199 for a while now. This one is closer to a 9.0, but the date stamp sold me, as it always does: • What can I say? I'm a sucker for this book in any grade... • A vintage TPB of classic early Wrightson reprints, in glorious b&w, from 1978 -- what's not to love? I also grabbed a copy of the Marvel/DC "Wizard of Oz" treasury from 1975 -- it seems weird now, I know, but that whole inter-company/competitor cooperation thing was a very big deal back then. Surprised it only took me nearly 40 years (as a Marvel fan & collector) to pick one up! The moral of this boring story? If you're heading towards a major urban area with kids on a weekend, and the activity planned for the day has nothing to do with you (other than as the chauffeur), always Google ahead for a regional show -- you might get lucky! It also beats the drunk driving rap if you wind up at a bar all day instead...

That's very, very cool. Thanks for posting it!

(thumbs u

There's one in there from Forever People #9 Yep. It's been hanging in my comic room since 2010. Very cool...could you post a picture of it? No worries, of course, if you'd rather not...

Agreed...in the meantime, we still have Masters of the Universe: MOTU and Kirby (4th World, too!) I read somewhere that Jack (like many of us, I'm sure) saw reflections of his Fourth World in the original Star Wars trilogy , too...

Awesome...! Are these regular magazines, or oversized (like a treasury)? I haven't bought a copy in years, but I seem to remember them going to a larger format at some point. And...just my luck...I'm bogged down this week and can't get to a comics store...

I'm pretty sure an issue of Wolverine appears near the beginning of Martin Scorsese's "The Departed".

Here are a few decent raw BA keys/semi-keys I lucked into this week:

Yeah, that's a good point: the fans who grew up in the '30s and '40s borrowed a phrase from Greek mythology, and retroactively applied it to the heroic "myths" of their youth, which have since been retooled and refurbished over and over again in an endless procession of (more-or-less) interchangeable superhero comics. So in general these "Ages" we love to quibble over only make a rough kind of sense if we're talking about one specific genre of comics (superheroes). The Archie line is an excellent example: excepting the clothes and a few other sops to contemporary fads and trends, it's pretty much the same as it ever was...

Quick update: I'm about mid-way through re-reading the entire saga in publication order (for probably the 3rd of 4th time since the 1980s!), and am once again amazed by how gripping, powerful, energetic, incendiary, and thought-provoking it all is. There are moments when it seems like Jack is making it all up on the fly, and moments when it feels very much like he knows (and has known all along) exactly where he's going and exactly how to get there. And it's precisely this monthly/bi-monthly tension between aspiration and execution which is both exhilarating and, sometimes, frustrating. But great art is often like that, or so I'm told. And then there's the matter of Jack's "writing", which is often understood to be synonymous with "dialogue" (as if that were somehow more important than plot, narrative structure, and the larger creative vision which fuels the entire work), and which is often (unfairly in my view) maligned by critics as "stilted" or "unrealistic". To each his own, I guess. But last night, I ran across this sequence in Forever People #7, in which the younger residents of New Genesis are petitioning Highfather on behalf of the wayward Forever People who, against all sound advice to the contrary, have become embroiled in the war of the Gods, and whose fate (death or worse) is still very much up in the air after their encounter with Darkseid's "Omega Force"... It has been said (justifiably) that Kirby's dialogue in this series is "operatic", by which (I think) it is meant that it conveys big ideas broadly and simply, but not simplistically. In the case of the last 3 panels on this page in particular, I think "Biblical" or "poetic" is much closer to the mark: These lines say as much about the temporal and the eternal as anything I've ever read in Wordsworth, Eliot, or Yeats, and should get extra credit for appearing, unvarnished, in such a debased medium as comic books. They do Homer & Tolkien proud as well. In another setting, I also can't imagine Stan Lee writing a single word of it. May YHWH bless you Jack...you were and still are the real thing...