jools&jim

Looks like I'm a little late to the party...but here it is -- my very own feedback thread. So sock it to me, baby!!!

Got these last weekend for 25-cents each at the "Fall Festival" flea market at my kid's school: Vol. 1 is a later printing; the others are firsts. The price was right, obviously, but vols. 2 & 5 were the only ones I still needed (after holding on to my old copies of 1, 3, & 4 from the late '70s)...

Great seller!

Yeah man, I know the feeling. There are usually better deals on books like that at shows, or (frequently) here in the Marketplace. I know for a fact that I often sell big reader lots in particular at lower prices here than you're likely to get at the typical flea market. It's ironic--and more than slightly amusing--that sellers who know their stuff generally have better prices than sellers who don't know shizz from shinola...

Oh yeah...I almost forgot: my family and I were taking a break in the square in downtown Gettysburg late this afternoon when I saw a guy walk out of a local restaurant (about 10 feet from where we were sitting) who looked an awful lot like Bruce "Army of Darkness" Campbell. Turns out it was Bruce Campbell. He was in Gettysburg for this: http://www.horrorfindweekend.com/celebrities.html Pretty surprising and funny...my wife had never heard of him, but I thought it was cool...

Here's a small flea market haul from PA today... ------------------------------------------------------------------ "Everything's Archie" LP: This is the second Archies LP (on two different labels... ), including six songs written or co-written by the great Jeff Barry (ex-husband and songwriting partner of the late, great Ellie Greenwich), with vocals by Ron Dante, and the whole shebang produced by Barry himself. And don't let the cartoon/bubble gum origins fool you: this is first-rate '60s pop-rock, separated musically and spiritually from the Ramones only by about seven years and the level of distortion on the guitars. Absolutely brilliant...and iconoclastic as hell in 1969. Rock-and-Roll, in other words!!! Whitman variants and a Dynabrite:

I ran across these somewhat hard-to-find hardcover DC treasuries (co-published by DC and Lyle Stuart) while making the antique store/junkshop rounds this weekend: I've seen these at shows every now and again (usually with a high price tag), but very rarely in "the wild", so it was a neat and unexpected find. I still have my original copy of the Sensation #1 reprint (minus the dust jacket) -- I think I paid a dollar for it in 1976 from a little mom-and-pop bookstore in Camp Hill, PA. And here's a shot of what these would have cost you at Walden Books (which is apparently where this batch originated from) back when they were blowing them out, too:

Kudos to etanick for a very sweet 9.6 copy of Avengers Annual #7 -- shipped VERY quickly and expertly packed: double boxed, bubble-wrapped, packing peanuts...the works! A superb job, and a great, great book! Thanks!!!

Thanks again, man...glad you liked 'em!

(thumbs u Thanks!

Makes me want to bust out Houses of the Holy or In Through the Out Door. that! I gots to have me some GRAND FUNK RAILROAD or BLACK OAK ARKANSAS with my black light posters!!!! Woooo!!!!

Bravo! Now THAT's Rock-and-Roll!! I've been trying to score just one of those individual posters on the cheap for years for my recording studio (= my basement), but no luck so far...

(thumbs u Right back atcha man!

(thumbs u Thanks! Glad you liked 'em!

Awesome! They look like Led Zeppelin...

It also just occurred to me that genre books (especially from Marvel and DC) went into a steep decline--and then disappeared completely--at roughly the same time (i.e., the late Bronze Age) as the rise of the Direct Market, after which it was pretty much all superheroes, all the time. So maybe one thing we're talking about when we talk about the Bronze Age is the last gasp of horror, western, romance, SF, fantasy, humor, etc., in mainstream comics...

I believe Stan Lee has said many times that chasing fads and cashing in was VERY much a part of his methodology, especially with the Atlas genre books in the mid/late '50s: if westerns were big on TV and at the movies (which they were), it was time to grind out more western books. Rinse and repeat for giant monsters (chasing Godzilla!), teen humor (Archie, yes, but also Dobie Gillis and many others on the tube), and more. So I don't think this was a unique characteristic of the Bronze Age. But with the market contracting in the '70s, the impetus to anticipate the coming bandwagon, and cast the net more widely for potential hit formulas, may have been stronger and more urgent...

Diana Rigg...

Good point. I'm not sure how many mainstream artists and writers at the time were "true" '60s radicals and hippies (Denny O'Neil was a Navy vet!), but many of them were clearly aspiring bohemians, and young and hip enough to be keenly aware of the counterculture (if not always genuine products of it), which as early as 1966 was already emerging (slowly) into the mainstream (e.g., The Smothers Brothers show; Laugh-In; Hunter S. Thompson's "Hell's Angels" and his late '60s articles for Esquire and other respectable magazines; Roger Corman's low budget biker movies which preceded "Easy Rider" by several years; the debut of Rolling Stone magazine in 1967; John Boorman's extremely dark, and extremely strange "Point Blank" -- a major studio nouveau-noir thriller starring Lee Marvin -- talk about anti-heroes! -- also in '67; etc., etc.). So yeah...the comics guys were definitely paying attention and absorbing influences from a variety of sources; my point is that a lot of the stuff they would bring to comics had already been happening for several years in other media -- mostly in the underground, with occasional (but influential) instances of it bubbling up through the bong water and into the mainstream...

I think it's also instructive to make the somewhat obvious point that comics were merely a (small) subset of the broader culture, wherein many of these same trends (more mature themes, leftist political content, more open sexuality, social relevance and protest, shifts in management philosophy, the rise of maverick "auteurism", etc.) had already made their way into popular entertainment via movies and music (and, to a lesser extent, television). What was happening at Marvel and DC in 1970 and 1971 would have been unthinkable without the cultural upheaval, on a wider scale, which transpired from 1967 to 1969. As they had done in past eras, comics in the '70s were reacting to, and emulating, existing trends in art and entertainment, not setting them. The tendency in art, as in culture in general, is always towards greater and greater license. In that sense, the Bronze Age of comics is roughly analogous to Rock-and-Roll post Sgt. Pepper (with its newfound "seriousness" and artistic pretensions) and the birth of "independent" film and New Hollywood in the late '60s. That comics were lagging behind these trends isn't surprising; what's surprising is that they followed them at all, and did it successfully enough for us to still care...

Excellent analysis, Zonker!

Big kudos to Kramerica for a way cool lot of high grade BA Warlock and Cap Marvel books by Starlin. Awesome Starlin freebies, too! Thanks man!

(thumbs u Thanks, Mike! Glad you liked 'em!