bluechip

So, you'd need 4 or 5 Action 1 covers front and back to buy a poor and altered example of the 1909 Honus Wagner card*, but one Action 1 cover would get you a gem mint 1990s Pokemon trainer card with a few K left over. *and that card is really really valuable because of course everybody idolizes Honus Wagner, OR ... because completists had a hard time finding one a hundred years back when every collector was a completist, and that perception of its value has somehow continued and snowballed more than a hundred years even though nobody is a completist anymore and almost nobody today knows or cares who the f Honus Wagner was.

Two back covers with variations on a war cover published a couple weeks apart, one released before the USSR became our ally, and then a revised cover released just after

While I love both Dr. No and King Kong, my kids are much less enthralled by them than I was. James Bond, of course, has been successfully reinvented and likely will continue to be. But memorabilia from a specific iteration of Bond (such as Dr. No) feels more comparable to memorabilia from a specific iteration of Batman (i.e. the 1940s movies, the 1960s TV show) than it does to the origins of the Batman mythos itself in comics. And I think that will continue to be the case. The first iterations of Bond were in the books but they never have been, and likely never will be, the most expensive Bond items. Most Bond fans (including me) couldn't even identify a first edition cover for the first Bond book. But most Batman fans can ID a Tec 27 or Batman 1. And when you say something like "this book has the first telling of Batman's origin" you appeal to the nostalgia of most Batman fans, regardless of which iteration of Batman's origin was their first exposure to it.

There was a time when 100K was the psychological barrier, even after the first sales exceeded it. Now that's not enough to get any copy. Time will come when 7 figs has been exceeded enough times that it won't be a psych barrier for nice copies.

"Do you know whose game this is? You're dead. You just don't know it yet. I'm lookin' at a dead man."

presume you are talking about the small panel that contained the first appearance of Wolverine, a character whom you could mention virtually anywhere in the world and likely the person you mention it to will know of whom you speak. As a cultural artifact is makes mincemeat of the Led Zepellin cover.

The Spidey image is a bit awkward but it's a Romita Spidey from the 60s (the very end of the 60s; probably drew this in September, 1969), and every little touch tells you that. Romita's style shifted every so slightly over time (like many artists) and if you knew Romita well enough you could pick out the year he drew this even if you had never seen it before.

An excellent piece. DC's racist soldier was a bit more of a cartoon than the one in the Sgt. Fury episode which tackled the same issue. But this was still an important and memorable issue. And the hit-you-over-the-head presentation makes for a more zeitgeisty cover

The simplest answer is usually the correct one. Unless you are working backwards from a premise. In this case the OP's premise is that Stan is the devil and Jack Kirby did everything at Marvel, including invent Spider-man. So even the appearance of a 1954 Ben Cooper Spider-man costume has to be considered only in terms of how it proves Kirby created Spider-man. The fact that Kirby worked in New York City and the Ben Cooper company also was located there -- voila! Never mind NYC in 50s had tens of millions of people who worked within a few miles of the Cooper office (or any other in manhattan). Kirby was there so he might have worked there and if he did work there he might have submitted costume ideas. No, wait, make that Kirby DID work there and he DID submit the Spider-man costume... Fact is there were spider man characters in children's books and in multiple comics in 1953-54 appearing at virtually the same time (Marvel, then called Atlas, had one, too). In fact Centaur (later Timely and then Marvel) had a villain called "the Spider-man" in a comic in 1938. None of them were, or would have become, remotely as good as the Peter Parker character created, whether a person wants to believe it or not, by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.

If you look up you'll see that sarcasm is flying over your head. The post you're responding to did everything short of cadging Woody Allen's joke title -- "Shakespeare -- was he four women?" I love Kirby but he's said things that are extreme and even manifestly wrong, which makes it impossible to take everything as gospel. Among the bizarre things he said was that Stan Lee didn't even "read things", when it was well known by all, and had to be known by Jack, that Stan was a voracious reader who could talk at great length about authors both famous and obscure, and quote lines and even passages verbatim from his favorite authors and pieces. There were plenty of battles between them, but they might well have gotten past their differences if not for the neutron bomb that was the Herald-Tribune article in which a snarky reporter said Kirby looked like (paraphrasing) the night manager of a girdle factory. I think it may be difficult to overstate how much that hurt Kirby and how much things were never the same after.

Hear, hear.

Cool page but your count is off. It's from 1961

A big question is how much of it will actually work its way into the economy versus being held in accounts or even moved offshore.

I tried using the same amex card which they used to charge me for something only a few weeks prior before they sent me a book I'd given them at comic con. So it wasn't the card, since it was already on file (and I thought also on auto-renew)

You started with a premise that his wife ghost-wrote for him and then went very quickly into the standard suppositions that have been used by those with an "anti-Stan agenda" so you should expect people to think that. And if I became an "ignored User" simply for countering your claims, I am sure I will be only the first of many to come as you prove my prediction that you will bristle at and refuse to consider any refutation.

I doubt very much I will ever have the same time, energy and desire to refuting your assertions as you apparently have for making them. But your premise was that Stan used a "ghost writer" and didn't write anything at all. This quote has been brought out many times by people who want to assert Stan was trying to deceive people about the extent of his work, failing (each and every time I've seen it used) to point out that this quote was not something Stan was "caught" saying in secret, but something he said openly, on the record, and often. He wrote and/or edited literally thousands of comic scripts. Of course he did not write every plot and every word himself, and of course, other people contributed. But why am I taking time to point out the obvious? You have not just a theory, I suspect, but an agenda which will preclude any refutation as well as embrace any contradiction, in the service of that agenda. Plus, apparently, a lot of time and determination you are willing to put into it.

"Jack and Steve were far too modest to get into it"??? Both men are on record being highly assertive and sometimes combative about the extent of their contributions.

Trust your instincts in terming it a bizarre notion. There are countless people who worked with Stan over the course of 78 years who can attest that he wrote countless things himself and many more in partnership with others.

For months now I've had books sitting in a box in my office, wanting to submit them to CGC, I got a bill from them recently on my card, so I presumed I was current as a member. But on the site it shows I am a "free" member. I tried to upgrade, putting in all my information, but the site keeps insisting this field or that is "required" even after the field is filled in. I called to speak to a person and asked if I could give my card information over the phone and was told it can only be done online. And that I should try using a different browser. I have used as many browsers as I can think of and all of them do the same thing. I put in all the fields and then it won't go to the next step because fields are "required" even after they are filled in. I finally requested that I simply be sent forms in the mail, and was told that'd be done. But it has been well more than a month, and more likely two, and I haven't received the forms. Thinking perhaps the glitches have now been repaired, I went online again, trying to pay them money to upgrade the membership. And again I get the same required fields messages for fields that are filled in. Anyone else having this experience? Any thoughts about what is going on? How to correct it?

I have no nostalgic memory of this issue and so far as I know the story isn't being incorporated into any films, so my only response begins and ends with "fairly good cover for its time". Which is not to say I need nostalgia or that a piece needs to have some place in culture for me. I have zero personal connection to that Chamber of Chills cover which sold high in the recent auction, and I wasn't even aware that it was reused by a band. But at first sight I saw it as a superb example of its genre and its time and felt that anybody with an eye could also glean from a first viewing.

With SDCC canceled I completely forgot about the Overstreet 2020 edition.

I'd heard that too and the first few stories do look almost as if the blue sections were drawn to be black with blue highlights before they made it all blue. But if Ditko says he had envisioned the costume orange and purple there's no arguing with what his intent was. Interesting for several reasons. There were Spiderman Halloween costumes as early as 1954 with many similarities to Ditko's drawings 8 years later. And those costumes were orange and black (or yellow and black, depending on which version you find).

In 2008 there was nothing curtailing people from spending what money they had outside the confines of their home. Art is one thing you can buy and enjoy, even (sorta) share with your friends, without ever setting foot outside.

All these years a Spidey fan and not once did I hear this hinted at. https://bleedingcool.com/comics/steve-ditko-wanted-spider-man-to-be-orange-and-purple/

Bound copies purportedly from Marvel's offices, (according to a connected source).