Rarest Bronze Age Comic? 3 3

[sfcityduck]

For a promo and overall, I'm going with Supergear (I've only seen one, and I should have hit the BIN on eBay but I was a fool):

For a "newsstand" comic (e.g. one with a price) I'm going with Dennis and the Bible Kids no. 10 (very rarely seen):

:

 

[Spawnfreak]

On 7/30/2022 at 3:55 AM, sfcityduck said:

For a promo and overall, I'm going with Supergear (I've only seen one, and I should have hit the BIN on eBay but I was a fool):

For a "newsstand" comic (e.g. one with a price) I'm going with Dennis and the Bible Kids no. 10 (very rarely seen):

:

 

For me, this one is it! Have never seen one for sale anywhere,(maybe I missed it), and there are none on the census, that I can find.  1973

[Spawnfreak]

On 7/30/2022 at 6:38 AM, Spawnfreak said:

For me, this one is it! Have never seen one for sale anywhere,(maybe I missed it), and there are none on the census, that I can find.  1973

Just looked on the bay. one for sale, one sold, still no census.

[Chaykin Stevens]

On 7/30/2022 at 8:55 AM, sfcityduck said:

For a promo and overall, I'm going with Supergear (I've only seen one, and I should have hit the BIN on eBay but I was a fool):

:

GCD says that according to Diamond's Scoop website 500 copies were produced but over half were destroyed.  Lois Lane is said to have a comment in the story: "What terrific outfits! That gear looks super! Clark, why don't you buy some new ski clothes like those kids have?"

How much was the BIN?

Edited July 30, 2022 by Chaykin Stevens

[sfcityduck]

On 7/30/2022 at 7:03 AM, Chaykin Stevens said:

GCD says that according to Diamond's Scoop website 500 copies were produced but over half were destroyed.  Lois Lane is said to have a comment in the story: "What terrific outfits! That gear looks super! Clark, why don't you buy some new ski clothes like those kids have?"

How much was the BIN?

This was around a decade or so  ago but it was less than $2k I think.  I believe the winner was a boardie. It was discussed. I vaguely think that maybe Flying Donut knew the winner ( and maybe he has one too).  I do not think that anyone who gets one sells them. 

Edited July 30, 2022 by sfcityduck

[sfcityduck]

On 7/30/2022 at 3:38 AM, Spawnfreak said:

For me, this one is it! Have never seen one for sale anywhere,(maybe I missed it), and there are none on the census, that I can find.  1973

What is that? Looks more like a fanzine or underground. Any notable creators?

Edited July 30, 2022 by sfcityduck

[FlyingDonut]

On 7/30/2022 at 12:23 PM, sfcityduck said:

This was around a decade or so  ago but it was less than $2k I think.  I believe the winner was a boardie. It was discussed. I vaguely think that maybe Flying Donut knew the winner ( and maybe he has one too).  I do not think that anyone who gets one sells them. 

The winner was me! I have it still somewhere squirreled away. I traded another one to Ian Levine maybe 15 years ago for a whole bunch of DC Golden Age as he needed one to complete his set. 

Undergrounds are probably a different animal - there may be some existent undergrounds where there were only 50 ever made and only three (or so) still exist. I'd discount them for this purpose because it isn't really a fair comparison,

For a mainstream character I think Supergear is the winner. Al Stoltz of Basement Comix and I both have been looking for 25 years for them and we've collectively only seen about five. It was an unauthorized book, so that's why there are so few of them - it is four pages folded. Note that the Overstreet price is ludicrously low on this book - it essentially cannot be valued as there are so few of them. The Warlord Remco giveaway is also way way up there in rarity.

The Dennis and the Bible Kids 10 is also seriously hard to find BUT it shows up every now and then. I think the best barometer of "rareness" these days is My Comic Shop, who appear to be churning through hundreds of thousands of books every year. I have an alert with them for both the Supergear and the Dennis and I've never gotten a ping for the Supergear but maybe once a year to 18 months I'll get a ping on the Dennis. I buy them whenever I can get there first, but I never do.

For a book that was actually sold - I'm going to go with Super Goof 61, which is one of the pre-pack books.

[Spawnfreak]

On 7/30/2022 at 12:28 PM, sfcityduck said:

What is that? Looks more like a fanzine or underground. Any notable creators?

Might be; Tom canty, nominated for the HUGO award for best professional artist 10 times in the 80s & 90s.Brian Cody; A graduate of Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, with a B.F.A. in illustration, Brian Cody has had a professional career which includes stints as a children's book illustrator, art director, creative director, and corporate marketing director for a variety of companies in a variety of industries. He lives with his family in Ipswich, a small coastal village north of Boston, where he's surrounded by a wide assortment of vistas – ocean, beaches, salt marshes, farmlands and forests – each tinted a different color with every passing season; plenty of subject matter for painting. Eric Kimball; Web comics, ad illustrator writer. And my brother.

[sfcityduck]

On 7/30/2022 at 1:37 PM, Spawnfreak said:

He lives with his family in Ipswich, a small coastal village north of Boston, where he's surrounded by a wide assortment of vistas – ocean, beaches, salt marshes, farmlands and forests – each tinted a different color with every passing season; plenty of subject matter for painting. Eric Kimball; Web comics, ad illustrator writer. And my brother.

Arthur Dow's Ipswich?

[Spawnfreak]

On 7/31/2022 at 2:23 AM, sfcityduck said:

Arthur Dow's Ipswich?

Yes, that Ipswich.

On 7/31/2022 at 2:23 AM, sfcityduck said:

Arthur Dow's Ipswich?

 

[sfcityduck]

On 7/30/2022 at 10:46 AM, FlyingDonut said:

 

Undergrounds are probably a different animal - there may be some existent undergrounds where there were only 50 ever made and only three (or so) still exist. I'd discount them for this purpose because it isn't really a fair comparison,

For a mainstream character I think Supergear is the winner. Al Stoltz of Basement Comix and I both have been looking for 25 years for them and we've collectively only seen about five. It was an unauthorized book, so that's why there are so few of them - it is four pages folded. Note that the Overstreet price is ludicrously low on this book - it essentially cannot be valued as there are so few of them. The Warlord Remco giveaway is also way way up there in rarity.

 

I agree with you on not counting undergrounds and fanzines.  They are super cool (I've been picking up early Dave Stevens covers and stories) but the rarity is manufactured into the concept and there are many that were basically just vanity press and never really distributed in any real way to anyone other than the author's friends. 

I did not know that Supergear was unauthorized - surprised that Swan or whichever regular Superman artist did it would work on the book. I think it is a cool item but being unauthorized puts it into a different category for me. It is more like a bootleg or counterfeit or Tijuana bible if it was unauthorized and I don't think deserves a place in a discussion of rare comics.

Remco Warlord is rare, although I see them for sale periodically. I feel as if I've seen more of them than the Dennis the Menace and the Bible Kids 10, but it may be rarer (definitely if you are talking in the original package with the action figure, right?). Some might argue it also doesn't belong in the conversation because it is a mini comic, but given your input I'm going to bump this up to my candidate for the rarest Bronze Age premium / giveaway comic:

The Super Goof 61, Black Hole 4, etc. Whitman variants I also seem to see more than I see the DTMATBK 10. That may be because they are more popular characters and titles. Dennis books are generally harder to find than Disney. I have also seen file copies of those books.  There are 26 Super Goof 61 Whitman variants on the Census.  So I'm still going with Dennis the Menace and the Bible Kids 10 as the rarest non-giveaway Bronze Age comic:

Edited July 31, 2022 by sfcityduck

[Lazyboy]

On 7/31/2022 at 2:41 PM, sfcityduck said:

The Super Goof 61, Black Hole 4, etc. Whitman variants

What variants? Whitman was the publisher. Period.

[Qalyar]

On 7/30/2022 at 11:28 AM, sfcityduck said:

What is that? Looks more like a fanzine or underground. Any notable creators?

New Legends is absolutely an underground, and just about everyone involved ended up being notable in one field or another. It's a great book and imo underrated on the lists of undergrounds because it's just creative storytelling rather than the sex-and-drugs content of the highest profile undergrounds. No idea how many were produced, but it's certainly rare. I imagine there are sleeper copies hidden in stacks of books in the Boston area for the diligent to find. Still, undergrounds are their own creature. 

If you're into variants, then the gold seal copies of Marvel Super Special #11-13 surely warrant mention, with confirmed print runs of 25 copies each. 

Likewise, the various Eclipse Comics non-3D special printings of their 3D books are maybe a year or two too late to be Bronze Age depending where you draw the line, but they're beasts to locate. The most common might have a dozen known copies; several, so far as I know, have never seen a copy emerge on the secondary market.

[fastballspecial]

Any Horror, Toon, or War Marvel 35 Cent Variants.

 

[sfcityduck]

On 7/31/2022 at 3:51 PM, fastballspecial said:

Any Horror, Toon, or War Marvel 35 Cent Variants.

 

I don't think the print runs were miniscule and they have been collectible for a while. I think the folks buying those tend to hold on to them and not submit them to CGC. So while the one's I looked at for genre books, including the Scooby-Doo 1 and a Sgt. Fury had more a than a handful of CGC copies, it's worth noting that the Star Wars 1 which trades more frequently is up to 257 copies. So I'm thinking that they are not as rare as other contenders.

 

[sfcityduck]

On 7/31/2022 at 1:49 PM, Qalyar said:

If you're into variants, then the gold seal copies of Marvel Super Special #11-13 surely warrant mention, with confirmed print runs of 25 copies each. 

 

The MSS perplex me.  Were they sold as a manufactured collectible or were they more of a vanity piece for those involved in their creation to give away?  I'm thinking the later, but I don't know.

Edited August 1, 2022 by sfcityduck

[sfcityduck]

On 7/31/2022 at 1:49 PM, Qalyar said:

Likewise, the various Eclipse Comics non-3D special printings of their 3D books are maybe a year or two too late to be Bronze Age depending where you draw the line, but they're beasts to locate. The most common might have a dozen known copies; several, so far as I know, have never seen a copy emerge on the secondary market.

Eclipse Comics 2-D variants of 3-D comics are cool, and I remember how you could get one by writing into Fantagraphics when they came out and paying a higher price. However, by definition almost all went to comic collectors (probably completists) who are likely to have preserved them.  So I think there are probably more in existence than some of the other contenders which didn't get instant recognition for being a limited edition collectible and instead were damaged or tossed out by kids who read them (like Supergoof and DTMATBK). For example, the rarest of the 2-D comics is, I think, the Miracleman 3-D no. 1 which has five 2-D versions on the census (the blue foil is also five and the gold foil is 10). But I think it is a safe assumption that there could be up to 80 or more copies still in existence given Eclipse sold them for a while during the 80s. I remember seeing some back in the day, but I haven't looked or thought about them for decades.

[Qalyar]

On 7/31/2022 at 8:23 PM, sfcityduck said:

The MSS perplex me.  Were they sold as a manufactured collectible or were they more of a vanity piece for those involved in their creation to give away?  I'm thinking the later, but I don't know.

As I recall, they were awards from some contest, although I do not remember the details.

On 7/31/2022 at 8:47 PM, sfcityduck said:

Eclipse Comics 2-D variants of 3-D comics are cool, and I remember how you could get one by writing into Fantagraphics when they came out and paying a higher price. However, by definition almost all went to comic collectors (probably completists) who are likely to have preserved them.  So I think there are probably more in existence than some of the other contenders which didn't get instant recognition for being a limited edition collectible and instead were damaged or tossed out by kids who read them (like Supergoof and DTMATBK). For example, the rarest of the 2-D comics is, I think, the Miracleman 3-D no. 1 which has five 2-D versions on the census (the blue foil is also five and the gold foil is 10). But I think it is a safe assumption that there could be up to 80 or more copies still in existence given Eclipse sold them for a while during the 80s. I remember seeing some back in the day, but I haven't looked or thought about them for decades.

Honestly, the 2D printing of Miracleman in 3-D #1 is the best known of the 3D-in-2D books, and it likely demands the highest prices on the market. Because Miracleman, and all. But I don't think it's the rarest. All four issues of Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters in 3-D presumably exist in 2D form also, but there are no copies of any of the issues on the census, and to my knowledge no copies of #2 or #3 have emerged on the secondary market within the last decade at least.

Also, there was some collector interest in these books when they came out. That's where Miracleman in 3-D #1 copy 23/100 came from, and likely why it remained in such good condition. But I suspect that a substantial percentage of copies sold went to their intended market: people whose vision conditions prevented them from reading the 3D books as intended, who may or may not have been interested in comic preservation over the years.

[sfcityduck]

On 8/1/2022 at 6:03 AM, Qalyar said:

 

Also, there was some collector interest in these books when they came out. That's where Miracleman in 3-D #1 copy 23/100 came from, and likely why it remained in such good condition. But I suspect that a substantial percentage of copies sold went to their intended market: people whose vision conditions prevented them from reading the 3D books as intended, who may or may not have been interested in comic preservation over the years.

It wasn’t like Cat Y was giving the 2-D issues away, Eclipse was offering them for sale for $5 each in the pages of (much lesser priced) comics that were only sold in comic book stores. So I am fairly certain the bulk went to comic collectors.  You do have a point about titles like Hampsters, the folks who have those may not think they are cgc worthy and I could see how they might end up in what we used to call a quarter bin along with all the other B&w turtle inspired books that came out back then.  Interesting topic! I am glad they came up!

[sfcityduck]

On 8/1/2022 at 6:03 AM, Qalyar said:

As I recall, they were awards from some contest, although I do not remember the details.

 

I think the MSS are definitely a contender for rarest giveaway.  Rarer than the warlord toy mini-comic?  IDK.