Some tasty comics.
At last, at last…I finally got a copy of this:
Now, I’m not much of a Looney Tunes collector, but isn’t that a great cover? The dark-humored “Tasty Friends” gag gets me every time. Sure, it’s not in great condition…you can see the insect damage at the corners and along the edges, but given that this is the first copy of this book I’ve seen come through the shop, I’m not going to be picky.
Inside, it’s cover to cover mayhem, with the Tasmanian Devil destroying everything in sight and trying (and never succeeding…wouldn’t that have been a comic!) to eat his fellow Warner Brothers cartoon characters.
This was from the period where Gold Key was experimenting with the borderless panels, like so:
Like I said, I’m not a collector of the Warner Brothers comics. Not that I have anything against them…the few I’ve read I’ve enjoyed, but you can’t collect everything, you know. And if I were so inclined, it would be quite easy for me to put together a sizable lump of WB comics for myself from the store stock. They turn up quite often in collections, but there is almost no demand for them among our clientele.
Demand for the Warner Brothers comics, at least for us, generally breaks down into two groups:
1. That one international customer who orders a handful of inexpensive funny animal books every few months or so.
2. People who need pictures of the Tasmanian Devil and/or Marvin the Martian for tattoos.
And no, I didn’t buy this comic for a tattoo…if I were to get a tattoo, it’d be of the top image on this page.
Anyway, it looks like the Warner Brothers books have been overshadowed by their Disney cousins as far as demand and collectibility goes. We have boxes of Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig and Daffy Duck back issues, most of them in average condition for only a few bucks each, but they’re rarely perused. We don’t turn ’em down when they come in…they’re still old comics, after all, but it’s not worth paying very much for them given the slow turnaround.
We acquired this, and many other Dell/Gold Key and Dennis the Menace comics from the early ’60s in a sizable collection that turned up at the store on Saturday. Most of them were in similar condition to the Tasmanian Devil comic, every Dell Giant had pencil on the puzzle pages, and a few comics just fell apart in my hands. Two comics were taped together into one larger book.
But there was plenty of good stuff in reasonable condition to be had, too…the first six or seven Jetsons comics, a Gold Key Jonny Quest #1, lots of Four Colors, and lots more.
Also included in this collection was a box full of Peanuts paperbacks…some dating from the late ’50s, early ’60s, as well as a few of the ’70s Peanuts Parade books, most of which are in nice condition.
There were also two boxes of Mad Magazine, running from the late ’60s into the ’80s. Mads are kind of a hard sell, given their enormous print runs from the time period these issues range. There ain’t no shortage of them, making this a buyer’s market. But some of these are absolutely gorgeous…they weren’t just read once and put away. They almost look as if they were unread…our copy of this issue, with its nearly all-white cover, is almost blindingly clean and shiny. Several special issues are included, all with inserts intact, with the usual exception of this issue not having the Zeppelin. Man, every time we see this issue, it never has the Zeppelin. It was just too cool for kids to resist tearing it out and assembling it, I guess.
So that’s how we spent our weekend…processing a bunch of old funnybooks. There are worse ways to spend one’s time, I suppose.
