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Still processing this collection, of course…it’s a lot, and I’ve got New Comics Day stuff to do on top of that, so it’ll be a minute before I finish.
What’s interesting is coming across some signatures in a few of these books here and there: notable was Gerry Conway’s John Hancocks in Amazing Spider-Man #121-2, the Death of [ANCIENT SPOILER DELETED] issues. Sold already, sorry!
But in Avengers #101, featuring the work of noted futurist Harlan Ellison:
…the bottom of the first page had the signatures of Mr. Ellison as well as that of Marvel stalwart Roy Thomas:
So, sorry, Collectors Solely of Comics Signed by Both Harlan Ellison and Roy Thomas, this one’s stayin’ in my collection.
Which reminded me of this first page of Silver Surfer #18 (1970), also found in this collection, and featuring the signature of the King himself, Jack Kirby, as big and bold as you could hope for across the bottom of the page:
But not to be outdone, a previous owner of this book decided to make his/her claim on comics history by putting his (or “her”) autograph at the top of the same page.
Here’s to you, G., forever sharing a page with one of the most legendary of comics legends.
An artifact of a different time…found this in a collection of comics I acquired the other day. Mixed in with the random volumes of classic comic strip reprints and Lovecraft comics with price tags from my former place of employment (with my writing on them, no less) was the above, clearly a display item from some anonymous comic shop (or otherwise — see below) store.
It’s hard to recall now, in this time of belt-tightening and ordering comics as close to the bone as possible, when such overwrought demand for investible collectibles necessitated 1) placing limits of “copies per customer” and 2) ordering so many copies of a first issue, even from a small indie black and white publisher like this, to anticipate demand so great that you can have enough to go around at five per.
Now there are many possible reasons for this, beyond just keeping the first guy in the door from buying all your copies, leaving none for anyone else. When I posted a pic of this comic on Twitter, I had folks suggest maybe this was being sold in a sports card shop, where demand could be relatively greater (possible, since card shops and everyone else were trying to sell comics for a time there), or maybe this came from a story in Nolan Ryan’s hometown, where folks could be more eager to get this baseball mitts on a funnybook featuring the local-boy-made-good. Or as I suggested, maybe the retailer in question accidentally ordered too many copies and put the “five per” sign on it to attract attention and maybe make it sell more quickly to the sorts of consumers anxious to get in on what would appear to be the new, hot thing.
I don’t recall if there was ever any secondary market demand for this particular book…enough so that anyone saw a significant return on their $2.50 per-unit investment. I know that the copy pictured above, after I took this photo, went straight to the dollar bins.
So here’s something that turned up in a collection recently:
…an ink illustration on a magazine-sized backing board, signed “Michael” and dated 1995:
We’re trying to determine if “Michael” was a comics pro, or if this was a piece of amateur art, or even who the character is, if it’s anyone in particular. (It kind of feels like a ’90s post-Image Comics redesign of an established character, but who knows, really.) If any of you folks out there can help a pal out and give me any clues, I’d appreciate it. And if the answers turn out to be totally obvious…well, I’ve had a long week, cut me some slack.
Speaking of which, I should be back on track, more or less, after this recent break, so posting should be back to whatever passes for my schedule here nowadays.
And then there was the time we found in a collection a yellowing comic bag containing Mr. Fantastic and Giant-Man figures cut out of some interior pages:
When you flip the bag over to the other side, suddenly you have crazy super-monsters straight out of Grant Morrison’s
Doom Patrol:
Why, that’s not nightmarish in the slightest.
…is our anonymous felt-tip pen commentator referring to Conan or Conan’s lady friend, or is s/he jumping to conclusions based on the admittedly-handsome hands of the green scaly crypt-deity? We may never know.
Conan the Barbarian #52 (July 1975) – art by John Buscema, Tom Palmer, and John Romita)
Discovered folded and tucked into a beat-up run of Watchmen that was recently dropped on us was this hand-drawn map of a certain location of import to the story:
Click that pic for a larger image.
I also feel like I’ve seen something like this before, like maybe in one of the Watchmen supplements for the DC Role Playing Game. It’s not in the backmatter of the Absolute Edition hardcover.
…much less do this:
Though the temptation to scrawl “ROTWORLD” parts one through, oh, 100 on the bags of my issues of New 52
Swamp Thing and
Animal Man is strong.
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