Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
The comic book portion of ComicLink’s February Featured Auction Ended Wednesday February the 26th and what a mammoth auction it was!
For the 1st time ever really a strong group of quality “Canadian Whites” were on auction and the results can only be described as historic. I’ll direct you to Ivan Kocmarek’s post covering that portion of the auction.
As I said above, this was a very strong auction.
The latest ComicLink online auction finished last night and on offer were three dozen slabbed Canadian comics with all but two of them WECA books. The biggest irony of the final tally for me was that the highest prices were commanded by essentially reprint material.
This week Heritage wrapped up its 2014 February 20 - 22 Vintage Comics & Comic Art Signature Auction, covering a large array of classic covers and stunning artwork. A nice mix of silver age covers, modern classics and a range of strip art. The big winner was the cover to Action Comics issue 15 for $286,800.00, but these five pieces caught my eye.
The weakening Canadian Dollar got me to thinking about the effect it is having, if any, on the back issue comic book market. Comic books are like oil in that they are traded in U.S. dollars. The price guide is quoted in U.S. dollars, almost all the big internet dealers are U.S. based and all the major comic auction sites are U.S. and prices are quoted in U.S. Dollars. Basically holding a comic collection is like holding U.S. dollars.
In doing my ongoing research into Canadian war time comics, I recently came across this Toronto Star article about a Whites artist named Michael (Bud) Riled who seems to have created a female jungle heroine called "Terena of the Jungle." It even has a quote from Peter Berkemoe, owner of The Beguiling about the period of The Whites.
Flash Comics #86, DC Comics, August 1947
It’s been a while since we visited the Golden Age. It was Undervalued Spotlight #172 to be precise, not that I’m trying to plug that post or anything.
John Stables (most often signing his work Jon St. Ables) has always been amongst the most appreciated of the WECA artists and his name is consistently placed at the head of lists of those artists best representative of the excellent, professional quality of Canadian war-time comic art whenever the artistic output of the Canadian Whites is brought into question. He was inducted into the Shuster Hall of Fame in 2006 and the write up with the induction by Robert Pincombe and Peter Hansen supplies you with the necessary details of his life and career.
Young Love #104, DC Comics, June/July 1973. Happy Valentine’s Day, I hope yours is filled with Young Love! There are a lot of undervalued comics in the Romance genre but alas I’m faced with the same dilemma as our cover girl Theresa, I can only pick one.
Of all the WECA books, those produced by Maple Leaf Publishing out on the west coast of Canada are in the most demand and are the hardest to find. In this post I want to initiate the question of the number and dates of all the Maple Leaf issues… especially that murky last year—1946.
The Brave and the Bold #159, DC Comics, February 1980. I know we’re all saving up for Valentine’s Day so I thought I’d make this Spotlight another affordable one. Forgive me though because I’m still on this Ra’s Al Ghul kick.
ComicLink's January 2014 Focused Auction ended last week, with Session 4 offering original art. This was a low key offering, as ComicLink states "The Original Art offering of this auction focuses on more accessible material (check out the growing February preview for higher-end art) and includes visually exciting works by esteemed artists", basically saying the cheap stuff is this month and big ticket items will be next time around.
My last post was on the “toony” side of Vancouver’s Maple Leaf Publications and in it I stated that there were no real toons in Montreal’s Educational Projects Publishers. I now want to qualify that since I’ve been able to find three fillers that might qualify.
Amazing Adventures V2 #1, Marvel Comics, August 1970 My kids and I watched the Avengers again recently and I found myself really enjoying the Black Widow character played by Scarlet Johansson. I think she’s one of the stronger characters in…
Comic book art runs the rainbow spectrum from realistic, to semi-realistic, to surrealistic, each time the metaphor getting stronger. In the surrealistic “toons” the world is populated by caricature humanoids and/or anthropomorphic fauna (‘funny animals”). Each of the four WECA publishers, except Educational Projects, had features that fell somewhere on the surrealistic end of this continuum.
Marvel Tales #137, Marvel Comics, March 1982 We’ve featured a reprint book before on the Undervalued Spotlight. It was actually Marvel Tales #1 that got the nod and deservedly so. In 1964 Marvel Tales #1 was needed to satisfy the…
Here’s one of those strange companies that started to appear towards the end of the WECA period. Its main title was The Weekender. For the first two issues it was known as The Comic Section of Illustrated Weekender News Reviews. The implication of the title was that it was some sort of newspaper or magazine insert but actually the so-called “news section” was included in the comic book itself. This news section was a dozen or so black and white pages of text and photos dealing with popular news items of the day.
Sub-Mariner #34 and #35, Marvel Comics, February and March 1971 Sub-Mariner #34 – dead. Sub-Mariner #35 – deader. Sub-Mariner the title – Deadest. There are comic books out there that are slower than they should be and Sub-Mariner #34 is…
January 2013 saw the release of the first volume "published in its original colors and in the deluxe, limited & numbered (here 999 copies only), super-oversized (12 x 16 inches) format"; wow. I was on the fence about the whole thing, since I already have The Incal in Graphitti Designs hardcover and the latest Humanoids collected hardcover. Plus it was $79.99 for 48 pages! But I love limited edition hardcovers, especially oversized, and these were limited to 999 copies each and individually numbered.
Of all Canadian icons the Mountie is perhaps the best internationally known. The red serge, jodhpurs and boots combination probably holds higher world-wide currency and branding for Canada than the beaver, crossed-hockey sticks, and even the maple leaf.
It’s funny but in that 45 year gap between the Riddler and Bane I can think of only 2 new villains that should be counted among Batman’s greatest, Poison Ivy from 1966 and our featured villain this week Ra’s Al Ghul in 1971.