Category Collecting Community

Undervalued Spotlight #194

Journey into Mystery #85, Marvel Comics, October 1962. Last Saturday evening my kid decides we should all watch Thor 2; I wanted to watch the Habs/Senators game. So Thor 2 starts and I kind of like it, I actually thought it was better than the first one. Near the end of the movie my kid mumbles something like “I really like Loki, he’s smart and crafty”. Woah!

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The Other Woman: John G. Hilkert’s The Wing

The Wing was the creation of John G. Hilkert and first appeared in Joke Comics No. 4 (Sept./Oct. 1942) as the Wing, but if we look closely we can find an appearance of a character (not costumed or super powerful) named Trixie Rogers in a text story written by Hilkert and art by Murray Karn in Dime Comics 5 called “Death Casts a Vote” a couple of months before she put on the costume in Joke Comics.

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“Lost Heroes” Premiere

Overall the documentary was a slick and informative effort. It reminded me a little of the recent PBS Superheroes three-parter because it made heavy use of talking heads in front of green screen projections. This allowed the film itself to take on a sense of comic book levity and healthy self-deprecation. A comic book doc has to be heavy on graphics from the books themselves and this one didn’t let us down in that respect.

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Undervalued Spotlight #192

Dazzler #1, Marvel Comics, March 1981. I’m pricing up books for the upcoming Toronto Comic Con and ran into a nice batch of X-Men. There was a sweet copy of issue #130 in there and I had to pick it up and thumb through it. I remember this book coming out and me being a bad boy rock and roller at the time I remember I hated the character.

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Auction Highlights #83

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.

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Heritage 2014 Feb 20-22 Comic Art Signature Auction

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.

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Comic Collecting Costs on the Rise

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.

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Whites Mystery Artist

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.

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Bill Speed

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.

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Maple Leaf Checklist

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.

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ComicLink January 2014 Focused Auction Original Art

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.

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WECA Toons 2

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.

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