I always forget to take pics of the warehouse progress, next week I promise myself I won’t forget and I’ll show you just how far along that big toy room has come. If I share these progress reports with you then I’ll feel a sense of responsibility to you, I’ll feel I have to put in a little extra effort to show you some progress, all this will help me get out of the warehouse, which kind of makes you my boss.
Let’s make ‘extra’ this week’s theme. The “going to eBay auction” pile extra-large this week, we’ve added a few raw collection consignments to the schedule and the lots are going to be amazing. Our cover of the week has to go to Colossal Features Magazine #3, Fox Features, September 1950, boasting that classic Wally Wood female prison break. Never trust a seamstress!
I was leafing through Amazing Spider-Man Annual #5 looking for a cool ad when I came across this two-page spread, this is delicious extra bonus content and I love it and embarrassingly, I didn’t even know about these pages. OK, without looking up references, here goes, Dick Tracy, Li’l Abner, Mickey, Archie, Sups, and Charlie Brown, I’m going with the Spidey/Archie.
The Adventures of Bob Hope #81 was going to be my cover of the week until I found the Wally Wood piece above. Luckily, I took a boo inside and found this delightful extra add in content. It’s tough to write comedy, I think a good artist can use caricatures to help the comedic gag but both parts have to come off right and they have to work together and not against each other, an amazing skill and talent.
Our ad of the week comes from the Colossal Features #3 seen above. We’ve become so desensitized with our ability to do anything at any time, almost instantaneously, the idea of being able to make your own records must have been beyond belief to the kids of those days. If the hundreds and hundreds of comic ads have thought me anything over the course of these posts it’s that the comic ad market was made up of two principal players, the shyster and the sucker, caveat emptor folks.
The latest icecollectibles weekly eBay auction ended last night with some strong results; the auction highlighted for me just how powerful a book Amazing Spider-Man #300 has become. I was born in the 60s, I never too Spidey #300 seriously when it came out. I don’t think I took it seriously even five years ago but it certainly has my attention, and respect now, it has become a staple of the hobby, an iconic cover and issue that is amassing more and more weight to its existence. Our CGC 9.8 copy sold for $3,000 USD.
3 years ago Walter sold my ASM#300 9.6 for $2175us and that is when I gained a lot of respect for that book too!
At the time I think I owed the last $1000 on my mortgage (a mortgage on a house in Melbourne starts at the million dollar mark to put some perspective on the joke)- and when the funds came into the account I paid off the house the same day…so I like to joke to my wife that ‘this is the house that Amazing Spider-man #300 paid off’ – like most of my jokes she does not consider it funny at all, but It makes me smile 🙂
It’s funny how the Wood we know and love was not quite there in 1950 with this work. It’s amazing to me looking at his work for Fox and even Avon in 1949, 1950, then the slightly better work in 1951 for EC. But then 1952-55, it’s like springtime and he just blossoms into a monster of an artist.
I finally began picking up some Bob Hope issues, purely for the cover gags and, ok, I admit it, for the GGA. They have brilliant girl gags, and I really am no fan of Bob Hope. Or Dean Martin, or Jerry Lewis. But some great covers by DC humor illustrators.
Owen Fitgerald gets credit for this – https://files1.comics.org//img/gcd/covers_by_id/70/w400/70571.jpg?-6271919129803989372
Spider, a fitting way to pay down that mortgage! Congrats. I had a comic book friend come in and hook up the sound speakers for my TV and he updated all the internet and WiFi stuff in the house, he put the password as “spideybuiltthishouse” but my wife thought it silly so I changed it, grrrr.
Bud, I’ll have some Bob Hopes up at auction soon, I hope they are issues you’ll need. I love the Wally Wood style, I didn’t even know this was Wood until I looked at comics.org, I bet I would have known if it was Wood art from the 60s.
Wood’s earliest work was pretty primitive. I got one of his really early EC stories once, from a Russ Cochran auction…it went cheap because it was horror stuff, early, not the Wood everyone identifies with. Funny coincidence, there was just a show down here in Sacramento last weekend. I was talking to Thomas Yeates who was a guest and and we had dinner after with a small group. Thomas is a great storyteller with an outstanding memory for detail. He was telling me about meeting Tatanja Wood, Wood’s first wife, at a memorial back east for Wood shortly after he commited suicide. Jack Harris and others from DC comics were there, including Al Williamson. Anyway, Tatanja was a colorist and did a beautiful job on a limited series Thomas, dunno if this was before or after the memorial. I think he said she colored the first Wizard King and then, a surprise to me, he said Peter Hsu actually drew the 2nd Wizard King, rather than Wood. And a third book in the series was actually partly done, but it showed Wood going seriously downhill. Thomas got a look at it much later, through Wood’s estate manager, Bill Pearson, who also took over Witzend after Wood gave up publishing it. But as far as Thomas and I know, that 3rd Wizard King has never surfaced. It’s likely it was lost in the fire that destroyed much of Wood’s material that was kept in an outbuilding at Pearson’s house. Aughh! Thomas said he was itching to have gone over it himself and cleaned up the funky parts, because it did have a lot of the Wood brilliance.