Australia eat your heart out, Southern Ontario is getting a week full of Plus 3 to 4 degrees Celsius weather, I can just see all those Kenora Dinner Jackets being folded up neatly and put away until next year, here come the tank tops! We need some of this white stuff to melt away, we its amazing how small a parking lot becomes when the plow pushes up those huge piles of snow.
Don’t ask me why I forgot to include a pic of our processing area at the warehouse, I’m blaming it on the heat! Besides, I was busy digging through the “going to eBay auction” piles. Out of those piles I found this nice copy of our Cover of the Week, Weird Fantasy #9, published by EC Comics in October 1951, it features cover art by the great Al Feldstein. We have to step back and realize that for the kids reading this book, this scene was true Science Fiction, there was no such thing as space travel, impossible some thought!
You think the cover to Weird Fantasy #9 is good? Check out the our Splash Page of the Week, from the same book, by the legendary Wally Wood. The Spawn of Mars splash is just dripping with artistic talent, maybe even to much so, there’s just so much to take in.
We’ve covered a lot of in house ads on these pages, ads that blow us away with the books they’re advertising as “On Sale Now”, we’ve all fantasized, I’m sure, about running down to the corner store to pick up those beauties. If I was reading House of Secrets #100 in my jammies I don’t think this ad page would have inspired me to go looking for my pants. Hey, they can’t all be winners.
Speaking of winners, our latest weekly icecollectibles eBay auction ended last night with some strong results. Man those early Bronze Age Marvel monster titles sure are hot, Frankenstein, Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night are seeing some strong demand, especially for the early 20 cent issues, our raw lot of Werewolf #11 to 13 sold for $193.50 USD, a strong result!
Chris Owen and I keep going hard at the Ice Collectibles YouTube channel. We posted a fresh video today, please try it out and if you like what we do please subscribe and hit that damn like button. Enjoy.
Folks, let me tell ya…a little sprinkling on snow would have been welcome on the past weekend. Saturday hit 37 degrees, which is all fine & good…but the entire night was 30+. I went to ride the bike at dawn’s light and it was 31 degrees in the dark…I decided to wait till it got light and a nice breeze came up and had it plummet down to 28 before leaving the house at 7:30am….but don’t worry cause it was back to 32 at 9am by the time I got to the bakery! You can still keep your white stuff all to yourselves though.
Just got a shipment of comics – only about 40 this time – so the next month will be cleaning and pressing and selling my under copies. Got some nice John Buscema Avengers – lovely! The other thing i can note is that I can always upgrade a Miller DD – my undercopy will sell within moments…always surprises me the enduring popularity of the run, I’d even say – due to it having a lower price point – that it sells quicker than early Claremont X-Men. 94-142 will easily average $100 per issue (obviously 95,95,100,101,121 are outliers) whilst DD will average around $20 for high grade…therefore the market is bigger (especially in uninspiring economic conditions).
I have been observing your deep knowledge of comics from here in nearby Grimsby for some time. Ya’ll have awareness of the market which has less interest to me right now than the similarities of 1960s Marvels to todays political climate.
I returned to comic collecting in the 1970s and did some comic art exhibitions. You know more than I of the details of the period but what from your vast knowledge of the 1960-70s, if that is the period, best characterizes the current political chaos.
Who is the character who wants to dominate the world. And who fought against him ?
Be careful out there Spider, stay hydrated my friend. Tell me, is the heat in Melbourne a dry heat or is the south coast where you are a bit humid?
Wayne! You have to pop into the shop, we can enjoy some coffee and philosophize a bit, maybe even talk some comics! I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know enough of the 60s story arcs to form and kind of insightful opinion on that interesting question. Can I egg you on to share your views and insights? To start things off?
Well I was hoping you and your crew of readers might inform me on this question. Marvel arose in the 1960s because college kids were taken by this new form of comics. I was one of the curious.
I was filing things the other day and came across the 28.November. 2021 NYT Book Review of All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told by Douglas Wolk (Penguin Press, 2021) Junot Diaz is the reviewer of this book I have not read.
Junot states that in issue that Wolk thinks that in #51 of The Fantastic Four Jack Kirby and Stan Lee ‘hit the motherlode; discovered the precise amount of human misery you need to inflict on a superhero in order to sell the galactic and fantastic, to make it real”
He goes on to say ‘The galactic fantastic without human anguish: kid stuff
Human anguish without the galactic: soap opera
But the two blended together in the right proportions equaled a new type of imaginative vibranium (whatever that means)
Then says that Kirby and Lee cracked the Galactus Equation.
From my foggy memory I thought Galactus was the comic book figure to describe current frightening politics to the south and you might confirm with more knowledge than I. My comics have been in the basement for 40 years. So I am not going down there to confirm this.
I will consider a coffee with you.
M.
Wayne, I’m a big fan of the Galactus Trilogy, I’ve always thought it to be the top arc put out by Marvel in the 60s, and brilliance of the way they dialed down #51 on the heels of it was too much to ask. I think Lee and Kirby cracked the code here and this achievement established the new beachhead for others to launch from. I’m not seeing its ties to todays politics though, I think I’d more lean towards one syndicate running another out of town, they busted through on a pendulum and, as pendulums tend to do, its swinging well past the point most people intended it to. There must be a comic story that follows this ?