We’ve been trying to list more and more lots on our weekly eBay auctions, we’re gunning for a consistent 200 lots per week and we’ve been coming close, getting into the 180s over the past few weeks. All those lots require shipping boxes so I had to go down to beautiful North End Hamilton to pick up a skid of “corrugated” – that’s what the box guys call it. I remember a few years back when I had to re-lease my vehicle, I was considering a Ford Escape to try and bring down the monthly costs, boy am I glad I went F-150, this thing doesn’t owe me a dime, she’s been doing nothing but hauling long boxes full of comics, skids of “corrugated”, skids of toys, not to mention her fair share of sorties out into the provinces tracking down comic collections and consignments. You gotta pay to play.
Out of the “going to eBay auction” pile I chose this lovely copy of World’s Finest Comics #69 as my cover of the week, it was between this and another strong candidate but a quick look at comics.org showed me that fellow Hamiltonian Win Mortimer drew this cover, and such a light, carefree cover by golly. From April 1954, remember that World’s Finest was one of the very few superhero titles that ran the gauntlet from the Golden Age into the Silver Age, without looking, I’m pretty sure it was World’s Finest, Action, Superman, Detective, Batman, Adventure and Wonder Woman, did I forget any?
Our Ad Page of the Week comes from the back cover of Beware Terror Tales #3, a classic Pre Code Horror from 1952, the inhouse back cover ad is almost as good as the front cover. I could not find out who did the art.
Our Splash Page of the Week comes out of our World’s Finest #69, such a strong and dynamic piece from Wayne Boring. The great thing about these old giant sized issues is that they offered up at least a half dozen splash pages to chose from, this was my favorite.
Our weekly icecollectibles eBay auction closed with many strong results a couple of nights ago. I was watching our Amazing Spider-Man #50 graded CGC 7.0 because its such a good representative for mainstream Silver Age books. Our copy sold for $1452 USD, almost equal to the previous sale, this is a solid result, meeting market expectations.
Hmmmm, methinks I’ve seen said Back cover monster somewhere before Walt
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Adventure with Superboy. Not superheroes, but a super run would be Blackhawk, it went right thru from 1946 (his first issue in his own title, parallel to his run in Military Comics, then name change to Modern Comics) to the silver age, moving from Quality to DC without nary a burp.
Gorgeous looking 7.0 there, those colours are amazing!
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IRdLPnMRilc/T18PGxrOk5I/AAAAAAAAIJY/szWD2nCnHX0/s640/Tales+Of+The+Unexpected19.jpg
Tales of the Unexpected # 77
My guess on your Beware Terror Tales #3 backcover is Bernard Baily who of course was a regular DC Golden Age artist on the big titles and characters. The same “host” character appears on the covers of most early issues of Beware and he drew many of the covers, including the ones for #2, 3 and 4.
I’d expect the other image is pulled from another Fawcett horror cover but not finding a match; a close blob is on another Beware cover. Maybe he knocked it off especially for the ad, since he was a house artists. This Magazine is Haunted had no matches there, but some more great horror covers also. Fawcett was tops on this stuff stuff (and inside was often George Evans and Bob Powell—these are close competitors with EC’s horror titles.
Baily was in his prime on horror comics and worked for several companies…he started his own company in 1943. It did four specialty comics with Operas, probably only circulated in NYC or maybe Chicago and other big cities? .25 I think it was…Faust, Aida, Carmen and Rioletto…very collectible and scarce, printed on stiff paper, 16pgs, in black, white and red. I still need two of them myself. He drew Carmen on his own.
https://www.comics.org/issue/70545/