Happy New Year officially. I’d like to start the year off with some news, Chris Owen and I have started a YouTube project where we make videos with a Top Ten countdown format. Chris and I will be picking all kinds of cover topics, some serious, some fun, and I hope, all entertaining. Please check out the channel and please Like and Subscribe and hit the Notification Bell so you know when a new video drops. We have three videos up at the moment, the next one comes out this Wednesday and the every Wednesday after that for 2025. We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments section of the videos, let us know how good, or how bad our list was. We’d also love recommendations on future Top Ten topics. The channel is called Ice Collectibles and is sponsored by our website. Chris and I hope you enjoy them.
YouTube videos are great but they don’t pay the bills, our weekly eBay auction pays the bills, that’s why I was sifting through the “going to eBay auction” pile this weekend looking for lots to post to auction. I found this nice copy of Feature Book #26 with Price Valiant by the great Hal Foster. The publisher liked this image so much they used it four times in the book, on the front cover, on the back cover as a pin up, on the splash page and inside as a not colored sketch page, talk about stretching your art dollar. A very worth Cover of the Week, and going up on auction soon.
Speaking of going to the well one too many times, in 1980 both Spot Bilt and Dingo ran shoe/boot ads featuring O. J. Simpson in Avengers #196, Spot Bilt on the inside front cover and Dingo on the inside back cover. I’m thinking the companies share an ownership group in some way. The OJ ads of this era are stark reminders on how quickly things can change.
I like this Irv Novick splash page from Joker #5, I’m wondering how come the Spade Surfer never made it big? One thing I will say about DC, they sucked at trying to be hip, now, cool, with it, Marvel hammed up their write/artist/inker/letterer credits on the splash pages waaay better than DC did, if you like cringe, DC is for you.
The first closing of the year for our weekly icecollectibles eBay auction happened last night, it was a busy auction with some strong results. I particularly liked the Sgt Fury #72 to 75 lot that colsed at $140.50 USD. Sgt Fury is not a popular title, I don’t know anyone building this run. I was nicely surprised with what I thought was a strong result, but when you look at the quality of the books and when you factor in that these things are not really available, especially in an auction, the result makes more sense.
That Prince Valiant Feature Book was one of the hallowed, legendary, highly desirable comics of the 1960s, before anyone began reprinting Val to speak of. The Fantagraphics series was still a long time away; a few things came out from Europe in the late 1950s and 60s, but in German or Italian language. I bought an Italian set of 26 or 28 magazine sized issues inthe mid 60s. Sent to Italy for them, based on a mention in one of the fanzines, perhaps ERB-dom. At that time, that was THE only way to see the strips then unless you came across the original Sunday Pages which was tough in early fandom days, before comic shows. I finally got a PV Feature Book much later on that belonged to the Fawcett editor Crowley and he wrote his name right on the cover, boldly in ink! He was probably a teen-ager when it came out. Good luck with your top ten project, sounds like fun.
Bud, you are the definition of fandom with that story, also the definition of a true connoisseur, for me that little story adds more weight to this book.