… And the livin is easy… I hope everyone enjoys their summer, make sure you take some time off and get some needed rest, make sure you marvel at the bees and stop and smell the roses. A fresh clear mind is what you’ll come back with, and you’ll need it to navigate the often cruel world of comic book collecting and investing.
From the “heading to our eBay auctions” pile I picked two covers this week, the first being Planet Stories #2 from Spring 1940. I usually don’t feature pulps but then I saw this once was published by Fiction House. It was fun having a peek inside and if you see below I got this week’s ad out of the thing. Pulp covers are incredible, if only the paper quality was better on these things.
Our splash page of the week comes from Savage Sword of Conan #1, its a two page splash from the mighty John Buscema. I’ve mentioned before how I loved reading Conan better through the magazines than the comics, yes you got black and white but you got what I thought was better art and you got less censored, more adulty stories, these were great reads.
As I mentioned above, my ad of the week is an in house ad that crossed media, Fiction House was plugging its comics in its Pulps. Here we have Fight Comics and Jungle Comics getting some ink. I wonder what the crossover for pulp and comic book readers was? You’d think it would be high, well above 50% but I’m not so sure.
My other Cover of the Week is Giant Size Spider-Man #2 from 1974, featuring Spider-Man and Master of Kung Fu. Giant Size Spider-Man was like Marvel Team Up and it gave newly introduced characters co-billing with Marvel’s most popular character. The series lasted 6 issues and highlighted Dracula, Shang Chi, Doc Savage, Punisher, Man Thing and Human Torch. Poor Human Torch, he’s older than Spidey but Marvel was forever trying to prop him up, with poor results.
Results from our latest weekly icecollectibles eBay auction came in last night and I really liked how our CGC 3.0 Amazing Spider-Man #4 held the line, last sale was $953, the 1st time it dipped below $1,000 this year, our copy fought its way to a respectable $1,026, well done, Spidey, well done Sandman.
