Bunny #12, Harvey, November 1969.
I was at Fan Expo in Toronto over the weekend and was visiting a dealer pal from Winnipeg at his booth. As we were chatting he says “hey Walt I have a Spotlight pick for you” to which I said “hey you read Undervalued Spotlight” to which he replied, “doesn’t everybody”. That’s when I knew he was trying to be funny. Anyway he offered up a book and I liked it so much I will now present it to you as this week’s Undervalued Spotlight, Bunny #12.
First off I want to say the whole Bunny run of 21 issues is highly collectible, full of great covers and all available at affordable prices.
Of course its the cover to Bunny #12 that makes it a comic to have. The cover is all about cultural appropriation and that’s a bad thing these days. Remember the high school student who wore the beautiful Chinese silk dress to her prom? People are getting called out for wearing dreadlocks, actors are being called out for playing different ethnicities, it’s all quite the social issue right now.
Bunny #12 is not the first comic to highlight this cultural expropriation issue but it is quite blatant in its approach and its collectability is helped by the great aesthetics the cover by Hy Eisman gives us, this is a good looking book!
Embarrassingly I don’t have any sales data, the last sale was like 7 years ago but a Bunny #15 in CGC 9.4 recently sold for $62 so read the tea leaves yourself.
Bunny #12 belongs in what I think will be a growing collecting strain of comics, especially covers, that have not stood the test of time in a social context. I did a romance one for Girl’s Love Stories #176 a while ago that related to the “me too” movement that belongs in the same collecting strain. The best part, for comic book collectors at least, is that there are tons of comics that will be “discovered” as clean fits into this strain. Let’s start our collection with Bunny #12.
The 48th Overstreet price breaks for this book are $27/$44/$60 in the 8.0/9.0/9.2 grade splits.
Strengths that make this comic a good long-term investment are:
- Cultural appropriation cover
- Great looking cover
Ouch! I agree with your take on this book, but I am surprised that it came out when it did! This was about the time that films like A Man Called Horse and Little Big Man came out and were sympathetic to indigenous people! Guess the Harvey people hadn’t gotten the memo!
Now remind me of that romance book again… since I hold you responsible for my recent start of collecting the romance genre….
I added the link above in the post Gerald.
You really had me going there. I was going to try to do one of my best “Hey, look over there!” jobs and then snag one of these because they are “rare”. Luckily I got so interested that I beat the bushes for copies, and found something disturbing. If you search Heritage for “Bunny Harvey” and select “View Past Sale Prices”, you see that in ten years they have sold over a hundred (I lost count) “file copies” of most issues of the title, especially everything issue #5 and later. The last sale was just this past June, three copies each of #5-#21 in VF/NM, working out to about $15 each. How many more will be arriving from the warehouse?
There are a lot of nice covers in this run, so it looks like fun to collect, but with this death cross of many high grade books out there and very few graded, I can’t see calling this “undervalued”, especially at guide prices. My advice would be if you think you have a 9.6 (which is probably going to grade out at a 9.2 or 9.4), then it’s worth a $20 bet if you really like the cover. I have to doubt that it is ever going to show any meaningful appreciation in our lifetime.
Gerald, the situation for Girls’ Love Stories couldn’t be more different. There is true scarcity for that book – no DC “file copies” floating around – and that particular issue is incredibly rare in high grade. The highest graded copy would probably fetch mid-four figures. It would probably be impossible to locate, but if you are interested I guess I could ask around for you.
Verdict: DENIED due to The Best Little Warehouse In Texas
Thanks for the link Walt and at four figures Chris I will have to pass… however I see the series is left with a lot of great affordable issues. As for Bunny…perhaps if I was an Archie collector I would find this series interesting…
Good digging Chris but file copies have a tendency to soak into the ground and slowly dry up. I’m still high on this one.
Clearly Ferd has better collecting tastes then Walt…nuff said?