Jim Aldridge

On one of my research visits to Gerry Lazare and his wife Setsuko, Gerry said that he had recently received a phone call from someone who had written him a fan letter 40 years ago. Gerry said that the man’s…

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An Artist’s Edition Index For All Publishers

Being a fan of the artist's edition line from IDW and all the other publishers that have followed, releasing books in the same format, I've started an index of all current and solicited volumes. Please use it as a reference and let me know what other information you'd like to see listed. I own most of these so it's been fairly easy to collect the information, but as more publishers join in information will have to be gathered from solicitations and online reviews.
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WECA Worth

My question is, does the scarcity of WECA comics put them in a universe of their own when it comes to determining their fair market value? These books are still somewhat impenetrable for the majority of collectors and maybe an accurate price guide can’t be set down because of the lack of available sales data. I don’t subscribe to GPA so I don’t know if there is any data on sales of some of the slabbed WECA books, but so far this year I have seen about 130 of these books change hands on line, but this unusually high number of WECA books made available in a single year was chiefly due to the 100 or so books offered in the February and March ComicLink (CLINK) auctions. The usual number of books exchanged on line per year is probably below 50. I suspect that most WECA books never reach the online market and are exchanged between collectors, or dealers and collectors hand to hand—or they are discovered when collections come to light from across the country when a collector digs extra hard and uncovers one.
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Marvelous Anglo-American

In the summer of that year Anglo-American put out Freelance Comics No. 1 (July/August) and then just after that Grand Slam Comics No. 1 (Sept./Oct.) and then Three Aces Comics No. 1 (Nov./Dec. 1941). This rounded off that first year for Anglo-American with all original Canadian material and characters such as Freelance, The Crusaders, Pat the Air Cadet, and Don Shield. At this point, however, Anglo-American decided to veer off this Canadian path and contract with Fawcett in the States, not to reprint their superhero stories, but to use their scripts for redraws. Of course, government acts prevented them from reprinting American comics outright (reprints weren’t really legalized until the war was over) in Canada, but not from drawing their own versions of the Fawcett scripted stories.
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1st Brief Appearance Vs. 1st Full Appearance: Which Is Better?

If we only look at the Wolverine example, we would assume that the value of a character's first full appearance always trumps the value of the first brief appearance. It would stand to reason that a comic book reader gets more of the character in the first full appearance issue and this would increase more buying demand (and value) for the first full appearance issue. However, as I sifted through and compared first brief appearance and first full appearance values in this year's guide, I found that this wasn’t always the case. Here are examples of comics showing both cases: examples where the first brief appearance issue is more valuable, and examples where the first full appearance issue is the more valuable of the two.
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