Comic Collecting (1 Viewer)

[The Drifter]

Several points:

I agree completely about most comics not being worth as much as a lot of people think they are - especially those from the 1980's-on. I also remember comic book store owners were notorious for ripping people off with exorbitant prices on "floppies" (individual comics) back in the '80's & '90's. This was well before Collected Editions (CE's) reprints became that prevalent/popular. So, during this era - if you wanted the comic the only real way to get this was to buy the original issue(s).

Circa 1984, I remember seeing a back-issue of Daredevil (can't remember the exact #, but it was an early issue) at a local comic book store. This was especially notable because the comic literally looked like it had been partially put into a shredder. It was unreadable, and I'm not sure why they were even trying to sell this. I.e., even as a kid I knew this was worthless. There was no price on the comic (big surprise!) and the comic book store owner said "Make me an offer". I just laughed.

Note that a lot of comics that were released in the '90's that were "hot" ATT are worth next to nothing these days due to extreme overproduction, etc. The most notorious were some of the titles from Marvel & then-new Image comics - many with gimmicky covers, i.e. "holograms", "foil covers", "cardboard covers", etc. - ad nauseam. These days, I've heard that people have trouble giving them away in some cases - LOL:

10 Supposedly Rare Comics That Aren't Worth Anything

Although comics still hold their value despite the '90s crash, not all supposedly rare issues are priced equally.

www.cbr.com

Circa 1996, I remember someone trying to sell me Marvel comics stock. Needless to say, I declined

 

[EricSchulz]

Several points:

I agree completely about comics not being worth as much as a lot of people think they are - LOL. I also remember comic book store owners were notorious for ripping people off with exorbitant prices on "floppies" (individual comics) back in the '80's & '90's. This was before Collected Editions (CE's) became that prevalent/popular, so typically if you wanted the comic the only real way to get this was to buy the original issue(s).

Circa 1984, I remember seeing a back-issue of Daredevil (can't remember the exact #, but it was an early issue) at a local comic book store. This was especially notable because the comic literally looked like it had been partially put into a shredder. It was unreadable, and I'm not sure why they were even trying to sell this. I.e., even as a kid I knew this was worthless. There was no price on the comic (big surprise!) and the comic book store owner said "Make me an offer". I just laughed.

Note that a lot of comics that were released in the '90's that were "hot" ATT are worth next to nothing these days due to extreme overproduction, etc. The most notorious were some of the titles from Marvel & then-new Image comics - many with gimmicky covers, i.e. "holograms", "foil covers", "cardboard covers", etc. - ad nauseam. These days, I've heard that people have trouble giving them away in some cases - LOL:

10 Supposedly Rare Comics That Aren't Worth Anything

Although comics still hold their value despite the '90s crash, not all supposedly rare issues are priced equally.

www.cbr.com

Circa 1996, I remember someone trying to sell me Marvel comics stock. Needless to say, I declined

In Chicago I pop in occasionally to Graham Cracker Comics or Chicago Comics (they’re the closest) and I’m still shocked at the number of variant covers being released. I, personally, don’t plan on spending $4 an issue on six copies of the same comic.

 

[The 1960's]

Recent Batman acquisitions from the same collection I posted about here.

 

[The 1960's]

I decided not to purchase these two.

​

 

[The 1960's]

These two are the best of this second group. I did not post these previously as I hadn't yet consummated my purchase.

This concluded the first group I was offered back in December of last year. I just acquired a second group last night

 

[The Drifter]

I remember reading some of the Sgt. Rock/Easy Company WWII comics back in the day. Great stories & artwork - especially those issues drawn by the legendary Joe Kubert.

Back in the early 200X's, DC comics reprinted some of these Sgt. Rock comics in a series of high-end Hardcover Collected Editions (CE's), the DC Archives. Unfortunately, they didn't reprint that many issues & the CE's didn't last.

There was also a series of b&w DC Showcase Presents reprints, which IMHO were not that great due to the b&w aspect. I.e., since the comics were originally printed in color a lot was lost with these presentations. I typically will only like seeing b&w reprints if the original issues were in b&w to begin with - i.e., the great Creepy & Eerie CE's.

I definitely would be interested in seeing the entire Sgt. Rock series reprinted in color - as well as the other iconic WW II DC comics like Our Army At War/G.I. Combat/Unknown Soldier, etc.

DC Big 5 War Comics: Our Army at War

I started to write this post before I heard about the death of the legendary Joe Kubert. Readers of this blog will be aware of my love of t...

silverandbronzeagesubjects.blogspot.com

 

[The 1960's]

I remember reading some of the Sgt. Rock/Easy Company WWII comics back in the day. Great stories & artwork - especially those issues drawn by the legendary Joe Kubert.

Back in the early 200X's, DC comics reprinted some of these Sgt. Rock comics in a series of high-end Hardcover Collected Editions (CE's), the DC Archives. Unfortunately, they didn't reprint that many issues & the CE's didn't last.

I definitely would be interested in seeing the entire Sgt. Rock series reprinted - as well as the other iconic WW II DC comics like Our Army At War/G.I. Combat/Unknown Soldier, etc.

DC Big 5 War Comics: Our Army at War

I started to write this post before I heard about the death of the legendary Joe Kubert. Readers of this blog will be aware of my love of t...

silverandbronzeagesubjects.blogspot.com

Kubert is great and although I'm not at all into War comic books, television series or motion pictures, I'd have purchased those two for investment purposes had the grades been higher. In the grades above they are only worth about $175 combined.

 

[jayembee]

Kubert is one of my favorite comics writer/artists. He's still my all-time favorite Tarzan artist.

There were four volumes of the DC Archives of Sgt. Rock. I'm still missing v.3, which I've been unable to find at a reasonable price. They were one of only three war comics titles reprinted in this format. The other two were Blackhawk (one volume of Golden Age stories) and Enemy Ace (2 volumes, also with art by Kubert)

There was also a later DC reprint brand called Showcase Presents. They were trade paperback with cheaper paper and in b&w, but in terms of trying to accumulate stories at a relatively low price, they were better than nothing. There were four volumes of Sgt. Rock, collecting up through Our Army at War #216 (the Archives only went up to #137). In this format, DC reprinted a lot more war titles.

Of the two Sgt. Rock 80-pagers that Neal posted above, the second one was reprinted by DC in 2000 as one of their "Replica Editions". Cover price was $5.95, but that's cheaper than an original would cost.

 

[jayembee]

And if you're looking for Kubert Collections, there are these:

 

[jayembee]

And these Artist Editions, reprinted by Kubert's original art:

 

[The Obsolete Man]

I hope DC reprint Sgt. Rock in either the Compendiums or their new DC's Finest (aka DC's Epic line) format.


Oh, BTW, found Vault of Horror 5 last August. Slightly above cover. Finished up the EC Archives collection just in time to pack 'em away for a move.

 

[The Drifter]

I hope DC reprint Sgt. Rock in either the Compendiums or their new DC's Finest (aka DC's Epic line) format.

I share this hope. To some extent, I collect & follow both Marvel & DC Collected Editions (CE's) reprinting older material. However, DC has an extremely poor track record of reprinting their 1960's - 1980's genre titles, i.e. their horror/sci-fi/western/war/etc. It seems like their main focus is on their super-hero titles. So, I find it unlikely that they would go back & revisit Sgt. Rock (or any similar titles) re: new reprints.

I hope I'm wrong, however. A great reprint line of Sgt. Rock & also the many other Classic DC war comics would be amazing.

 

[jayembee]

I share this hope. To some extent, I collect & follow both Marvel & DC Collected Editions (CE's) reprinting older material. However, DC has an extremely poor track record of reprinting their 1960's - 1980's genre titles, i.e. their horror/sci-fi/western/war/etc. It seems like their main focus is on their super-hero titles.

Within the past couple of years, I started getting more into war and western titles. Kubert comes into this part of the story. When I first came across IDW's Artist's Edition releases, one the two artists that first grabbed me was Kubert (the other was Walt Simonson). Seeing his Tarzan work in original-art size helped renew my love of his work. Knowing his primary work for DC were the war titles, which I wasn't a big collector of over the years. Knowing that the war titles also had work by other artists I liked (Russ Heath, Alex Toth, Sam Glanzman, et alia), I researched what had been reprinted in various collections.

The DC Archives did some (as I described in an above post). They significantly increased that with the Showcase Presents line. In addition to the Sgt. Rock volumes, they released two volumes of The Unknown Soldier, two of The Haunted Tank, and one each of Blackhawk, Enemy Ace, The Losers, Weird War Tales, and (the entire run of) Men of War. They also did a pre-Rock volume of Our Army at War (#1-20). And, a volume of the series The War That Time Forgot (the "soldiers vs. dinosaurs" stories from Star Spangled War Stories). For westerns (which they did none of in the Archives format) they did Bat Lash and two volumes of Jonah Hex. And they did a number of other non-superhero genre volumes like some anthology titles such as Strange Adventures, Tales of the Unexpected, The Witching Hour, and Ghosts, as well as SF of SF-ish titles like Challengers of the Unknown, Rip Hunter, Time Master, and Sea Devils. And a couple of romance titles: Young Love and Secrets of Sinister House.

Now with the Omnibus editions, they're largely back to very little other than superhero or superhero-adjacent titles. They have released omnibus volumes of Swamp Thing, House of Mystery, and House of Secrets. But for westerns, they only title is Weird Western Tales: Jonah Hex (which technically isn't an omnibus, though it was originally announced as one), and the only war title is Suicide Squad: The Silver Age Omnibus, which has nothing to do with the Squad as we currently know it, but was a run of titles/issues that overlap with "The War That Time Forgot". Oddly enough, though, there are stories that are in both TWTTF Showcase Presents volume and the SS:TSAO, but others that are in only one or the other.

There are also other, random collections. Back in the 1970s, the publisher Simon & Schuster (under their Fireside trade paperback imprint) released three anthologies of DC genre stories: (1) America at War - The Best of DC War Comics, (2) Heart Throbs - The Best of DC Romance Comics, and (3) Mysteries In Space - The Best of DC Science Fiction Comics. All of them are OOP and hard to come by at any reasonable price. Recently (2020), DC released an anthology DC Goes to War, which is, for all practical purposes a reissue of the S&S war title, although there are some stories in the S&S volume not in the DC volume, and some vice versa. The annoying thing about it is that they probably could've done an exact reprint if they didn't include Garth Ennis's Enemy Ace: War in Heaven, which runs almost 100 pages and had previously been released on its own in book form.

 

[jayembee]

Part Two: the same is pretty much true of Marvel, though a lot of it depends on how you count things that are SF/fantasy or horror that drift back and forth over the line into superhero titles. Also licensed properties such as Alien/Predator titles, Star Wars titles, Robert E. Howard characters (Conan, etc.) and suchforth.

With the Marvel Masterworks, their version of the DC Archives, they only released one western title -- The Rawhide Kid (two volumes) -- and two war titles -- Sgt. Fury (4 volumes) and, from the Atlas Era, a single volume with the complete run (11 issues) of Battlefield.

When it came to the Essential Collections line, their version of DC's Showcase Presents, they only released one Sgt. Rock and one Rawhide Kid volume, each of which had less material than what was in their respective Masterworks editions.

With the Epic Collections, they released two volumes of Sgt. Fury, but still haven't gone beyond what was in the Masterworks volumes. (That said, I don't mean to suggest these are valueless. I'm missing the first Sgt. Fury MM volume, so the first Epic Collection volume fills in some stories for me.)

With their Omnibus volumes, there's only The Complete Kirby War and Romance Omnibus, for which the title says it all. Otherwise, there are only the "Marvel Month" Omnibuses, of which there are four so far: August 1961, June 1962, July 1963, and February 1964. Each one takes a Marvel milestone -- Fantastic Four #1; Amazing Fantasy #15; The Avengers #1 & The X-Men #1; and Daredevil #1 -- to reprint every comic issue released in those months. As such, they include issues of Sgt. Fury (the only war title), western titles like Kid Colt Outlaw and Two-Gun Kid (as well as The Rawhide Kid), romance titles, and humor titles like Millie the Model, etc.

I suppose, though, that while I'm ignoring some horror titles like Tomb of Dracula (which I love, so it's not a knock on that particular comic), they've also released Masterworks volumes and Omnibus volumes of their monster/horror anthology titles of the 1950s. The Masterworks line include Tales to Astonish, Tales of Suspense, Strange Tales, and Journey Into Mystery. In the Omnibus line, they've released two volumes of Marvel Masters of Suspense: Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and two of Monsters: The Marvel Monsterbus by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber & Jack Kirby.

I should also mention that Dead Reckoning (a graphic novel imprint of The US Naval Institute) had released in 2020 the anthology Atlas at War!, which includes 40 stories from a number of Marvel/Atlas's 1950s war titles. Dr. Michael J. Vassallo, the editor of that anthology is currently working with Fantagraphics on two lines of Atlas comics reprints: The Atlas Comics Library and The Atlas Artist Edition. So far, in the latter line, there's one volume for Joe Maneely. In the former line, there's one release so far: Adventures Into Terror, Volume 1. Forthcoming Library titles announced so far are Venus, Volume 2 (next month, finishing what was started by Marvel as an Atlas Era Masterworks volume), In the Days of the Rockets! (May), and War Comics, Volume 1 (August).

Atlas Comics

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On edit: It looks like the Venus volume from Fantagraphics has been pushed back to April.

 

[The Drifter]

Re: the large TPB DC Showcase Editions & the Marvel Essential volumes, I agree these reprints are better than nothing. However, they're all in b&w (including the covers) and I don't have a lot of interest in collecting/reading these - since the original comics were in color & since color was such an important part of these comics.

So, I don't really count these when mentioning reprints - but, that's me.

 

[jayembee]

So...one of the other things I've gotten into in recent years has been newspaper comic strip collections. Of course, once I started picking up various volumes of IDW's "Library of American Comics" releases, IDW stopped doing them.

But, one of the things that this has lead to is trying to collect a number of "strip-zines". The big one that's still running (and seems to be the only one being published today) is Comics Revue, which started in 1983. Still going after 40 years is not too shabby. I currently have a little over 100 issues out of the first 280. After #280, they went to double-numbering each issue, with the issues also being double the size. I have about a third of the double issues.

There were also a number of collections published circa the 80s, largely from Dragon Lady Press (in Canada) and Blackthorne. I've got a number of those, but there are still some I'm looking for.

The biggest trove is a number of strip-zines that appeared in the late 60s to about 1980. The most notable were two tabloid "newspapers" out of Wisconsin, The Menomonee Falls Gazette and Menomonee Falls Guardian. While other zines reprinted classic newspaper strips from prior decades, the two MFGs made deals to published then-current strips (as well as selected classic strips, and some non-US strips), though about two weeks behind the normal strip syndication, so as not to step on the toes of the various papers around the country. The Gazette focused on adventure serial strips like Steve Canyon, Secret Agent Corrigan, The Phantom, and (by Neal Adams) Ben Casey. The Guardian focused on humorous gag-a-day strips like Pogo, B.C., Broom-Hilda, and Tumbleweeds.

Being primarily interested in the adventure strips, I started with the Gazette. As of this week, I've managed to acquire all but three of the 232 issues, most in pretty good condition. The only ones I still need are #1, #196, and #199. Well, I also need another copy of #105. The copy I have is missing one sheet (two pages), which looks to be torn/cut out.

Now to start in on the Guardian. That was started later, and only ran 146 issues, of which I currently have only 24. After that, I start trying to fill in Comics Revue.

The biggest frustration is a magazine from 20 years ago called Big Fun Comics. It ran only nine issues, but most of them are virtually impossible to find. The first three issues are ridiculously easy to come by (I have all three), but the others...not. A couple of months ago, someone on eBay was auctioning a complete set, but I got outbid. That hurt, as the last four issues contained the entirety of Frank Robbins's 5-year run on the classic strip Scorchy Smith. I'm a big fan of Robbins, from his DC (Batman and Detective Comics) and Marvel (Captain America and The Invaders) to his 33-year run of his own newspaper strip, Johnny Hazard.

 

[TravisR]

So...one of the other things I've gotten into in recent years has been newspaper comic strip collections. Of course, once I started picking up various volumes of IDW's "Library of American Comics" releases, IDW stopped doing them.

Semi-related: I'm currently going broke periodically buying The Complete Dick Tracy volumes. I had meant to buy them when they first started coming out but didn't get them. Then I got too far behind on the books and wrote off getting them and they eventually started going out of print and the price went up on the secondary market. Then last year, Clover Press re-released the first six volumes (to match the size of V7 to 29) and I decided to start picking them all up. Some of those later volumes when print runs presumably went way down are gonna hurt when I buy them.

 

[jayembee]

Dick Tracy is one strip that I just could never get into. I suppose I should be fortunate in that, as it got the largest number of volumes from IDW (29). On the downside, the second largest number of volumes from them was Little Orphan Annie, which I've been warming to somewhat after reading some of it in the Gazette.

I knew that Clover had taken over the Library of American Comics from IDW, but didn't realize they started reissuing Tracy. I've been getting their new editions of Terry and the Pirates.

The frustrating thing is that I'm two volumes shy on IDW/LoAC's Steve Canyon volumes, and the two I need have crazy prices on the secondary market. Same with the one volume I still need of Li'l Abner.

 

[TravisR]

I knew that Clover had taken over the Library of American Comics from IDW, but didn't realize they started reissuing Tracy. I've been getting their new editions of Terry and the Pirates.

I've been getting the Terry And The Pirates volumes too. Though I'm surprised that I didn't wait until they went out of print so I can spend four or five times the cover price.

 

[jayembee]

Being primarily interested in the adventure strips, I started with the Gazette. As of this week, I've managed to acquire all but three of the 232 issues, most in pretty good condition. The only ones I still need are #1, #196, and #199. Well, I also need another copy of #105. The copy I have is missing one sheet (two pages), which looks to be torn/cut out.

I managed to pick up another copy of #105. Oddly enough, it was also missing one sheet, but it was a different sheet than the copy I already had, so I was able to cobble together a complete copy. I also managed to snag a copy of issue #1. Paid more than I would normally be willing to pay, but I wasn't sure I'd otherwise be able to find a copy for less.