Thursday, April 1, 2010

Feast Your Foolish Eyes!





April Fool's Day seems like a great opportunity to post a montage of recent Catacombs acquisitions, so feast your eyes on a few bronze age gems that have recently been archived by yours truly.

A few of these are nestling into new berths in the dust bin, since I never had them in the first place, while the largest part of these books simply replace copies that I sold or traded off over the years of my wayward youth.

I've comfortably eased back into searching out lots of bronze age books, after a brief sabbatical where I focused on silver age stuff & decent modern age titles.

For the record the titles depicted above are: The Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian #47 & 54, The Rook #3, The Invaders #2 & 6, The Fantastic Four Annual #11, Marvel Two-In-One Annual #1, Marvel Two-In-One #20, Marvel Premiere #29 & 30, Marvel Spotlight #'s: 14, 16, 17, 19, 22 & 24, The Son of Satan #'s: 1, 4 & 6, Giant-Size Chillers #1 and The Avengers #116.

I wish that the Grand Comics Database featured more uniform sizing in their cover scans. That was the source of these images, and I must add that most of my copies are in higher grade than many of these.

Have a great holiday and keep your fingers crossed that the tricksters will go easy on you today!

8 comments:

James Figueiredo said...

Man, those Conan covers are beautiful - Earl Norem kicks so much ass!

Mykal Banta said...

Chuck: Awesome! (normally I am more wordy, but here one word will suffice!) --Mykal

Chuck Wells said...

Patience really is a virtue when it comes to collecting and it's probably no secret that I focus my efforts on bronze age stuff.

Of course it's getting increasingly hard to find 1970's stuff without busting your wallet.

The slabbing of books by the CGC doesn't help, due to the "multiples of guide" mindset that sends copies locked into plastic turtle shells through the roof pricewise, but a good chunk of the books pictured in this post were acquired for very modest dollars. I grabbed a really nice copy of Invaders #2 for $1.40 off of eBay and FF Annual #11 was only $.99 (cents) when nobody but yours truly bid on those!

A buddy who owns a comics shop recently took in a mixed box of 1970's mags and he sold the Savage Swords and the Rook to me for only $2 each. They are beautiful copies too, with no major flaws, no musty smell, and they have cream to white pages and tight centerfolds.

Mykal Banta said...

The Rook comic I was particularly covetous of! Man, what a good snab! -- Mykal

Chuck Wells said...

Mykal, that particular cover by Bob Larkin is really awesome in person.

My copy of The Rook #3 has brilliant beautiful colors and unfaded cover gloss. It is probably an overall 9.2 grade. You ought to see the second feature Alex Toth story inside, just incredible storytelling. The Rook tale is drawn by the great Lee Elias.

cash_gorman said...

So, apparently in addition to being Flash Gordon, Mack Bolan, the Spider, the Avenger, and most famously Doc Savage, Steve Holland was also the Rook! He's even wearing the same shirt he used modeling for all those covers.

Got to hunt that one up.

cash_gorman said...

It's Bob Larkin and not Bama? I know Larkin used Holland for his Doc covers as well, but the style, pose and and the backgrounds scream Bama. Wonder how much is him using the same model, him wearing his influences on his sleeve before he found his own voice or if he was intentionally aping Bama's Doc covers?

Chuck Wells said...

I really would have liked to have met Steve Holland.

Lots of purists know of his modeling work, but I doubt that many genre fans realize just how many iconic characters he "stood in" for on those covers.