"Post No. 663"

The above photo was posted with my good old friend, Johnny Bacardi (aka: David Jones) in mind as he does a segment on his blog posts from time-to-time called "Confessions of a Spinner Rack Junkie" and uses a "Hey Kids! Comics!"" photo from an old comic book spinner rack.

The above tins from such should prove nostalgic to him as they are the actual ones from the racks from the old Ben Franklin 5 & Dime Store we used to have in our home town that, not only Johnny and I bought many a comic off of, but I'm sure a lot more kids and adults.

The top tins are the complete set off of the one that sat in that store in the early to late1970's, and the bottom one is one of two sections which covered the sides of top of the Gold Key rack. I'm not sure what the date is of the top one, but the GK one first appeared in the store in late 1962 when that company began. (The "regular" rack contained D.C.Comics).

And today is the second of two days I had off in a row this week. Got a few things accomplished such as mowing both mine and my mother's yard again (Ghod, will the grass EVER stop growing this year???), weed-eating around her sidewalks and trimming her hedges, repairing her sidewalks with Quik-Crete as well as some bricks I had to loosen on mine last week when we ran the new gas line, hauling yet another large stack of brush up to the street for the city to mulch up, taking mom to the doctor today and around for a few chores she needed, and...myriad other things.

Seems like I missed at least one Charlton Comic that has a "Tales of the Mysterious Traveler" reprint and have since added it to my Want List, which is Ghost Manor #55. Looks like that issue is nearly ALL such Ditko reprints from that 1950's title.

Was digging around in some "stuff" I had recently and came across the 10 issue small press editions of The Mundane Adventures of DISHMAN, written/drawn/published by Canadian writer/artist John MacLoud from 1985-1990. Thought I still had a copy of the 1988 Eclipse Comics Dishman #1 as well, but that's "disapeared" over the years (so, if anyone has a copy they wanna sell me "cheap", let me know). Always really enjoyed that title. The Eclipse issue reprints the cover of the first one plus the interiors to (I think) issues 1 thru 3. (And if anyone knows what John's been doing since then, let me know as I'd be really interested.)

Not sure if I mentioned that I was recently able to pick up the first eight Archive editions of Will Eisner's "The Spirit" for a song (like, 25% of the cover price). The Volumes 5 thru 8, in fact, still had their shrink-wrap on them. Lotta good reading there. The last time I checked there was something like 26 volumes of those archives, the last one reprinting the two1960's Harvey Comics. Don't know if I'll ever attempt to complete such a set, but these give me the Sunday sections of the character from 1940-1944, or something like approx. the first 200 Sundays. Some, of course, are Lou Fine (since Eisner served in the Armed Forces in WWII).

Getting back to small press publications for a moment here, you may recall that back in 1985-1987 I published an annual porfolio of small press artists called Upperground. Over a three year period those issues contained the work of over 50 different SP artists (as well as a few pros). Well, oddly enough, it seems that they've become a little collectable now that they're in the 20+ age and I've ended up selling individual issues from my file copies several times. So much so, in fact, that I've made more off of those in the past couple of years than it cost to publish the first issue! Few people know that I hand-collated and hand-stapled and individually signed and numbered every copy of that (a 500 print run), just to save money back then. (As a matter of fact, I've got one of them up on my current auctions if you care to click on the link in the column to the right.) No extra copies of No.'s 2 or 3, though, as they weren't photo-offset or magazine-size, but photocopy and digest sized editions (which had smaller print runs are are much scarcer. I only have one of two each of those in my own files.) The cover to the second issue got me a little publicity when the cover of it was printed in Renegade Press's Ms.Tree's Rock N Roll Special (back in the 1980's), as it has an illustration of "Ms. Tree" by Gary Kato on its front cover.