COUNTDOWN TO 9-21-12 GARAGE SALE

On Sunday, I made an unexpected trip to the Fortress of Storage to retrieve a Christmas tree we were donating to Goodwill.  There was room in the Van of Steel for about a dozen boxes of stuff.

One of those boxes was an unopened DC Comics box from 2003.  That was back when DC sent me virtually everything it published every month.  I haven't gone through it yet - too much other work to do - but it's sorely tempting my will power.  However, most of the stuff in this box will be available at the next garage sale.

On the bad news front, I discovered my copies of the Marvel British weeklies I worked on in late 1972, 1973 and 1974 were hopelessly water damaged and moldy.  The damage occurred before they had been brought to the Fortress, so it's not indicative of a larger problem.  Even so, it's sad to lose those weeklies. 

If anyone has copies of them for sale or trade, please contact me.

That's all for now.  Keep watching this space for nigh-daily updates on my last full-blown garage sale of the year. 

I WILL NOT SNITCH CARROTS

Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies #124 [February 1952] has a cover
by Ralph Heimdahl.  The artist was a Disney animator from 1937 to
1940, drew the Bugs Bunny newspaper strip for three decades, draw
lots of comics and covers for Dell and Western, and illustrated all
sorts of juvenile books.  Though the gag on this cover is labored,
the impish/insane glint in Bugs Bunny’s eyes and his big grin makes
me smile every time I look at.  It takes a master artist to put so
much animation into a two-dimensional drawing.

The Grand Comics Database doesn’t yet have writer credits for this
issue’s stories, but it does identify artists:

Bugs Bunny: Tony Strobl (10 pages)

Porky Pig: John Carey (6 pages)

Elmer Fudd and Daffy: Phil de Lara (5 pages)

Mary Jane and Sniffles: Al Hubbard (5 pages)

Henery Hawk: Vivie Risto (3.5 pages)

Sadly, I have read precious few of the Bugs Bunny comics from this
era.  I’d love to see a collection of them. 

Look for more vintage comic-book covers from the month of my birth
- December 1951 - in future bloggy things.

******************************

My next-to-last garage sale of the year was another success.  I was
delighted to see new and returning customers.  It’s always cool to
see the eyes of those new customers light up when they see how much
stuff is crammed into my garage and how inexpensive it is...and to
see returning customers find new stacks of stuff to buy.

An extra treat this time was the surprise visits from Tom Batiuk of
Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft fame and Mike Sangiacomo, who is a
Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter and a comics columnist and writer.
Thanks for stopping by, my friends.

My last full-blown sale of the year will be on September 21 and 22.
I’ll be restocking boxes and rethinking displays in between working
on other things.  I will do my best to make sure there are lots of
great new items on sale that weekend.

I’ll be at the Wizard World Ohio Comic Con the following weekend.
More on that in a moment.

My final “garage event” with be a mystery sale on October 5-6 from
9 am to noon.  Right now exactly what I’m doing is as big a mystery
to me as it is to you.  But I’m kicking around some ideas and I’m
eerily confident the sale will please those who attend it.

I have four goals for this mystery event.

1. Show my appreciation to my customers.

2. Have fun.

3. Offer some fun bargains.   

4. End up with less to take back to the Fortress of Storage to sit
until next summer.

More on this in future bloggy things.

******************************

A reminder...

Wizard World Ohio Comic-Con will be held September 28-30 at the
Greater Columbus Convention Center, 400 North High Street in
Columbus, Ohio.  Show Hours are 5pm to 9pm on Friday, 10am to 7pm
on Saturday and 10am to 5pm on Sunday.  I’m one of over 150 guests
and will have a table in Artist Alley.

I won’t be selling anything at my table, but I will be doing three
other things:

1. Signing Isabella-written books and comics.  I’m not so keen on
signing other items because, in many cases, I haven’t been paid for
these items (action figures, etc.) or not paid the full amount that
is owed to me.  But I don’t want to be a complete dick about it so
I’ll try to flexible, especially if you make a donation to the Hero Initiative.
They do good work.

2. Meeting with any legitimate artist, editor, or publisher wanting
to work with me.  I’m open to a wide range of possibilities, which
would include partnering with any of the above to bring some of my
own projects to the readers.  I’m not even against doing work-for-
hire work if the conditions are acceptable.

3. Accepting review copies of comics, books, movies, or anything I
can review here.  I don’t normally make guarantees on whether I’ll
review something or not, but, because of my long association with
this convention, I will guarantee to review at least 31 items that
I receive at the con...averaging one a day for each day in October.
I live on the edge, baby!

I’m looking forward to attending the show and hope to see a bunch
of my bloggy thing readers there.

******************************

Getting back to the garage sales...

The most frequently asked question is: Are these comics in any kind
of order?  Sadly, they are not.  If I tried to put them in order,
I wouldn’t have time to do anything else...including having these
garage sales.

Another frequently asked question was: Just how huge is your Vast
Accumulation of Stuff? Picture the final scene of Raiders of the
Lost Ark without anything that could melt your face off.  It’s just
a little smaller than that.

Another question: Why don’t you open up a store to sell all these
comics and books?  I owned and operated a comic-book store for over
a decade.  It was backbreaking work with way too many employees who
stole from me on a regular basis.  One of these crooks once told me
I should have expected them to steal and figured that as a cost of
doing business.  Of course, he also thought I didn’t do any work at
the store because, naturally, he wasn’t around when I did all the
thousand things running a store requires.  No, I don’t miss running
a store at all.

One more question: Have you read all these comics?  No, I haven’t.
There just wouldn’t be enough time in the day or years left in my
life to do that.  So, when I go through boxes to restock the sale,
I only pull aside about one box of stuff for every dozen I put on
sale...and may think twice about the stuff in that one box between
now and next summer’s garage sale.

DC and Marvel have made it remarkably easy for me to not read their
older (as in the past decade or so) comic books.  I don’t care so
much that the continuities have been taken apart and rearranged as
often as they have as that the characters are often unrecognizable
in their rebooted or updated configurations.  I’ll try to keep up
with the current runs, but that’s not the priority it was back when
I was still interested in writing for those companies.

Clarification.  It’s not that I’m completely uninterested in doing
any writing for those publishers.  I just recognize that they have
no interest in my doing so and that, unless they came up with some
project I could do without playing with 52 other creators, I might
not be able to fit into their current roster.  Except in one very
specific case, I’m not bitter or even particularly upset about it.
It is what it is.

I make similar decisions with the various series I’m reading via my
library system.  This weekend, I quit on three such series.

Kozue Amano’s Aria takes place on the planet Mars after it’s been
terraformed into a water world.  Its young heroine is a gondolier
tour guide.  She’s a likeable enough character and the setting is
intriguing, but, without any actual drama, the wonder of this new
Mars wore thin after a couple volumes.

I’m a huge fan of GTO Great Teacher Onizuka, but, after reading six
volumes of GTO The Early Years: Shonan Junai Gumi, I’m bailing on
that as well.  It’s too nonsensical and violent to hold my interest
and I have trouble telling the characters apart.

I recognize the quality that goes into Locke & Key by Joe Hill and
Gabriel Rodriguez, but three chapters into Clockworks, I realized
I wasn’t enjoy the series any more.  So it goes back to the library
later today.

I love comics.  Just not all comics.

That’s all for today.  I’ll be back tomorrow with more ramblings.

© 2012 Tony Isabella

COUNTDOWN TO 9-21-12 GARAGE SALE

My final full-blown garage sale of the year will be Friday and Saturday, September 21-22, from 10 am to 3 pm at 840 Damon Drive in Medina Ohio.

I just organized the existing boxes and my estimate is that I will have to add well over 2000 new comics to the comics boxes and well over 150 trade paperbacks to those boxes.

Make your plans to attend this garage sale now and keep watching this blog for daily updates.

Tony

ANOTHER GREAT GARAGE SALE!

Another fun and successful garage sale is in the books.  It was great to see returning customers, new customers and surprise visits from pals like Tom Batiuk and Mike Sangiacomo.  I'm taking a day off from the bloggy thing, but I'll have more on the sale and on other topics come Monday.  See you then.

THE LONE RANGER’S COMPANION

The actual way-too-long title of this comic is The Lone Ranger's
Companion Tonto #4 ]Dell; February-April 1952].  I’m just going to
call it Tonto, since that was the title for the first two issues of
its 33-issue run. 

We don’t know who painted this not-the-least-bit-exciting cover of
Tonto communicating via sign language or who wrote the issue’s two
Tonto stories.  “The Range War” and “The Trespassers” were both 16
pages and both drawn by Alberto Giolitti.  Paul S. Newman is known
to have written Tonto comics from 1952-1957, so he’s a possibility.
Any one know for sure?

The inside covers and the back covers had text articles with either
illustrations or photos.  The subjects were: “Plains Indian Homes,”
“The Eskimo” and “Indian Basketball.”  Apparently, the Mayans had
a game similar to both basketball and soccer.  Which makes me wish
the NBA allowed players to kick the basketball as well as dribble
or pass it.  That could be fun.

This comic book was on the newsstands in my birth month of December
1951 and I’m exhausted from yesterday’s garage sale.  Which is the
only logical explanation for why I think basketball players should
be allowed to kick the ball.  Tune in tomorrow for another vintage
cover from my birth month and my theory on why adding the javelin
to golf would liven up that moribund sport.

© 2012 Tony Isabella

WHO WAS THAT MASKED LOGO?

What jumps out at me when I look at the cover of The Lone Ranger
#44 [Dell; February 1952] is that terrific logo!  Whoever designed
it knew what they were doing.  Not only do you get the iconic mask
of the hero, but you get the title of the series in crystal-clear
white lettering on black.  It’s simple but more effective that most
of today’s comic-book logos.

We don’t know who painted this cover, but we do know who wrote and
drew most of the 36-page issue’s contents.  The Lone Ranger starred
in “The Masked Lady” (18 pages) by Paul S. Newman with art by Tom
Gill. 

Gaylord Du Bois wrote “When the Earth Opened” (2-page text) and a
9.5-page “Young Hawk” story drawn by Jon Small.  The latter’s worth
noting because the first Turok Son of Stone comic [Four Color #596;
October/November 1954] was originally written by Du Bois’ for his
earlier Native American hero. 

Rounding out the issue were “Red Cloud's First Battle,” a two-pager
which the Grand Comics Database describes as the “true story of
Sioux chief Red Cloud's first battle against the Army in Wyoming in
1866" and which has a follow-up story in The Lone Ranger #45...and
a single-page fact feature on “Indian Lingo.”

The Lone Ranger #44 hit the newsstands in December 1951, the month
of my birth.  I’ll have another Lone Ranger comic from that month
in tomorrow’s bloggy thing.

******************************

If you happen to find yourself in the vicinity of Casa Isabella at
840 Damon Drive in Medina, Ohio on Friday or Saturday, September 7-
8, you’d do well to stop by one of the few remaining Tony Isabella
garage sales of the year.  As always, I’ll have thousands of comic
books (including a nice selection of comics and books suitable for
all ages), magazines, paperbacks, trade paperbacks and hardcovers
on sale at insanely low prices.  The sale hours are 10 am to 3 pm,
though, truth be told, I sometimes get excited and open the garage
door early. 

I’ll also be selling the very spiffy two-sided Superman/Clark Kent
poster created for Cleveland's International Superman Exposition in
1988.  I’ll be selling the posters for $20 each and there will be
a limited supply available.  After my garage sale customers have a
chance to buy them, I’ll make them available via mail order.  Look
for details on that next week.

Here’s the schedule for this summer’s remaining sales:

Friday, September 7 (10 am to 3 pm)

Saturday, September 8 (10 am to 3 pm)

Friday, September 21 (10 am to 3 pm)

Saturday, September 22 (10 am to 3 pm)

MYSTERY SALE Friday, October 5 (9 am to noon)

MYSTERY SALE Saturday, October 6 (9 am to noon)

MYSTERY SALE? What the heck is that all about?  I guess you’ll have
to ponder that for a while.  Heh, heh, heh.

******************************

Remember how in yesterday’s blog, I didn’t know much of anything
about Little Iodine?  Well, I know a little bit more today thanks
to this e-mail from Brent Frankenhoff, the editor of Comics Buyer’s
Guide.  He wrote:

Nope, not strip reprints as far as I can tell. It's a fun series,
with a kind of a Dennis the Menace as a girl vibe to it. It's not
really Little Lulu-like in that Iodine has male friends, but
they're not at odds as Lulu and Tubby can be, it's more of the
Iodine gets some screwy idea to help her dad or do something else
and she drags her friends into it to help. The usual round of
misunderstandings ensue.

You know, you can always ask Maggie [Thompson] or me about this
sort of stuff. Thanks to my folks and a whole mess of later
purchases, I've got plenty of comics from the late 40s/early 50s.
My maternal grandmother taught school in one-room schoolhouses in
northeastern Iowa and, as a reward for the kids, she'd let them
read comics. (Progressive lady.) She "borrowed" my mom's comics for
the purpose, but my mother, being the anally retentive person she
is, put her initials in pencil on the covers and counted exactly
how many went to school. They all had to come back home as well.
Grandma never threw them away and, when I was old enough, we
retrieved them from storage at my grandpa's farm. I've still got
every one. Mostly Dell Westerns, but some other oddities mixed in.
My dad's comics were a little older and I foolishly sold a big ol'
bunch of 'em (a good run of Joe Palooka, a bunch of Walt Disney's
Comics & Stories, etc.) just before I started at CBG. What did I
know? Kept his Popeyes, his one Captain Marvel Adventures (origin
of Billy Batson and his mean uncle), and a tattered Captain Marvel
Jr.

Thanks for the information, Brent, and for that great story about
your mom and grandmother.  It made my day.

There are two reasons why I don’t ask knowledgeable people like you
and Maggie for information before I post these bloggy things..

One good reason and one bad reason.

The bad reason...I don’t make a dime off my blog and, as a result,
I’m kinda lazy when it comes to researching stuff for it.  If I
can’t find information online and quickly, I embrace ignorance and
move on to whatever paying work I have on my desk.

The good reason...that occasional ignorance is part of what makes
this blog fun for me.  It reminds me of my earliest days in fandom
when the only way I found out anything about comics from before I
started buying and reading comics was if I read a fanzine article
about them or talked with someone who was around when those comics
were published. 

I have read almost none of these comics from my birth month.  If I
had access to them, I would devote an entire blog to writing about
each issue.  But, since I don’t, I seek out whatever knowledge is
easily available online and hope for more information from fellow
fans.  Once again, thanks for the note.

I’ll be back tomorrow with more stuff.

© 2012 Tony Isabella

LITTLE IODINE

Here’s the cover of Little Iodine #10 [Dell; February-March 1952],
which would have shown up on newsstands in December 1951, the month
of my birth.  When I looked at this cover, I realized that, while
I knew of the title character, I had never read any Little Iodine
story or newspaper strip.

What makes this incredible is that Little Iodine was around for a
long time.  Wikipedia says:

First seen during the 1930s in a supporting role in [Jimmy] Hatlo's
popular gag panel, They'll Do It Every Time, Little Iodine was the
daughter of Henry Tremblechin and his wife, Cora. Her purpose was
to serve as a pesky nuisance to the strip's star, Henry, and her
behavior caused endless misery for her. 

Iodine became so popular she had her own Sunday strip from 1943 to
1985.  There was a Little Iodine film in 1946, though no copies are
believed to exist at this time. 

After a couple issues in Dell’s Four-Color series, Little Iodine’s
own comic ran 56 issues from March-May 1950 to April-June 1962.  I
don’t think I’ve ever so much as seen an issue.

I’m guessing the Little Iodine comic books reprinted the newspaper
strips, but that guess may not be 100% correct.  As always, if any
bloggy readers know more about this comic than I do - and, clearly,
that won’t be difficult - I’d love to hear from you.

Keep reading this bloggy thing for more vintage comic-book covers
from the month of my birth.

******************************

My two favorite Marvel titles are Avengers Academy and Daredevil.
The former, though brilliant, is drawing to a close because of the
Avengers Vs. X-Men event.  Thankfully, Daredevil, written by Mark
Waid, will be continuing.

Daredevil won Eisner Awards for Best Writer, Best Single Issue and
Best Continuing Series, so I don’t have to tell you that a lot of
folks like it as much as I do.  Waid took a character who had been
beaten to a pulp by a succession of sadistic writers and editors
and brought him back to life.  That he did it without walking away
from what his predecessors had done is nothing short of miraculous.
Indeed, the events of those dismal pre-Waid stories still exercise
a pull on Matt Murdock’s life and adventures.  The deterioration of
his relationship with best friend Foggy Nelson is but one example.

I read Daredevil #15-17 [$2.99 each] in one sitting.  Three issues
weren’t enough.  I wanted more.  Waid’s writing and the remarkable
art of Chris Samnee and guest artist Michael Allred bowled me over.

The desperate plight of Daredevil in Doctor Doom’s Latveria was one
new to the hero.  Think about that.  New to a character who’s been
around since 1964.  Now that’s writing.

DD’s courage and determination in this situation was breathtaking.
The roles played by Iron Man and other Avengers made perfect sense
without diminishing the title hero.  The frightening discovery made
by Foggy kept the tension high, even as the Allred issue examined
the Murdock/Nelson friendship and partnership.  I want to hack into
Waid’s computer and read the next issues.

Read Daredevil.  It’ll remind you how good super-hero comics can be
in the right hands.

******************************

I wanted to love Marvel’s new Captain Marvel title.  Unfortunately,
two issues was all in took to dash that hope. 

From a distance, the new title’s covers looked terrific.  The bold
logo and colors, the heroic poses, what’s not to love?  Then I got
closer.  Silly-looking hairdo and a doll’s face that doesn’t look
like it belongs to either Carol Danvers or an adult woman.

Opening the first issue, I was struck by the over-rendered and just
plain ugly artwork.  The familiar characters (Captains America and
Marvel) didn’t look like themselves.  They did, however, look like
they were brother and sister. 

Carol Danvers has a convoluted back story and, in recent years, has
been written as unlikeable/unpleasant.  The writing in these first
two issues did nothing to change that.  Just added more back story
to the character in a failed attempt to humanize her.  On the other
hand, points for this line: “I think I know your problem, Absorbing
Man.  You’re bitter than your name sounds like a brand of toilet
paper.”

After reading these two issues, I’m more convinced than ever that
the Marvel and DC universes needed to be most sincerely and utterly
blown to pieces.  A new Captain Marvel, preferably female because
there’s still a shortage of well-realized heroines, would be a good
thing.  But it’s not gonna happen with Carol Danvers.

******************************

I hadn’t looked at anything Teenage Mutant Ninja Mutant Turtles
since my children were kids.  But, when I saw Barbara Randall Kesel
was writing IDW’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Microseries #7 [IDW;
$3.99], I got a copy of that issue.  Barbara was one of my better
editors in comics, a fine writer herself, and a friend.  Not that
any of those things gets her a pass when it comes to my reviewing
something she wrote.

This issue focuses on April O’Neil, friend to the Turtles and, in
this version, a lab assistant to insane scientist Baxter Stockman.
I knew her as a TV reporter, but Wikipedia tells me this version is
how April was shown in the original TMNT comics.  Did I mention how
many TMNT cartoons I watched with my kids?

This story is tied into some larger story, but Kesel provides just
enough information on other components of the story to keep me in
the loop.  That’s the mark of good writing and good editing.  Wish
the industry had more of both.

April comes off as genuine and real.  She’s brave, but she’s not an
action hero.  Her fighting skills are rudimentary, but she manages
to keep her wits about her as she sets about disrupting Stockman’s
various sinister projects.  That’s the key to her success in this
story and as a character.  She doesn’t do anything we couldn’t do.
She does what many of us would be afraid to do.  She’s someone we
can relate to and admire.

The Marley Zarcone art is pretty good.  It has some movement, goes
big when necessary, and does a decent job telling the story.  It’s
solid professional work.

The story isn’t as satisfying as I would like, but that’s because
it’s just part of the puzzle.  If IDW’s other Turtles comics are as
good as this issue, I could see requesting their collections from my
local library system. 

More Kesel writing would be a good thing.  I hope savvy publishers
figure that out.

******************************

It’s garage sale time again!  My next-to-last full garage sale of
the summer will be Friday and Saturday, September 7-8, from 10 am
to 3 pm, at 840 Damon Drive, Medina, Ohio.

The restocking from the previous show has been largely completed as
I write this bloggy thing.  There will be thousands of comic books,
magazines, and mass market paperbacks at a quarter each.  There’ll
be hundreds of trade paperbacks and hardcovers at $2 and $5 each.
A limited number of the extremely rare 2-sided Superman/Clark Kent
poster from Cleveland’s 1988 International Superman Exposition will
be on sale at $20 each.  There will also be some Isabella-written
material on sale and, as always, whether you buy it at the sale or
not, I’m happy to sign anything I’ve written.

Insanely low prices on comics and books...and yours truly answering
your questions about this and that.  It’s like the smallest comics
convention you ever attended.  I hope to see you there.  
 
I’ll be back tomorrow with more stuff.

© 2012 Tony Isabella