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Post by beccabear67 on Jan 6, 2020 17:11:53 GMT -5
The Golden Age Doctor Fate Archves collects all the Dr. Fate stories from More Fun. Prices seem to be anywhere from $50-$90-up on this, though I see someone did get lucky on eBay at $30 once. I probably would wait for a thinner cheaper edition of the best early stories. They did include the first appearance in a late '90s-early '00s Weird Secret origins collection (plus the same for More Fun Spectre inside... not great repro though).
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Post by Deleted on Jan 6, 2020 20:36:29 GMT -5
chadwilliam ... I've finally got a copy of it a month ago and sorry that I took so long to thank you for it. Great Read ... I'd hoped you'd get a kick out if it! Thanks for letting me know you did. I did and it's really a wonderful read and full of insights. Thanks for suggesting it.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 6, 2020 23:10:19 GMT -5
The Golden Age Doctor Fate Archves collects all the Dr. Fate stories from More Fun. Prices seem to be anywhere from $50-$90-up on this, though I see someone did get lucky on eBay at $30 once. I probably would wait for a thinner cheaper edition of the best early stories. They did include the first appearance in a late '90s-early '00s Weird Secret origins collection (plus the same for More Fun Spectre inside... not great repro though). Cover price on it was $75, so $30-$50 is not bad price for it. -M
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Post by beccabear67 on Jan 6, 2020 23:51:31 GMT -5
Cover price on it was $75, so $30-$50 is not bad price for it. -M I'd pay $30 U.S. but could watch for three years and not find another at that price. There is one at $89, and Lone Star has no copies. Definitely an expensive item to me. The big Miss Fury book was $50 can. (with Trina Robbins there to sign copies so it might've been a promo price) and there was a long article with illustrations and unpublished art by Tarpe Mills besides the Sunday comics collected. The relatively cheap format comics aren't selling but these lavish and pricey collections are? I can see that the markup can make them more attractive to specialist book sellers for sure. Comics have always struggled with being too cheap to be worth the trouble for wholesalers and retailers, but too expensive and the percentage remaindered can be a killer. It's boggling to imagine comics were once 68pages of all new material for ten cents. Now it's boggling to see collections entirely of work long ago commissioned and paid for with retail prices of $50-$75, especially if they are recoloring a redrawn version in some cases which is inferior. Perhaps I'll have to go the pdf route on ever seeing much more of the early Doctor Fate... my library is not very into these unfortunately, even with interbranch loan. Next time in OR I will check what they have.
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Post by electricmastro on Jan 7, 2020 3:06:36 GMT -5
As crudely written some may deem Golden Age stories to be, I gotta say that I appreciate how interestingly/uniquely thought out the backgrounds for some of DC heroes were.
Hawkman - reincarnation of an Egyptian prince
Spectre - a spirit sent back to Earth
Doctor Fate - a trained sorcerer who has mystical items, including a helmet which lets a cosmic being occasionally possess him
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 7, 2020 9:14:12 GMT -5
From Harvey Comics' Speed Comics issues 12 and 13, 1941, The Hand: Like The Eye (Sees!), The Hand was an apparently autonomous body part that solved crimes and spooked people. There were some absolutely nutso ideas at the dawn of the comic book superhero, before the norms had been firmly established, and I love seeing bizarre concepts like this being trotted out as the foundation for an ongoing series! Although presented unexplained and mysterious, the first installment (by Bill O'Connor and Ben Flinton, who were the creators of DC's Golden Age Atom), provided some visual hints that there might be more to discover about The Hand, specifically, that The Hand might not be disembodied, but in fact attached to an invisible mystery man: Although if it were attached to this shadowy form in a slouch hat, that leaves the mystery of how The Hand was able to fly through the air, through transoms too small for a full human body, grow to large size, and write flaming words in the air with its index finger. In The Hand's second and final appearance, a brief four-pager, a better inker improves the look of the strip, and there is a hint of a supporting cast developed: FBI agents Nick and Randy, who propose an ongoing partnership in the final panel. But there are no more hints of an invisible man attached to The Hand (occasionally referred to as "The Big Hand"--there are some gaps in the lettering, especially in the first story, that suggest to me that "The Big Hand" was the intended title of the feature, altered to the more modest "The Hand" at the last minute). I wish O'Connor and Flinton had been allowed to carry on a little longer with this odd concept. While their work was crude, I find their Atom stories to be surprisingly enjoyable. And I suppose I'm just fascinated in general with stories of disembodied organs--after all, my first comic book was the "Split!" Captain Marvel in 1966! One other thing that pushes my buttons: this character evokes one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite books, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: "A hand from the cloud emerges, holding a chart expanded."
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Post by mikelmidnight on Jan 7, 2020 13:15:38 GMT -5
I'd not seen the 'invisible man' side of the Hand. For some time I've wondered whether the Hand and the Eye are part of the same entity, and somewhere there's a crime fighting Nose and Foot etc etc.
There's a terrific British character, the Steel Claw, who has a prosthetic claw-shaped metal hand. It allows him to (among other things) turn invisible, although the claw itself doesn't, so it appears to be floating in mid-air.
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Post by beccabear67 on Jan 7, 2020 18:29:13 GMT -5
'The Hand' is weeeeird comics! That is up there with Basil W's Eye comic. Of course the ultimate in omnipotence in disembodied pedal extremities was crafted by Terry Gilliam (re-mixing Bronzino)...
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Post by electricmastro on Jan 7, 2020 18:36:31 GMT -5
Robot characters also tend to be interesting. The White Streak for example was created centuries ago by an advanced, extinct South American civilization called Utopia to help mankind during times of war. He was deactivated when the civilization succumbed to internal strife, but he was awakened from his slumber in an American museum during an attack by German bombers. He destroyed the planes and decided to fight for America against the Axis. From Target Comics #1 (February 1940, Novelty Press). Art by Carl Burgos.
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Post by nerdygirl905 on Jan 22, 2020 6:05:38 GMT -5
The art may not be very good, but the original Red Tornado stories were great. Sadly she isn’t that well known now. Ma Hunkle rocked with her casserole helmet and her bright red suit.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Jan 22, 2020 7:11:32 GMT -5
The art may not be very good, but the original Red Tornado stories were great. Sadly she isn’t that well known now. Ma Hunkle rocked with her casserole helmet and her bright red suit. I've only read a few of her stories, but I also love the original Red Tornado (it's pretty much in inverse proportion to my ambivalence toward the android Red Tornado). If there was ever a character that deserved a revival, it's Ma.
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Post by Mister Spaceman on Jan 22, 2020 10:52:29 GMT -5
Supersnipe has fascinated me ever since I first saw this cover in All in Color for a Dime back in 1974: I love that this was the imagined alter ego of Koppy McFad, "the boy with the most comic books in America." The first meta comic book?
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Post by electricmastro on Mar 25, 2020 13:07:45 GMT -5
Music Master (aka music teacher John Wallace) from Eastern Color Printing:
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 30, 2020 11:47:59 GMT -5
Music Master (aka music teacher John Wallace) from Eastern Color Printing:
One character I'm shocked has yet to be revived by Howard Chaykin is the Quality Comics character 'Swing' Sisson. He's not a superhero, he's a two-fisted crime-solving jazz big band leader!
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Post by electricmastro on Apr 7, 2020 2:37:44 GMT -5
Another would definitely have to be Panther Woman (Marga), who was raised in the wild by black panthers and was scientifically given abilities like cat-like claws:
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