It’s been a busy week: we added a couple of new consignors to our weekly eBay auctions. I prefer to buy collections; more money upfront but generally there is more ‘meat on the bone’ for us as in better margins. We always give the collectors the choice and lately, most have been opting to run their collections through our auctions. We’re doing our best as a business to adjust to this and are trying to focus on getting the seller good results which help both parties.
I couldn’t even get past the second pile before I hit my first “divert to the personal collection” lot of books. Look at this beautiful lot of Gold Key Porky Pigs! I believe that is #7, #21 and #22: they are stunning copies, in that 8.5 to 8.2 range but have such healthy gloss and great eye appeal that I just couldn’t bring myself to list these and end up getting $20 to $25! With books like this, they need to be at least a CGC 9.6 to be worth grading; raw copies get hardly anything, if they were 7.0s I would have ran them but these beauties have to stay.
I was listing a lot of Heart Throbs and on the back of issue #71, there was this beautiful ad for DC’s Romance Comics line. Heart Throbs, Girls’ Romances, Falling in Love, Girls’ Love and Secret Hearts are all featured. Young Love and Young Romances would soon be resurrected to add to the selection. DC had the romance segment locked and loaded just before the Marvel Revolution began.
A couple of years ago we had a buying event at our shop in Hamilton; people brought in all sorts of collectibles, most of it junk. One guy did come in with a few vintage hairband rock tour t-shirts from the late 80s and early 90s. I didn’t know anything about them but our resident expert Jay told me there was a huge market for these old rock tour t-shirts. He said the old Wrestlemania tour t-shirts from the 80s were huge as well, hundreds of dollars each and some a lot more. So when I saw this ad in the back of a Night Rider #6 from Marvel I couldn’t help but wonder if there is a healthy vintage market for these original Marvel t-shirts. Does anybody know? Do they come up for sale? The authentic ones from these ads? I would imagine these were worn till they wore out; I would have back in the day if I had one, they look great.
I’m going to be showing my ignorance again but last night we sold a nice raw copy of Avengers #48 for some good money. Avengers #48 features the first new Black Knight. Black Knight first appeared in a 1950s Atlas comic and the Avengers was some sort of reintroduction. So I’m leafing through and counting the pages of a Tales of Suspense #59 when I see this splash page featuring the Black Knight. This is obviously not a reprint so why doesn’t this copy that came out almost 4 years before Avengers #48 get the Black Knight accolades?
Last night we had some great results on our weekly internationalcollectiblesexchange eBay auctions, raw lots continue to do very well though I did think that our lot of the DC Annuals went a little bit cheap. Superman Annual #1 and Batman Annual #1 together in very presentable shape went for $119.50, a bargain I thought.
Maybe someone who knows Ebay can fill you in on t-shirt collectibility. I’m pretty sure I had a spider-man SWEAT shirt, very close to the same image. I for sure had one of the six-foot Spider-Man posters on the back of my door for years.
I think Marvel first offered sweats and ti-shirts back when they began the MMMS in 1965. But I have no idea what happened to mine. These you captured here are later renditions, the ad notes 1975. One of the ex-Marvel production people, I can’t remember his name now, got into merchandise and eventually was licensing quite a bit of stuff around this time and in the early 1980s. It may have started by using Marvel’s address but it eventully was spun off and he even did a impressive newsprint catalog of just Marvel merchandise.
The ti-shirts here, I think these look cheesy with the colored collar and arm bands. In 1975 I was graduating from college and moving myself, my best friend who was my one and only employee up until then, my fledgling business and my new wife to Grass Valley from San Jose. These would not have been appealing to me, then or now, Now maybe The Spirit, or Captain Marvel (I have a nice one of him with Billy Batson that I always get comments on, It’s getting threadbare, though.
Ok, one more t-shirt aside. On the cover of one my very earliest catalogs is a kid with a wagon and a Captain Marvel t-shirt. People used to assume it was me, but I was only born in 1952 when CM was on his way out. The photo was probably from 1950 or so, and it’s my buddy Al Davoren, who did the cover and mailing label and even section artwork for the first few years of my catalogs. Al was also a co-editor of our fanzine Promethean Enterprises and he’s still doing good, he just this week sent me a spoofy drawing of Captain Marvel, so things have come full cirlce, it seem like.
Glad you found that Romance ad. Wonderful work, even if some of your readers might not like the subject matter. That has to be by the legendary Ira Schnapp, who has come up in this column before. He also designed the Superman logo.
I always have to look up his name, so this time when I did I found this, “My Favorite DC House Ads” from pro comics writer Paul Kupperberg. Check it out, it’s cool:
https://13thdimension.com/paul-kupperberg-my-13-favorite-dc-house-ads-lettered-by-ira-schnapp/
On specific Comic T-shirts my knowledge is less than Walt’s, it is THAT low…however…
Being a teenager in the late eighties was an amazing experience and skateboarding had a profound impact on my development, one of the many aspects to it was honing my aesthetic taste and those skateboard graphics were very powerful; today skateboards are hugely collectable, not in the millions of dollars like our top end stuff but the average is a lot higher, you’re not getting a deck from the 80’s for less then $200us and $1000 is very easily achieved…anyway…
the original t-shirts from that period are highly collectible, $500us for a Powell Peralta t-shirt is a very realistic figure and a few of the professionals that I spoke to (whilst I collected the stickers of that brand and period) had had Japanese collectors approach them buy their team-only jackets for $10,000.
So yes, there can definitely be good money for vintage clothes that are linked to nostalgia.
Love the Porky Pig books Walt and that romance house ad is perhaps the best Ive ever seen.
Bud, your link to My Favorite DC House Ads, was just as exciting as buying a shiny new marvel book in the sixties. Thank you
Yes thanks a lot Bud! Just when I want to get rid of my comics… I now want that Teen Titans Christmas issue!!
You are welcome, guys. I love Paul Kupperber’s story about the cover of Teen Titans #13, here it is:
“Without doubt, one of my Top 10 (13?) favorite single issues of a comic book from the 1960s. It’s got a fun, hammy script by Bob Haney, exquisite art by Nick Cardy (he told me he drew it as his last “screw you” job for DC so they would see what they were losing after he was refused a modest page rate raise; seeing the work, Carmine Infantino got Cardy his raise)…And not only did Schnapp design and letter this memorable ad, but he also lettered the cover.
Man, I love those old DC ads and issues. The Annuals are beautiful and they offered so many great stories from past eras. The 100 pagers were even moreso with even more room to offer older stories. I look for showcase videos on YouTube but have a real peeve with what I’ve been finding.
People: stop using the terms ‘grail’ and ‘holy grail’ to describe comics a couple of months old and that are so plentiful, that every comic shop probably has several dozen of them for sale. There are so many ‘grail’ videos with people yakking about stuff from the past few months that they sent to CGC for grading. No wonder there’s a 6 month backup.
I would love to see golden and rare silver comic videos that feature really great items, and not those ‘hoarder videos’, where they go into an abandoned house and find stuff that has not been cared for.