The moment that almost ended the Batman! Not a hoax!

Where’s MY parade? Where’s MY party? Where’s MY 75th anniversary? Sheesh! None of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for me! But you don’t see any 3-d holographic wrap-around foil covers with MY mug on them! You don’t see any $699 maquette statue with HARLEY QUINN rubbing her tatas on me! How about a little slice of the 75th anniversary for me? YOU GUYS OWE ME!!!

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Saakel’s Satire

The Whites were not only about the cliffhanger dramatics of superheroes, spies, and soldiers taking on the Axis. Satirical strips like Steele’s Private Stuff and Saakel’s Spike and Mike, both in Joke Comics, were just plain tongue-in-cheek fun.

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I am Starlord!

Every time there is a new release of a comic book movie, I help out Big B Comics in Barrie at our local theatre with a table. We have a display set up helping promote the store, and we give away comics and prizes before each screening. The last couple times Dee (Stephanie) and I dress up in cosplay and have fun with the crowds. Seven days before the movie's release we decided we would try to come up with a Guardian's themed costume. Time would be tight, but we scrambled to find the materials it would take to put it all together.

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Black and White and Bronze

When Marvel stepped into the B&W magazine business in the early '70s it was a bold experiment. There were a few fits and starts along the way with well over two years between Savage Tales number 1 and 2. But by the time The Savage Sword of Conan came about the market seemed to get a lot of the distribution problems and scheduling pretty well done right.

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News From Comic Con

Well, another year and another San Diego Comic Con has come and gone. With it brought a deluge of announcements on new projects, movies, tv shows, video games, and comic books. Some of the announcements were pretty obvious, and others caught me by surprise. Here, in no particular order, are the things that I was excited to hear about.

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TAS: Masks, Calories, and Beavers

In late 1944, Steele seemed to have come up with the idea of doing cut-out masks of a few of the lead Bell characters on the inside covers of some of the Bell Features books. We modern collectors look back somewhat aghast on this because, just like Bell’s placement of cut-out coupons in similar locations, it must have led to wanton disfigurement of many of these books, but such were the ways of the world back then towards something that was seen as ultimately disposable and easily remaindered. Steele signed these "fathead" portraits with his shortened monogram "TAS."

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Review | Mike Mignola’s Hellboy In Hell and Other Stories Artist’s Edition

Well designed and produced, Mike Mignola's Hellboy In Hell And Other Stories Artist's Edition has a major flaw. I gleefully opened my copy, enjoying each page as I flipped through the table of contents and indicia beautifully designed by Randy Dahlk. I landed on the first page of Hellboy In Hell and noticed there was not text. Then I flipped to the next page and saw no text. Skimmed the full 110 pages of Hellboy In Hell story and there is no text.

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Undervalued Spotlight #207

Legends #3, DC Comics, January 1987. The Suicide Squad made its first appearance back in September 1959 in Brave and the Bold #25. BB #25 is a great comic to own and very undervalued at its 9.2 guide value of $1,800. The book is a tough find though, it rarely comes up for auction so this week, rather than send you out on a mission impossible, I thought I’d lighten it up and send you after a book with potentially way more upside, at the very least it will be much easier, much more fun and much much cheaper to hunt down.

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Canada’s Own Comics: a WECA database

Today is the launch day of our modest attempt to set up an online database of Canadian comic books from the WECA period (1941-46), better known to collectors as The Canadian Whites, at canadasowncomics.com. We were approached early on in our project to avoid the difficulty of creating an online index of these comics from scratch and simply upload our information to the Grand Comics Database. However, we felt it of utmost importance that the first real indexing of these comics be based in Canada. I’m sure that the information we put up there (and remember that this is the first real setting down of comprehensive data about a unique, rare, and arcane set of comic books) will often have holes and need amendment and tweaking, but this first effort is important. I’m sure that a lot of our information will be mined by sites such as the Grand Comics Database, I just hope that whoever ends up using our findings as published material will link back to our site or, at least, credit their find appropriately.

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