Kaastor Blog

FAIRBANKS, Alaska – A longtime Alaska comic book buff is selling one of the gems in his vast collection, a rare copy of Batman No. 1 published 70 years ago.

Mike Wheat of Fairbanks has put the 1940 comic book on the auction block through Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries, where it's expected to fetch more than $40,000. Online bids already have climbed to $35,000 for the book, believed to be one of fewer than 300 still in existence.

Online bids will compete with a live auction set for Thursday.

The second and fourth Batman issues also will be part of Thursday's auction. They are expected to bring more than $5,000 combined.

Wheat, a retired city wastewater treatment plant operator, said he considers the Batman comics an investment. He said it feels like the right time to sell.

"I just decided it's time for someone else to have it," he said.

The Batman No. 1 comic book was discovered after local businessman Ron Jaeger bought an old dresser at a garage sale in the early 1970s, then kept it in storage for a few years. When Jaeger finally brought it out, he noticed one of the drawers didn't slide easily.

Three comic books and a few old issues of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner were tucked beneath the drawer and a quarter-inch piece of plywood. The haul included a copy of Batman No. 1, Superman No. 17 and an old issue of a Red Ryder Western comic.

Wheat already had a reputation as an avid comic collector in 1974, and Jaeger sold him the comic books for $300.

The auction house has handled many copies of Batman No. 1, but Wheat's copy is notable because the low humidity and cool temperatures in Fairbanks have kept the paper in excellent condition, said Barry Sandoval, director of comic auctions and operations at Heritage. Old comics were printed on cheap newsprint, but the pages in Wheat's copy remain white and crisp.

"If we got a Batman No. 1 from Texas or Louisiana, if you opened it up after 70 years the pages would start to crumble," Sandoval said.

The condition of comics is graded on a scale of one to 10. Wheat's copy has been graded a 5.5. That's a middling score for a newer comic, but impressive for a vintage copy.

"I see how most comics from that era look," Sandoval said. "Most 70-year-old comics are in pretty rough shape."

Batman No. 1 was the first solo spin-off for the character, who made his first appearance in 1939 as a character in Detective Comics No. 27. The debut includes the original appearances by two of Batman's key foes, the Joker and Catwoman.

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Online:

http://www.ha.com

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Information from: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, http://www.newsminer.com

NEW YORK — A rare copy of the first comic book featuring Superman has sold for $1 million, smashing a record set just last year.

 

The issue sold Monday morning is a 1938 edition of Action Comics No. 1, widely considered the Holy Grail of comic books. It features Superman lifting a car on its cover and originally cost 10 cents.

The transaction was conducted by the auction site ComicConnect.com. Stephen Fishler, co-owner of the site and its sister dealership, Metropolis Collectibles, orchestrated the sale.

Fishler said it transpired minutes after the issue was put on sale at around 10:30 a.m. Eastern time. He said that the seller was a "well known individual" in New York with a pedigree collection, and that the buyer was a known customer who previously bought an Action Comics No. 1 of lesser grade.

"It's considered by most people as the most important book," said John Dolmayan, a comic book enthusiast and dealer best known as the drummer for System of a Down. "It kind of ushered in the age of the superheroes."

Dolmayan, who owns Torpedo Comics, last year paid $317,000 for an Action Comics No. 1 issue for a client. Others have sold for more than $400,000, he said, but this copy fetched a much higher price because it's in better condition. It's rated an "8.0 grade," or "very fine."

Dolmayan said he didn't buy this copy but he wishes he could have.

Dear Magazine collectors. We found these great blog entries about Old Magazines we want to share with you:

Mad Magazine Collector Doug Gilford Interview

Doug Gilford, a floor-covering store owner from Gresham, Oregon, has been running his Mad Cover Site for ten years. We talked about the joy of Mad Magazine and his passion for collecting.

When did you start collecting Mad?

Gilford: As a youngster, in the mid-70s, I was introduced to Mad magazine by a babysitter. I'm not sure what triggered the obsession to have a collection. Suffice it to say, something happened in the deep recesses of my mind; that compulsive part of the collector's personality for obtaining parts of the whole. The prize of a complete collection seemed possible and had its beginnings in my early youth and lasted into my early 20s....

To read more click here...

http://ephemera.typepad.com/ephemera/2007/03/interview_with__2.html

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Vintage Magazine Collector Cliff Aliperti

Cliff Aliperti has spent his life immersed in collectibles, buying them, examining them, selling them. In today's interview, we spoke about his collection of vintage magazines and his remarkable career as a collector.

How did you become interested in old magazines?

Aliperti: I'd dealt in baseball cards/sports collectibles since the mid-1980's and there had always been a little run-off into titles like Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News, even some issues of LIFE with sports covers. When I started selling on eBayin 2000, I quickly came to find that the margins for baseball cards weren't that great. I gravitated to movie cards/collectibles which also involved selling some movie magazines. I'm a bit of an information junkie, and I love both literature and history, so suddenly, I found myself testing out magazines. General titles like Time and the Saturday Evening Post to more obscure literary titles like Paris Review and Poetry magazine, with a little bit of everything in between. By late 2006, I found the competition strengthening in movie categories on eBay and saw a lot of the more obscure stuff, which is what I liked, selling for prices higher than I was willing to pay. I upped the ante with magazine back issues then.

To read more click here...

http://ephemera.typepad.com/ephemera/2008/07/here-you-go-ive-included-some-links-mine-and-others-feel-free-to-use-them-or-not-i-hope-this-is-okay-i-began-to-get-the.html

Two months ago we had about 15,000 magazines in the database. Today we have more than doubled this number, surpassing the 32,500 mark. We are counting on the user community to add more magazine issues and are also looking for people and contributors with a more active role (such as moderating and having the ability to flag magazines as draft or released).

As stated previously, our objective is to reach the 50,000 mark by the end of the year.

The Kaastor team.

 

You may have noted how the Kaastor database has been growing lately, in particular when it comes to Pulp, Action and Western magazines. With 20K+ magazines in the database, and a couple of thousand pulp covers gracing the site, a little history is warranted...

The name "pulp" comes from the cheap wood pulp paper on which these magazines were printed. Frank A. Munsey pioneered the format in 1896 with The Argosy. Magazines printed on better paper and usually offering family-oriented content were often called "glossies" or "slicks". Titles such as Adventure and Blue Book (featured in Kaastor)  increased the exposure of the format, which really took off with Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Tarzan of the Apes."

Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines are perhaps best remembered for their lurid and exploitative stories, and for their similarly sensational cover art. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of "hero pulps"; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters such as the Shadow, Doc Savage, and the Phantom Detective.

Pulp covers, printed in color on higher-quality (slick) paper, were famous for their half-dressed damsels in distress, usually awaiting a rescuing hero. Cover art played a major part in the marketing of pulp magazines, and a number of the most successful cover artists became as popular as the authors featured on the interior pages. Among the most famous pulp artists were Frank R. Paul, Virgil Finlay, Edd Cartier, Margaret Brundage and Norman Saunders. Covers were important enough to sales that sometimes they would be designed first; authors would then be shown the cover art and asked to write a story to match.

In 1931, Street & Smith was promoting Detective Story by having stories from the magazine dramatized on a radio show. The program's narrator called himself "The Shadow" and S&S were quick to jump on this memorable name that had eclipsed the title of the magazine he was promoting. Within a few years The Shadow had started a whole rush of "hero pulps" including The Phantom Detective, Doc Savage, Nick Carter, G-8 and His Battle Aces, and The Spider. In the early Thirties, before radio really had its heyday, pulps were the dominant entertainment, like television is today.

After World War II, the demand for pulp magazines waned as a more durable cheap entertainment took hold: paperbacks. (These were often just as "pulpy" since they were being written by a lot of the same authors.) In the Fifties, television became the favored form of escapism and the surviving pulps finally ceased publication. 

Popular regular pulp fiction characters included:

• Biggles
• Big Nose Serrano
• Bran Mak Morn
• Buck Rogers
• Adam Zero
• Captain Future
• Conan the Barbarian
• Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective
• Doc Savage
• Doctor Death
• Dr. Yen Sin
• Domino Lady
• Flash Gordon
• Fu Manchu
• G-8
• Green Lama
• Hopalong Cassidy
• John Carter of Mars
• Jules de Grandin
• Ka-Zar
• Kull
• Lord Lister AKA Raffles
• Nick Carter
• Operator No. 5
• Refugee Smith
• Secret Agent X
• Sexton Blake
• Solomon Kane
• Tarzan
• The Avenger
• The Black Bat
• The Continental Op
• The Eel
• The Phantom Detective
• The Shadow
• The Spider
• Zorro

PulpFest, the venerable convention catering to fans and collectors of pulp, will be held in Columbus, Ohio from July 31-Aug. 2, 2009.  Here you can learn more about the history of the pulps and indulge yourself in the world of pulp fiction collecting.

Sources:
http://www.pulpfest.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_magazines
http://kaastor.com/pulp-action-western

Kaastor is a community-built database of magazines. Registered members are able to insert and update information about magazine categories, issues  covers.

There are two types of forms where members can enter new data:

• Categories ('MAD', 'Colliers' or 'Rolling Stone') 
• Magazines ('MAD #0110', 'Colliers 1907-04' or 'Rolling Stone #1001' )

Let's say you own an issue of Rolling Stone that currently doesn't exist in the Kaastor database. You will enter a 'new magazine' from here. Now if you want to enter an issue of a magazine and you can't even find a single issue of that magazine type in Kaastor, well, chances are we are missing the entire category and you are also welcome to create it here!

Categories require a few fields, including country or region of release (as in US, Latin America), category title and parent category. Parent categories help Kaastor organize magazines by genre. Selecting the parent category can be a tricky enterprise as it is a subjective attribute, but we hope that the self-regulating nature of the portal will correct mistakes.

When you add a new magazine you have to make sure that the category exists and only then you should fill out the rest of the data. We really welcome those pictures, but they are not a mandatory piece of the data entry process.

After adding a magazine it will become part of your draft collection available here and once a moderator approves that issue, it will become part of your submitted items list available here

What's in it for me?

Once you added a new magazine and category, those contributions will engross your personal lists (magazine and category submissions and drafts). We hope you take some pride in that, but we also think there should be an additional reward for contributing to this process. A percentage of the commissions that Kaastor earns on any future sales of a particular magazine will go to the member that submitted it. In a way, contributing members become stakeholders. This is a bold move and differs entirely from the philosophy of the few community-built portals for collectors that exist out there.
Also, keep in mind that if you are seller, you can only list an item for sale if it already exists in the database (and has been approved by a moderator).

The process

As always in life, there are certain procedures to follow, but this one is very simple:

   1. Create a user account here if you don't have one
   2. Add a new magazine from here
   3. Add a new category from here
   4. The "Update" links at the right hand side of a magazine or category allow you to update those
   5. As soon as you add a magazine it can be viewed by any member, but they will only be accessible for the general public once the magazine has been published (approved by a moderator).

We are a small but growing community, starting to build the de-facto online archive of magazines and covers. We are pulling information from multiple sources and trying to make sure the information for each magazine is accurate. Obviously this is just a start, but we are counting on the user community to add more magazine issues. We are currently at more than 15,000 issues.
Our objective is to reach 50,000 by the end of the year.


If you want to be part of this, simply log on, and add magazine issues that comprise your collection but cannot find in the Kaastor database.


Enjoy!

Welcome to the first online community-built database of Magazines.
Our mission is to build the largest magazine archive in the world.

What Is Kaastor?

Picture a giant online archive of magazines. Kaastor is the portal that enables this vision. We are a community-built database with information on magazines, covers, release dates and other interesting magazine information.

We do not pretend to be a thorough database (for starters we don't publish the actual contents of magazines), but to reach a better state of completeness we welcome feedback on additional fields and pieces of information that should be tracked. As members submit new issues of magazines to the database we get closer to the ultimate goal of being the de-facto internet magazine archive.

What's in it for me?

Kaastor is aimed at magazine lovers and collectors. The database contents and all the Kaastor features are for you to use. We only charge sellers a very small fee for magazines they sell, which helps us improve the site. Other than that, everything is free.

Here are some of the things you can do:

• Manage your collection online
• Create a wantlist of magazines
• Communicate with other members
• Participate in the User Forum
• Buy and Sell magazines
• Figure out what your collection is worth, based on magazine statistics

Also, if you submit a magazine that does not exist in the database, in the future you may get something in return. Every time that magazine sells in the marketplace, you get a percentage of the sellers fee.

Does Kaastor sell magazines?

 We are not an online store, although you can buy magazines from sellers that offer them here. Check out the marketplace section, which has a nice search engine.

What does Kaastor mean?

Nothing.