*DC: Headlining our Christmas 1940s style updates are three issues of Batman from 1945, 1946 & 1948, all with delightful Christmas covers and stories to match. All from the wonderful Midas Collection.
PICTURED:
BATMAN #27 Apparent VG £350 Splendid Jack Burnley cover. The interior art is shared between Burnley and Jerry Robinson on the three main Batman stories and the Adventures of Alfred short. Stories by Don C Cameron & Joe Samachson. Lead story is The Penguin’s Apprentice, featuring the wily old bird training up a newcomer. The second story involves Batman & Robin in a mystery within the Explorer’s Club. And in the third story, Batman attempts to convince a very young “Scrooge” of the true meaning of Christmas. This is a decent solid copy with an unmarked and good colour cover. A central vertical crease can only really be seen on the inside front cover; inside covers are a little tanned. The staples are pulled a little, but still securely attached at spine and centrefold. There is a small 2 cm upper spine split. We have awarded an ‘Apparent’ grade because we believe this copy may have been trimmed slightly at bottom and right edges. The finishing on Golden Age comics was notoriously inconsistent, and it’s always difficult to be sure, but by comparing this with contemporary copies and images of this issue online, we think that trimming is probable and have priced this issue to take account of that. None of the content is affected in any way. 

BATMAN #33 VG/FN £575 Great cover by Dick Sprang. Interior art all by Win Mortimer on Batman stories. Lead story by Bill Finger; other writers unknown. Lead story involves the Penguin and mobsters. Second batman story features crooks and earthquake prediction. Third story is the Christmas one, The Search For Santa Claus, which of course involves nefarious deeds. This is a really nice mid-grade copy with a white background cover which is well preserved and unmarked; there is a shallow and faint crease of about 7 cm across the Christmas tree, which does not break colour. The spine is solid with the staples secure there and at centre. Beautiful white to off-white pages. High resolution images are available on request.

BATMAN #45 Apparent FA+ £125 Charming cover by Win Mortimer. Interior art on Batman stories by Charles Paris. Stories by Bill Woolfolk & Bill Finger. The lead Batman story stars Catwoman in The Lady Rogues. The Christmas story is second, featuring Bruce Wayne, a double and many seasonal mishaps. Third story features an arsonist villain called the Match. This low grade copy has a taped spine and is restapled; there is a 6 cm vertical tear just in from the top of the spine along the taped edge; a similar 2 cm tear is up from the bottom edge. Cover is an okay image, with a faint dust shadow along the top edge. Small corner off bottom right. Reasonable off-white page quality. We have awarded an ‘Apparent’ grade because we believe this copy may have been trimmed slightly at right edge. The finishing on Golden Age comics was notoriously inconsistent, and it’s always difficult to be sure, but by comparing this with contemporary copies and images of this issue online, we think that trimming is probable and have priced this issue to take account of that. None of the content is affected in any way.

*Marvel: There are two great lines in Spider-Man history. The first – ‘with great power there must also come — great responsibility!’ was not original to Stan Lee, but as far as we know the second – ‘Face it tiger, you just hit the jackpot!’ is entirely Stan’s own work. Well, we’re not offering you the first this update (fresh out of Amazing Fantasy #15 for now), but we do have the second in the shape of Amazing Spider-man #42. In this issue, the astronaut offspring of J Jonah Jameson gained super-powers and posed a threat to Spider-Man… but let’s be honest, who really cares? Because the Big Deal this time was the revelation, finally, of Mary Jane Watson, the mysterious lady who’d been hovering in the odd panel, her face always obscured, for several previous issues! When Stan Lee and John Romita finally showed us the ‘Full MJ’, it was like all Peter’s Christmasses came at once, with one of the most famous intro lines in the history of comics! This is a superior cents copy (there was a UK dock strike on at the time, and for two months, no Marvels were imported through normal channels), with a strong reflective colour cover, tight, firm staples and supple white to off-white pages. Small amounts of edge wear and corner blunting, with tiny micro-creases across top and bottom right corners which break colour. 
PICTURED: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #42 FN/VF £175

*Marvel: Marvel’s ‘other’ Kung Fu phenomenon, Iron Fist, enjoyed an upswing in quality when taken over by the then-team supreme of the X-Men, Chris Claremont and John Byrne. The final issue of Iron Fist’s first run guest-starred the ‘classic’ Uncanny X-Men, in a highly commercial move which everyone expected! This is a lovely high grade copy with great colour and gloss, flat and tight with great staples and supple white to off-white pages. Only the tiniest stress marks at spine prevent a NM or higher grade. This is an outstanding copy from an original owner collection, bought new in 1977 on a New York newsstand, and carefully preserved ever since.
PICTURED: IRON FIST #15 VF/NM £75

*Miscellaneous 1940-1959: This is a strange one from the Bute Collection. Back in 1941, 50 cents would have bought this mammoth tome. Its 324 pages contained various Fawcett comics published in their entirety minus covers. It was in fact the first of 7 such seasonal giants published in the 1940s. The contents comprise New Captain Marvel Adventures #3, Bulletman #2, Whiz Comics #21, Wow Comics #3 and Master Comics #18, all from 1941, so you get Captain Marvel, Spy Smasher, Mr Scarlet, Minuteman, Bulletman & Bulletgirl and loads of other heroes and villains including Sivana and Hitler. Originally thought to be unsold rebound copies, the current thinking is that they were extra copies from the original print runs set aside specifically for these festive treats. This is a decent copy with strong binding and an intact spine. Surplus glue can be seen along the inside spines front and back, but all of the few copies we have seen online appear to be the same. The cover has bright, vivid colours and the back cover has a great ad for Whiz Comics in full colour featuring Captain Nazi. Page quality is pretty good; one or two taped tears and/or missing corner margins, but nothing horrible. You probably won’t get many chances to pick up this ‘Giant Xmas Gift For Every Boy And Girl’! High resolution images are available on request.
PICTURED: XMAS COMICS #1 VG £800

*Romance: Also from the Midas Collection this week, three issues of Heart Throbs from 1957-59, the long-running DC title that started as a Quality publication, but was absorbed by DC in the 1950s. The series lasted until 1972. Always a high quality of art on DC romance titles, with Sekowsky, Romita, Drucker, Sachs, Roth and many others featured in these issues. I particularly like the heart symbol in the DC logo on these.
PICTURED: HEART THROBS
#49 VG+ £19
#51 GD/VG £13
#49 VG £17

*Humour Comics: Our Christmas 1940s celebration concludes with two Christmas issues of the Dandy from 1947 & 1948. ‘All your pals are here to wish you – A Merry Christmas in this issue’: Desperate Dan, Black Bob, Julius Sneezer, Raggy Muffin, Danny Longlegs and many more beneath splendid Korky the Cat Christmas covers. Both issues are flat and clean copies without significant condition problems; 1947’s #359 has a small horizontal tear right edge margin; 1948’s #385 has a slightly rough right edge.
PICTURED: DANDY
#359 1947 GD £50
#385 1948 GD £50

*Crime, Spies & Sleaze: Josephine Tey (real name Elizabeth MacKintosh) was perhaps the last of the great Queens of Crime, somewhat bridging the gap between the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and the modern crime writer, as she touched on many subjects which were to feature more in the works of those who followed her. Tey wrote just eight crime/mystery novels, six of them featuring her main protagonist Inspector Alan Grant. She had a considerable output of other novels and short stories, stage, television and radio plays and poetry in her relatively short life (she died at 55 in 1952). She was a person of extreme privacy.  Her novel The Daughter of Time (featured here), a detective work wherein Grant in the modern day investigates the death of the Princes in the Tower, was chosen by the Crime Writers’ Association in 1990 as the greatest crime novel of all time. The Franchise Affair, also featured here, was 11th on the same list. Our third selection, Miss Pym Disposes, a non-Grant mystery set in a girls’ school, is a personal favourite. 
PICTURED: ALL BY JOSEPHINE TEY
THE DAUGHTER OF TIME Penguin 1961 6th UK PB VG £4
THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR Penguin 1954 2nd UK PB GD/VG £4
MISS PYM DISPOSES Pan 1964 3rd UK PB VG £4

*DC: An early Superman gem from the Midas Collection: #9 from 1941. Beneath a dynamic cover by Fred Ray with Superman bursting through it, there’s a beautiful splash page by Paul Cassidy and four Superman stories also illustrated by Cassidy (who ghosted on art for Joe Shuster) of adventure, mystery, crime and subterfuge. Plus loads of feature pages. This copy has seen better days. The cover is totally detached. There is a thumbnail-sized chunk out of the top of the spine, a ragged 4 cm strip off top cover and a small chip out of right edge. Several of the centre wraps are off the staples. The front and back covers look as if they’ve had pencil scribbling over them at some stage in their history, which has subsequently been erased (mostly successfully), but it has left the front cover a little less than fresh. There is also what looks like a graphite stain around the top right edge of the border on the splash page. Other than that the pages are mostly clean and off-white. Although the cover’s a bit of a wreck, internally, it’s a clear and mostly undamaged read. And hey! – it’s Superman #9!
PICTURED: SUPERMAN #9 FA £430

*Marvel: After a little artistic floundering in his early issues, the Sightless Swashbuckler lucked out when the superlative Wally Wood took over illustrating his adventures. This is probably the finest Wood issue, marked not only by the premiere of the red Daredevil costume, (replacing his original outfit, which actually looked like it was designed by a blind man…) but also by a genuinely gripping battle in which Daredevil, overpowered by the vastly superior might of the Sub-Mariner, shows such courage and determination that even Namor’s scaly heart is moved to compassion. This lower-graded copy has much creasing at the corners and edges, all breaking colour, and one or two which intrude on to the cover, but do not spoil the main image. The spine is solid and the staples firm, except that the lower staple is detached at the centrefold. Pages are a supple off-white. MMMS Wants You box featured on cover.
PICTURED: DAREDEVIL #7 GD/VG £135

*Marvel: It took a couple of years, but with 1978’s Marvel Team-Up #65 & #66, Captain Britain was firmly integrated into the Marvel Universe ‘proper’, teaming up with Spider-Man as both heroes were captured by the villainous Arcade, master of deadly amusements, who made his debut in the second part of this two-parter. By the X-citing team of Claremont & Byrne.
PICTURED: MARVEL TEAM-UP
#65 VF+ £45 Lovely clean glossy copy with just a couple of stress marks at the spine.
#66 VF+ £22 Lovely clean glossy copy with just a small dink at base of spine.

*IW/Super: We continue with our series of updates from that most esoteric publisher IW/Super. IW Publications was a short-lived comic book publisher in the late 1950s and early 1960s, named for the company’s owner Israel Waldman. Comics were published under both the IW and Super imprints and were notable for publishing unauthorised Golden Age reprints of other company’s properties. Usually these companies were out of business, but not always. Basically, it seemed to be whatever they could get their hands on that determined the esoteric nature of their output. Thus you get super-heroes, war, romance, western, funny animals, crime, horror, science fiction and just about every genre within their pages. Full details of what was reprinted in what are listed in our website catalogue. NB usually with newly-drawn covers. Over the next few months, we’ll be presenting a series of issues from this publisher; this week, all three issues of Mystery Tales, which reprint three different pre-code horror issues from various publishers. They’re numbered #16-18 (we told you that the IW numbering system was esoteric, right?)
IN THIS UPDATE: MYSTERY TALES ALL SOLD
#16 FN+ £17.50 (PICTURED) Reprints Tales Of Horror #2 (Toby 1952). New cover by Ross Andru. Art by Fass, Dresser, Hollingsworth & Elkin.
#17 VG/FN £12.25 Reprints Eerie #14 (Avon 1951). New cover by Ross Andru. Art by Norman Nodel.
#18 VG £10 Reprints Strange Terrors (St John 1952) New cover by Ross Andru. Art by Kubert, Nicholas, Tuska, Sultan.

*Miscellaneous 1960 Onwards: Published in 1993, Alan Moore’s 1963 is a six issue series ‘homage’ to the fledgling days of the Marvel Universe, where the protagonists bear uncanny resemblances to Marvel’s flagship characters. Art by some of Moore’s most frequent collaborators, including Veitch, Bissette & Gibbons. The complete set is available, averaging VF/NM condition.
1963 Complete set of 6 £25 SOLD
#1 MYSTERY INCORPORATED VF (PICTURED)
#2 THE FURY NM 
#3 TALES OF THE UNCANNY NM
#4 TALES FROM BEYOND NM
#5 HORUS LORD OF LIGHT VF
#6 THE TOMORROW SYNDICATE NM

*Alan Class Reprints: Two of Alan’s lesser known short run titles are Tales Of The Underworld and Weird Planets. The former reprints Charlton crime stories (with plenty of recurring characters and features), the latter the type of fantasy and science fiction common to many of Alan’s longer running titles, with plenty of Ditko and Kirby featured. A small selection from both titles new in this week as follows:
IN THIS UPDATE: ALL SOLD
TALES OF THE UNDERWORLD
#3 VG £10 (PICTURED)
#9 VG £10
WEIRD PLANETS
#9 GD/VG £5
#10 VG £6
#16 VG £5.50 (PICTURED)

*Crime, Spies & Sleaze: Hard Case Crime brings you the best in hardboiled crime fiction, ranging from lost noir masterpieces to new novels by today’s most powerful writers, featuring stunning original cover art in the grand pulp style. Three examples this week, from famed science fiction author Robert Silverberg, master of the genre Mickey Spillane and a collaboration by Spillane and modern crime writer Max Allan Collins, author of Road To Perdition and creator of private eye Ms Tree.
PICTURED: ALL SOLD
ROBERT SILVERBERG: BLOOD ON THE MINK Hard Case Crime 2012 1st UK PB VG £4
MICKEY SPILLANE: DEAD STREET Hard Case Crime 2007 1st UK PB VF £6
MICKEY SPILLANE & MAX ALLAN COLLINS: THE CONSUMMATA Hard Case Crime 2011 1st UK PB FN £5

It’s never too early to plan and do your Christmas shopping. Here’s a list of relevant dates for our trading during the festive period.

Saturday 14th December: Last day for orders for pre-Christmas delivery. You need to place your order no later than 4 pm. Orders placed after this deadline will not be posted until the New Year. This is also the day we shall be issuing our last Newsletter before Christmas.
Tuesday 17th December: Last posting before Christmas for all orders placed by 4 pm on Saturday 14th and paid for by 4 pm on Monday 16th December.
Saturday 4th January 2025: Newsletter resumes. All orders placed after 4 pm on 14th December (up to 4 pm on 4th Jan) will be filled this weekend and bills issued on 5th Jan.
Wednesday 8th January 2025: Posting for all paid orders outstanding.

*DC: Also from the Midas Collection, four issues of Batman from 1959, #125-128, right up to the time of UK distribution, which is as far as the Midas Collection goes. By this time, Batman had gone truly interplanetary, with aliens and adventures on other worlds being prominent, as well as appearances from members of the extended Batman family, such as Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, Batwoman and Ace, the Bat-Hound. And there was always room for the Joker…
PICTURED: BATMAN
#125 FA/GD £37 Ace and Batwoman. Cover and centrefold detached, upper spine split. SOLD
#126 FA/GD £37 Batwoman cover. Centrefold detached with damage to central page edges.
#127 GD- £43 Batman Vs Thor (a few years before Marvel!). Joker story; Superman app. Worn spine and edges.
#128 VG/FN £120 Tight, flat copy with nice colour and gloss. Just minor corner blunting and very slight wear.

*DC: Seven fairly low grade issues of the Flash this week between #131 & #210. A lorra reading for relatively little.
IN THIS UPDATE: FLASH ALL SOLD
#131 FA+ p £8.50 Green Lantern crossover. Small cover name and tape inside.
#171 GD p £5.25
#194 GD- p £2.75
#195 GD p £3.25
#199 GD+ p £4
#205 GD p £4.50 Giant; spine roll
#210 GD/VG p £4.75

*Marvel: Three cracking issues of the Avengers from a great period this week in the Good Doctor Collection release. In #73, the Black Panther goes solo up against the Sons of the Serpent; in #79, our avenging chums encounter the Lethal Legion (see the cover – great Buscema teeth on the villains); and #85 features the debut of the Squadron Supreme.
PICTURED: AVENGERS
#73 VF+ £50 Great cover colour and gloss; white to off-white pages, tight, firm staples. Minimal wear with a couple of tiny stress marks at the spine which do not break colour.
#79 VF- £45 Great cover colour and gloss; near white pages, tight, firm staples. Minimal wear with a few stress marks at spine which do not break colour; tiny dink top spine.
#85 FN p £35 Pence stamped. A few crease marks at spine and on cover, some edge wear. Faint central vertical crease. Nothing colour breaking. Nice supple pages; firm, tight staples.

*Marvel: From 1996, another complete four issue mini-series of Venom: The Hunger. This is the one where everyone’s favourite cuddly symbiote gets hungry – watch your brain! All in pristine NM condition. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like.
PICTURED: VENOM: THE HUNGER #1; Complete Set #1-4 All NM £20 SOLD

*Humour Comics: Continuing our policy of providing more information for Beano and Dandy, we have a small batch of Beano in this week from 1952, 1954 & 1955. No strip debuts, flyers or special issues (we’ve checked), just good clean fun and adventure! We’ve now also marked which years of Beano and Dandy in our catalogue have been checked and overhauled where necessary with new and enhanced information.
PICTURED: BEANO #669 (1955) VG/FN £13.50 Big Eggo guests on cover

*Crime, Spies & Sleaze: We’re continuing to introduce the new layout for our books categories, with an image for each book. This week, we return to our Crime, Spies & Sleaze Category for the famous and long-running Sexton Blake Library. Often dubbed ‘the poor man Sherlock Holmes’, there’s still no doubting the popularity of Sexton Blake, who has probably had far more fiction written of him than the world’s greatest detective. 11 issues featured this week. These are picture library sized, but mainly text. The series ran from 1915 to 1968, and our stock dates from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, following the 1956 revamp by W Howard Baker when the covers took on a more gangster/sleazy mode and were drawn by notable artists such as David Wright. Written by a ‘harem’ of notable writers including Wilfred McNeilly, W Howard Baker, Michael Moorcock (one of many moonlighting as house name Desmond Reid), Peter Saxon and Jack Trevor Story, the longevity of the series is testament to the quality of the plotting and writing. And a factoid: one of Sexton Blake’s arch-enemies was Zenith the Albino – who is widely acknowledged to have inspired Moorcock’s morose hero Elric.

PICTURED: SEXTON BLAKE LIBRARY ALL SOLD
#356: BY WHOSE HAND?: REX HARDINGE Amalgamated 1950s VG £7
#359: FRIGHTENED LADY: HOWARD BAKER Amalgamated 1950s GD/VG £6
#441: A COLD NIGHT FOR MURDER: MARTIN THOMAS Fleetway 1959 FA £3
#442: GUILTY PARTY: REX DOLPHIN Fleetway 1959 GD £5
#444: DESERT INTRIGUE: JAMES STAGG Fleetway 1960 GD/VG £6
#448: BRED TO KILL: MARTIN THOMAS Fleetway 1960 GD £5
#459: DATE WITH DANGER: MARTIN THOMAS Fleetway 1960 GD/VG £6
#466: DEAD MAN’S DESTINY: MARTIN THOMAS Fleetway 1960 GD/VG £6
#467: THE DEVIL TO PAY: REX DOLPHIN Fleetway 1961 GD/VG £6
#468: THIEF OF CLUBS: GILBERT JOHNS Fleetway 1961 VG £7
#488: BULLETS ARE TRUMPS: DESMOND REID Fleetway 1961 FA/GD £4

*Mad Books: This week, reinforcements for our Mad Books category, celebrating those fondly remembered paperback books featuring the best of Mad. Wit, sarcasm, parody and irony never go out of style. Four volumes new in as follows (NB condition notes in our catalogue):
PICTURED: ALL SOLD
THE BEDSIDE MAD Signet 25th US PB VG £4
HISTORY GONE MAD Warner 1977 1st US PB GD/VG £4
A MAD LOOK AT THE 60’S Warner 1991 2nd US PB VG £4
THE POCKET MAD Warner 1974 1st US PB VG £4

*DC: Also from the Midas Collection, a war time issue of Batman, #15 from 1943, with the Caped Crusader firing a machine gun on the Jack Burnley cover, where the blurb urges: ‘Keep those bullets flying! Keep on buying War Bonds and Stamps!’ Four Batman stories inside, the lead with Catwoman (in a new costume), where the ambiguity of her relationship with Bruce Wayne is further explored. There’s also a gangster story where a criminal boss decides that he will use Batman’s methods against him and adopts a youngster to aid him. Thirdly there’s a war story which postulates different futures after the war, and a Christmas story where Batman & Robin play Santa for the loneliest men in the world. Cracking content by writers Jack Schiff, Don C Cameron and Bill Finger, artists Bob Kane, Jack Burnley and Jerry Robinson. This is a low grade copy. The cover is detached, with fingernail-size holes at both staples. There are cover tears at right edge, repaired by tape on the inside front cover. There are also small chips out along the right edge and a thumbnail chip out bottom edge. Four score lines vertically down the cover, with dust shadows at top left edge and bottom right, and a small stain on Batman’s cloak. Superficially, it looks like the top edge is trimmed, since the date and DC logo look clipped, but there is a white line along the bottom edge that suggests the cover was misaligned and it compares favourably with contemporary copies length-wise, so we don’t think any trimming has taken place. Inside the staples are firm at the spine, but off at the centrefold. Page quality isn’t too bad – off-white to cream with very slight tanning to some edges. At least all this makes this seminal issue relatively affordable!
PICTURED: BATMAN #15 FA £400 SOLD

*Marvel: The implacable robotic Sentinels, nemeses of the X-Men, have loomed large in the history of Marvel’s Mutant Heroes, making multiple appearances, each more fearsome than the last. The creations of a man determined to expunge the mutant genome from humanity, they emphasise the X-Men’s ‘otherness’, which is why they resonate so strongly with the readership. Here, we are pleased to present the first two appearances of the Sentinels in X-Men #14 and #15; the latter also includes the origin of the Beast. 
PICTURED: X-MEN
#14 VG/FN £225 A Marvel Pop Art Production. 1st Sentinels. Decent pence-printed copy with good cover colour. There is some handling and edge wear and minor creasing with faint colour breaks (but nothing that spoils the cover image), staples are attached and okay, pages are a supple white to off-white. SOLD
#15 VG/FN £85 2nd Sentinels; origin Beast. Decent pence-printed copy with strong cover colour. There is some handling and edge wear and short, minor creasing with faint colour breaks; stress marks at upper staple break colour. Staples are tight and firm at spine and centrefold, pages are a supple white to off-white. 

*Marvel: Frank Miller, later of Dark Knight Returns and Sin City fame, made his name on the sightless swashbuckler Daredevil, starting in 1979. His stories centred mostly on DD himself of course, plus the menaces of the Kingpin and Bullseye, and the debut and fate of DD’s lost love Elektra, whose storyline comes to a close following her showdown with Bullseye in #181. Six consecutive issues here; the Punisher appears in a couple of issues, plus, with Miller still scripting, there’s a seamless transition to Klaus Janson on pencils in this sequence.
IN THIS UPDATE: DAREDEVIL ALL SOLD
#180 VF £14 Newsstand copy
#181 VF+ £30 (PICTURED) Bullseye Vs Elektra
#182 VF £13
#183 VF £13 Punisher
#184 VF- £11.75 Punisher
#185 FN £5