*DC: Having spotlit Superman in our previous Golden Age DC Greats alert, we turn our attention this week to the Guardian of Gotham City. Batman #32 features not only a Joker story, but the origin of Robin retold (for the first time at some length), and a time-twisting tale in which our Dynamic Duo team up with the Three Musketeers! This copy is GD-; superficially nicer, but with spine splits at top and botom up to the staples marring the profile of what would otherwise be a very nice mid-grade copy. Bargainaceous at £115! We then have a brace of Detective Comics – issues #111 GD £75 and 138 VG+ £225 (invisible Joker cover and story), co-starring Batman & Robin with Air Wave, Slam Bradley, Robotman, Slam Bradley and the Boy Commandos, among various others. Finally, a lovely copy of an early World’s Finest Comics, #18 dated Summer 1945. This 100-page squarebound extravaganza stars not only Batman & Robin, but Superman, Green Arrow, Star-Spangled Kid, Zatara, the Boy Commandos and others. For its vintage, this is an extraordinarily attractive copy, with an unmarred white cover background, tight binding, and remarkably well-preserved tight interiors, with none of the rolling or sliding normally associated with glued squarebound spines. Its only flaw is that at some point in the intervening decades, the lowest 1/2″ of the spine has somehow been cleanly removed, but still, a thing of beauty; FN- at £320.
We were very saddened today to hear of the death of Brian Aldiss at the age of 92, a personal favourite of ours here at 30th Century. One of the greats of British Science Fiction, he wrote classic novels such as Hothouse and Greybeard, the epic trilogy of Helliconia, almost unrivalled in the breadth and scope of its imagination and very many others in a substantial body of work. In the 1960s, he was at the forefront of the British New Wave of Science Fiction. He also edited lots of anthologies, was an artist, wrote mainstream fiction and poetry and the seminal history of Science Fiction, The Billion Year Spree. It’s clear from the many tributes that he inspired many others not just to love the genre, but also to write Science Fiction themselves. “I don’t agree with those people who think of science fiction as some kind of prediction of the future,” he said on Desert Island Discs in 2007. “I think it’s a metaphor for the human condition.”
