The Leader, tucked away in his mysterious Lair, always derives great amusement from his immense collection of various popular culture collectibles. But his grasping nature is such that he is never satisfied with what he has. He must have more so he leaves no stone unturned in his endless quest to find more art treasures and cultural artifacts. Below is a list of some of the acquisitions he has made over the last several months.
Amazing Adult Fantasy #9
One of my favorite genres of comic books is the Pre-Marvels which is a period in Marvel’s history from 1958 – 1963 where they produced a large number of science fiction and fantasy stories in a few titles like Strange Tales, Journey Into Mystery and a few others. My favorite Pre-Marvel title was Amazing Adult Fantasy because all of the stories were drawn by Steve Ditko. One of the better stories in that title was “The Terror Of Tim Boo Ba” in issue #9. I wanted a cover reproduction of that issue but who was to do it? I didn’t want some current day artist to meddle with the halcyon luster of the bygone Pre-Marvels. I wanted a Marvel artist who came from the correct time period. Nearly all those artists are dead now but there is still one left who is accessible since he appears at comic book conventions. That man is Vic Carrabotta.
Vic didn’t draw any science fiction or fantasy Pre-Marvel stories but he was working at Marvel in the early 1960s doing some art for their Western comic books. But, but better yet Vic had worked at Marvel in the 1950s when Marvel was known as Atlas. He did draw horror and science fiction stories for the Atlas titles. I like the Atlas stories almost as much as the Pre-Marvel stories so Vic was the man for me. I finally pinned him down at the South Carolina Comic Con in Greenville in 2019 where I paid him to render me this lovely cover reproduction to Amazing Adult Fantasy #9 showing Tim Boo Ba in all his fearsome glory. Just recently I cobbled together enough money to have it framed by my usual guy Bill Tollis of Ocean Art. Bill found this orange metal frame which comes close to matching Tim Boo Ba’s color and skin texture.
Amazing Fantasy #15 Shadow Box
In 2012 the word was out that an anonymous donor had given to the Library of Congress all of the original art by Steve Ditko for the 1962 Marvel comic book Amazing Fantasy #15. The lead story in that comic was the first appearance of Spider-Man. So in 2012 I drove to Washington D.C. to see the original art to this first Spidey story. I looked over each page carefully and wrote down Stan Lee’s pencil margin notes since they were too faint to reproduce well in a photograph. The Librarians downloaded for me all their high resolution digital files for the pages to the Spidey story onto my USB device. So later I made up a webpage about my trip and included all the pages showing Stan Lee’s margin notes and my own comments. I also used the files from my USB device to have a nice dye sublimated shirt made which always draws favorable comments at the comic book shows I wear it to.
My latest project was to have made the shadow box shown above. I took the splash page to the first Spider-Man story still saved on my USB device to a local digital printing shop and they transferred the image onto a sheet of transparent film which could be lit from behind. Then I took this film to my regular framing expert Bill Tollis of Ocean Art and he mounted the film inside a frame thick enough to mount some LED lights behind the film. The lights came with a remote control which could change the color of the lights or make them blink and so forth. Bill found me a local artist who painted some Ditkoesque spider webs onto matte board surrounding the film. I had the artist paint the webs with glow-in-the-dark paint that glows under an ultraviolet black light. I photographed the shadow box under the black light. That is why everything except me has a purple tint. Even under normal light the webs show up well. I photographed myself under normal light and composited myself into the photo so I wouldn’t appear as ghastly purple.
Wally Wood EC Stories Artist Edition
A few years ago IDW publishers released a large hardcover book with some of Wally Wood’s science fiction stories he drew for EC comic books in the 1950s. I love EC comics and Wally Wood is one of my favorite artists. I remember seeing this item listed in the monthly Previews catalog I get from Wayne Zeno’s comic store and I don’t remember why I didn’t order it then from Wayne. He would have given me my usual 30% discount off the retail price of $125.
After the book was released I watched some videos of it on the internet and saw how well it was produced and realized my mistake in not ordering it from Wayne. But it was too late to correct my mistake as the book sold out immediately and the copies offered for sale on Amazon or ebay were about $400. So I let a few regretful years pass to see if the price would come down but it never did. Finally a few months ago I decided I had to have the book. A seller on ebay had a copy still in the shrink-wrap and he said he would mail it in its original IDW mailing box inside another box for protection from the Post Office. The price was still $400 but I bit the bullet and paid it.
Citizen Kane
Orson Welles’s masterpiece film Citizen Kane has been in on my list of top four or five favorite movies for as long as I can remember. I don’t remember when I first saw it. I do remember in the early 1970s at my grandmother’s house in Tarrant City, Al watching it on the late show. I was surprised to find out the next day my aunt Betty June, not known for her sophisticated taste in movies, had also watched it the same night. She was amused at the scenes where Mr. Kane was forcing his no-talent wife Susan Alexander to keep up her opera singing that was boring everybody to tears. I also remember at a comic book convention in the late 1970s seeing a 16mm print of the film on a screen much larger than a TV which made even more of an impression on me. I even vaguely remember thumbing threw a copy of film critic Pauline Kael’s book Raising Kane at a Tower of Books bookstore in California. I regret not buying the book.
If you look at most any list published since the early 1950s of the 10 best American movies Citizen Kane was almost always listed as #1. This consensus was carved in stone in 1998 when the prestigious American Film Institute (AFI) released its first list of the top 100 American films and Citizen Kane was #1. It kept that position when the list was revised in 2007. I don’t know if another list has been released since 2007 but I did find this from 2022 with the AFI still listing it as #1.
When the noteworthy video company Criterion first started in the early 1980s the first two laser discs they released were Citizen Kane and King Kong. Of course I bought both these on laser disc. When the laser disc format faded into history it was replaced by higher definition Blu-Ray and I naturally bought the best edition of Citizen Kane I could find on Blu-Ray. In the photo above Criterion’s just released 4K version is shown. The two publicity photos I recently won in an internet auction on Proxibid. If these photos had been at auction on ebay or Bruce Hershenson’s emovieposter.com the price would likely have been higher. The photo in the frame is the most famous Kane photo showing Mr. Kane making his thunderous campaign speech. The large photo I’m holding shows Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) and his friend Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten) standing amidst newly published issues of their newspaper The Inquirer.
Movie Soundtrack Albums
I like to collect movie and TV memorablia like publicity photos, press books and movie programs. I also dabble in collecting vinyl soundtrack albums of my favorite movies and TV shows. I got started on this part of the hobby by buying a small but high grade collection of pre 1980s soundtrack albums as part of a deal I came across in Bluefield, West Virginia in 2009. I didn’t find anymore soundtrack albums until 2020 when I bought a Western themed collection of magazines from a collector in my town of Virginia Beach that included a few albums. Then recently in June 2022 I saw an ad in Facebook Marketplace for a storage shed with a few thousand albums. I figured out of that many albums I should be able to find a few soundtrack albums in nice shape. So I made the hour drive from Virginia Beach along bucolic Highway 58 out to the little town of Waverly. I spent a few hours inspecting nearly album in the storage shed and managed to buy about 60 that had nicer than average jacket covers.
This album with the Bettie Page cover “Ain’t Misbehavin'” should be the most valuable one I found. I have seen another more famous Bettie Page album cover where she is posing in a jungle girl costume with some leopards but I had never seen this other one. I thought this album by stripper Ann Corio “How To Strip For Your Husband” was interesting. I wonder if she sings a song about it or just tells you how to do it? Luckily there were a few science fiction related albums as shown Greatest Science Fiction Hits, Orson Welles’ War Of The Worlds, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Soylent Green
Charlton Heston has always been one of favorite actors. He had made a good living playing in big budget historical epics like The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, El Cid but by the mid 1960s that film genre was played out. So he found a new but much briefer gig playing in science fiction movies. From the 1968 through 1973 he starred in three excellent science fiction movies: Planet Of The Apes, The Omega Man and Soylent Green. The one that had the most agonizing wait for me to see was Soylent Green. I saw Heston on the Mike Douglas TV show one afternoon talking about his upcoming science fiction movie Soylent Green. I really wanted to see it and I knew it would be playing in a theater at the newly opened Oglethorpe Mall in my town of Savannah, GA. So I checked the newspaper every few days. I remember the Mall theater was currently playing one of those black exploitation movies like Superfly that were popular in the early 1970s. I was furious that a silly movie like that could be holding up a new Charlton Heston science fiction movie. After I finally did see the movie I remember as I was in the parking lot walking to my car a group of old people who had also just seen the movie were talking. One of the old men amused me by saying he wasn’t shocked by the prospect that someday we would have to eat dead people to stay alive. He said if that was the only food source available then it was your civic duty to be used for food when you die.
I remember reading a review of Soylent Green in Time magazine. The reviewer was one of those typical snooty critics that described Heston’s acting as “the usual square-jawed heroics.” However, even this jaded critic was touched a bit by the sentimental scene where Heston visits his dying friend played by Edward G. Robinson in the government sponsored suicide clinic.
Naturally I had a laser disc of Soylent Green and currently have it on Blu-Ray, I also recently picked up a high grade paperback book for one of my dye sublimation shirt projects.
The publicity photo above of Charlton Heston holding a can of Soylent Green I won recently in a Proxibid auction. I had never seen it before. It is rarer than usual since I don’t see it like many other Soylent Green movie publicity materials that appear in auctions. Surprisingly, this photo does appear in an article about the movie in the current July 2022 issue of the British popular culture magazine Infinity. This photo has two mistakes. In the movie Soylent Green wasn’t sold in cans. It was dispensed in pieces at government food stations to the hungry mobs and you had to bring your own bag. An even bigger mistake is the tagline in the photo “Wednesday is Soylent Green day.” It was clearly stated in the first few minutes of the movie by Governor Santini (Whit Bissell) on TV that Tuesday was Soylent Green day.
Movie Programs
One of the more affordable and interesting ways to collect movie memorablia is buying movie programs. Unlike movie press books the movie programs are usually cheaper and have lots of color photos. Movie programs were distributed in the movie theater lobby to the customers which makes them more common than press books which were only distributed to the owner of the theater. I don’t know if movie programs were sold or given away. I’ve never seen a movie program with a price sticker but I can’t believe that just handed them out for free. I never saw any movie programs as a kid going to movie theaters in Savannah, GA and Birmingham, AL so I just don’t know. The photo above shows some of the movie programs I’ve bought in the last few months from ebay, Proxibid or Bruce Hershenson’s emovieposter.com auction site.
The Fall Of The Roman Empire, 1964 was one of the last big budget historical epics. The super expensive Cleopatra was a disastrous flop the year before which signaled the approaching demise of the historical epic cycle that started with The Robe in 1954. This extra deluxe The Fall Of The Roman Empire program is almost twice the normal size of a movie program. Here’s a sample of the opulent color photos to be seen inside. I have this movie on Blu-Ray but it’s from Germany and I can’t watch it again until I get a new region free Blu-Ray player. In the movie Stephen Boyd plays Sophia Loren’s boyfriend. The producers offered the part to Charlton Heston first but he didn’t get along well with Sophia Loren in El Cid and didn’t want to make any more movies with her.
Solomon And Sheba, 1959 is a pretty good movie and looks good on Blu-Ray. The leading man was Tyronne Power but he died during filming and was replaced by Yul Brynner. The Boxoffice magazine I’m holding in the photo above isn’t a movie program. It’s a special issue of Boxoffice all about just this movie and designed more like a movie program than the usual issue of Boxoffice. Similar to press books, Boxoffice and Motion Picture Herald were magazines distributed by the movie studios only to movie theater owners to advertise the studio’s upcoming movies and try to get the theater owner to book them for his theater. They also had articles for the theater owners on how to promote the movies in their local theater. Here’s a sample photo from this special Solomon And Sheba edition of Boxoffice.
Circus World, 1964 is one of the few John Wayne movies I’ve never seen. It’s must be tied up in some kind of legal limbo and so there is no non-bootleg DVD or Blu-Ray available.
Facts About Destination Moon, 1950 is a rare item I had never seen before. It’s smaller than a regular movie program and has no color photos. I’ve had a DVD of this George Pal movie for many years but the picture quality is really crappy. There is an Australian Blu-Ray company named Via Vision that has a new contract with Paramount Studios and Via Vison has been releasing some other George Pal science fiction movies on Blu-Ray. So I’m hoping I don’t have to wait much longer for a Blu-Ray of Destination Moon.
Great article! Keep ‘em coming.