OK, kids, with school about done, the ol’ Professor is finally getting back to the questions that have been trickling in over the last few… er, months. Here’s one from March 5:
What happened to pengiun when he was born
Now, in fairness to the Professor, there’s not a lot that can be said in response to this question: young Oswald Cobblepot came out in the normal way, took a breath, and there he was. His mother wasn’t frightened by any Antarctic waterfowl while he was in the womb, and he wasn’t bitten by any radioactive penguins or anything — he just grew up kind of shy and weird-looking, and in that same comic-booky, quasi-poetic way that let E. Nigma become fascinated with riddles and turn into the Riddler, the sharp-beaked, waddling, shy young man developed an affinity for birds, and eventually became the Penguin.
Jumping ahead six weeks, and moving from the egregiously late to the merely one-month-behind, here’s a question from April 13:
I have an action comics #1 June 1938 Superman comic book in a plastic case [not the orignal] in good condtion.Approx what would this be worth?
The key words here, of course, are “not the original” — if it’s one of the numerous reprints of that book, it’s not worth much. The best case would be if it were a near-mint copy of the Famous First Edition reprint — the one that’s about 10 x 13 inches — which would make it worth about $60. Most of the more recent versions, like the DC Millennium one, or that thin little giveaway that just reprinted the Superman stories from the book — are worth less than $10. The Professor would have to look at it to be sure which it was, but it sure sounds like you could be using that plastic case for better things.
Here’s another, from April 20:
WHAT ARE THESE COMICS WORTH? I HAVE A WALT DISNEY’S (PLUTO) NO.595 AND BACK WHEN IT WAS WORTH 10 CENTS
Technically, that’s Four Color Comics #595, and if it’s in average condition for a book that age (say, VG), then it’s about $10; a really nice NM copy would be worth $70, assuming you could find a Disney completist who wanted it. For a VG copy, All About would offer, oh, maybe 50 cents, since the back room has at least one or two copies already, and no one ever asks for them.
Moving right along, eh? Here’s another, from April 28, which practically makes it recent:
This is actually a comic grade question, but I recently bought almost the
entire run of New Warriors (finished it off at your fine establishment! :)) Anyways, the first 14 issues were still well-bound, and the covers are glossy, but the interior pages have a lot of smudged blacks and faded inks. These were released only in 1990…is that something I can expect from comics bought back then? Thank you for your help!!
Ah, yes, the late ’80s and early ’90s, probably the nadir of production values for regularly-priced comics. There were better-paper versions by then, Baxter and Mando, especially, but the plain old vanilla weekly $1 floppies were still being printed on the cheapest stuff possible, with plastic printing plates and horrible reproduction. The bottom was probably reached in early 1990, when Marvel switched to a paper so cheap that the tops of all of the books were slightly rippled, as though they’d been water-damaged; the Professor can still look at a long box of, say, Iron Man or Avengers from that era, and tell when the early-1990 issues start, just by their wavy tops. So, to answer your questions: yes — for regularly-priced books from that era, “smudged blacks and faded inks” are just business as usual.
One more, and the Professor can enter his Summer Vacation with head held high….:
What was the origin of eh Falcon? What is his relationship to Captain America and eh Avengers?
The original origin, the Lee/Kirby one from Captain America #117-119, has Steve Rogers, who’s been body-switched by a Cosmic-Cube-wielding Red Skull and is on the run in South America, run into Sam Wilson there; Sam’s just an African-American wanderer who happens to have this pet falcon, and a gift for punching the right people at the right time. Later, it’s established that he has a “psychic link” with the bird, and still later, Steve Englehart establishes that the whole encounter was the Skull using the Cube to plant “Sam” as an unsuspecting sleeper agent — he was really a street thug named “Snap” Wilson, and… well, frankly, this is the point where his back story becomes just lightly less complicated and retconned than Wolverine’s, so this is probably a good place for the Professor to abandon his fading memory, and suggest either Wikipedia or the most recent Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe….
