Thursday Missive: Tintin Origins

What do you see when you look at the first photo below?  Probably nothing more than old news print...that happens to be in French.   Twelve years ago, I would have seen the same thing.  When my wife and I moved to France, I was actively collecting American comics.  In France, you can still collect American comics, but there is almost no reason to do so given the rich heritage of French and Belgian comics that is evidenced the moment you walk into any store specializing in "Bandes Dessinées".

In the pantheon of French and Belgian comics, there is no more well known character than Tintin.  And as an American collector, the first question I was bound to ask was, "When did Tintin first appear?" Well, Tintin was originally created in 1929 by Georges Remi (aka Hergé based on the pronunciation of his reversed initials RG, in French).  He worked at a newspaper in Belgium called "Le XX'eme Siècle", or "The 20th Century".  The paper publish a children's supplement every Thursday called "le petit XXe", or "The Little 20th", which was primarily meant for boys who were in the boy scouts.  The first story arc was written with Tintin acting as a reporter in the Soviet Union, and was a thinly veiled polemic against the absurdities of Soviet Russia.  Pictured here is the 3rd appearance of Tintin in print from January 31st, 1929 (the first appearance was January 10th, 1929).

I don't have a complete set of these...I suspect very few complete sets exist.  But I have several issues of the series...and they are a treat to look at.  I'll show some more of my French finds in future posts.


Until next time...or, perhaps I should say, à bientôt!

Disneyland Panorama

Back in the late 1950's, not too long after the park was opened, Disneyland published a group of cards that were large format panorama cards.  As you can imagine, this was a bit of an awkward card in terms of preservation, so not too many of them survive today in their original state.

This particular copy was found on eBay recently, and had been folded in half, probably to fit better into whatever storage location it was stuffed into.  And while that certainly detracts from the "collectibility" of the card, it beats having it thrown into the trash!

I include both sides of the card here for reference.  When you collect Disneylnd postcards, you often get a slice of someones vacation from ~50 years ago.  I will post more on this later, but for now, enjoy reading about Sally's stay in SoCal from 1958!

Until next time....

Physics in Action

One of my more random collections is of old physics text books.  I don't often add to it, and I only have about 8 books.  But the reason I find these so interesting is that, back in the day, Physics text books were loaded with great photos and illustrations of all kinds of machinery and the like which illustrated "Physics in action".

One such photo is shown here, from "Modern Physics", published in 1934.  It shows an old US Naval battleship going through the Panama canal and the caption lists a bunch of statistics on the boat.

The most interesting part of the book though, was not related to the book itself, but what I found in it.  Inserted in the leaves of the book was the following postcard which had been post marked on February 12, 1944:

W.M. Latimer was a chemistry professor at U.C. Berkeley in the 1940's and 1950's.  When I attended there in the 1980's, several of my classes were in Latimer Hall.  And while I am not a stamp collector (well...at least not avidly), you have to admire the special delivery stamp with the old motorcycle on it....classic!

Until next time...

Star Wars Trading Cards

I have been collecting stuff for a long time...and one of my first collections was of Star Wars bubble gum cards in the 1970's. I had a few pieces of the gum and can still remember that super sweet flavor that lasted all of 12 seconds before fading away.  But the cards were what I was really after.

I actually started collecting the cards when the second series, the red ones, came out...which means I had to assemble my blue set, the first series, entirely by trade.  Which I managed to do successfully on the school play ground at recess.  I still have the same cards today, 35 years later.

Featured here are the first card of the first set, Luke Skywalker, and card number 80 from the red set.  I put this one here because to this day I remember that it took me forever to get a copy of this card!

Until next time...

FF

Many years ago, maybe 20, I was at a comic book convention in San Francisco and was browsing through some books when a guy came up and asked the dealer behind the table, "How Much for your FF5?".   The guy pointed to a book on the wall behind the dealer...the wall that contained all the "good stuff".  FF5?  FF?  I was sort of familiar with what he was saying, but I had yet to be exposed to the epic series of the Fantastic Four and to the singular achievement of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in these books.

Jack Kirby did over 100 issues of FF from issue #1 forward.  That's over 2000 pages of comic art.  No wonder he was known as Jack "The King" Kirby.  Featured today is a cover from FF 55 with the Silver Surfer and the Thing.  At the time, the Silver Surfer was a fairly new character, having been introduced in issue 48.  This was the beginning of a three issue story arc that is one of my favorite in the whole FF canon.

In future posts I will be sharing more Kirby work from Thor and his later DC work.  And maybe I will post on FF5 as well...so you can see what that guy was talking about 20 years ago!

In the meantime, enjoy this one...it is a definite "Top 10" FF cover.

Until next time....

Freakish Dwarves

I am a little short on time for writing this post tonight, so I decided to literally reach into one of the boxes of Disneyland cards I have, pull out a random card, and post about it.

This is a fairly common card from the 60's or 70's.  The thing that makes this card remarkable is the incredibly large and rather freakish heads on the Seven Dwarves.  I am not quite sure what they do in the park these days since I just don't get there that often, but given that Mickey and Minnie used to be like this as well (and have drastically improved over the years) I have to believe that the dwarves have come to look a little better as well!

Until next time...

Thursday Missive: Estate and Garage Sales

Before my wife and I had kids I used to go to garage sales all the time.  And while I don't go to as many as I used to, I still find that garage and estate sales continue to be a lot of fun to visit.

A lot of folks think that garages and estate sales are a waste of time.  "It's just a bunch of junk".  And while there is ample justification for that statement, very often you will find diamonds in the rough.  When you go to these sales (especially estate sales) you are being given a glimpse not only at a bunch of old stuff...but a glimpse into someones life that cuts across the past fifty, sixty or even seventy years.

I went to an estate sale up in Los Altos several years ago.  The man had been a doctor and also had a lot of children.  Well, looking through the books he had and the left over things he had from the long past childhood of his children, it was very clear that this guy was dedicated to the education of his kids.  Here were the tools he used to raise his family...all being scattered away.  I felt like I needed to buy something to preserve a legacy.  Maybe that sounds silly, but it was true.  I ended up with a box of small national flags.  My kids have them in their room and we occasionally break them out and talk about which belongs to which country and where it is on the map.

At another sale, the man had been a pilot for Pan-American Airways.  There were all kinds of things related to his work...some more interesting than others, but all of it together made for a fascinating slice into this guys career.  I walked away with a number of things from this sale, one of which is pictured here.  It's a certificate that was apparently handed out to people who crossed the international dateline on Pan-Am's clipper service in the Pacific.  It's a beautiful piece of art for one, and it's a relic from an era of progress in America which changed the world really.

Finally, another reason I like estate sales may seem a bit odd, but it is sincere.  They remind me that all the stuff I have will one day be scattered.  As the saying goes, you can't take it with you.  So, while I love collecting and it brings me a lot of pleasure...at the end of the day, it's all just "hay, wood and stubble", as my mom would say.  So...I try not to take my stuff too seriously...it is after all, just stuff.

Until next time....