"This day's experience, set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside." –Alice Munro, "What is Remembered"
I only have two of the paperbacks in this series of Perry Mason novels that was published by Pocket Books in the early 1960s, but I would definitely buy them all if I could find them at a good price. They’re lovely.
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From the musty pulp paperback collection of yours truly, here are today’s minty fresh scans:
I’m sure there are others on the Web who have scanned and posted all of the covers in the “Operator 5” series, but I only own three, and unless I run across them for sale cheap at a thrift store, I don’t intend to complete my collection. So if you’re hoping for more “Operator 5” here at RCN, you’re likely going to be disappointed.
My favourite cover of the “Operator 5” books that I own is the one for Blood Reign of the Dictator. The image is so extreme that when I first saw it, I burst out laughing. It probably sold a lot of books, though.
Notice that artist Robert Bonfils has taken the liberty of removing the movable part of the guillotine’s lunette, i.e., the device that holds the head in place, so the executioner can be depicted forcing the woman’s head under the blade with his one hand while he releases the blade with his other. Action, not accuracy, is the goal here.
In the real world, however, I suspect it is a lot safer to keep your guillotine properly maintained, with all essential components attached and in good working order, than it is to improvise in front of a madding crowd. Although if one were hell bent on destruction, who knows what ridiculous health and safety risks one might outface?
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To view all of the covers with art by L. B. Cole that I’ve posted so far, click here.
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To view all of the covers with art by L. B. Cole that I’ve posted so far, click here.
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To view all of the covers with art by L. B. Cole that I’ve posted so far, click here.
Writer, film buff, and @crimefactory editor, Andrew Nette (@pulpcurry), has assembled a terrific Pinterest collection of pulp covers (including a few from RCN) that he has sorted into various categories, including Pulp Fiction Down Under, Pulp Fiction Asia, Pulp Fiction, Pulp Fiction from the 70s, Pulp Miscellany, Pulp Asia, and Pulp Westerns. What I especially appreciate about the collection is that it doesn’t simply consist of cover scans posted via other sites but also includes many attractive and difficult-to-find covers that Andrew himself has scanned and uploaded, presumably from his own library.
Probably the best way to get you to visit Andew’s online pinboard is to show you a sample of what awaits you on the other side of the link. So… here’s a sample:
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Want to add a copy of Terry Harknett’s Promotion Tour to your personal collection of disintegrating pulp fiction? If you have US$69.95 plus US$18.00 for shipping, you can buy a copy right now on ebay. As for me, I’m just going to admire that scan…
Anyway… for your clickin’ convenience, here are those links again:
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A treasure from my personal collection:
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The Judges’ Choices for the Eisner Hall of Fame, announced back in January 2012, were Rudolf Dirks and Harry Lucey. The voters’ choices, announced at yesterday’s awards ceremony, were Bill Blackbeard, Richard Corben, Katsuhiro Otomo, and Gilbert Shelton.
To view all forty-nine of the posts here at RCN that (to date) have been about Richard Corben’s work, start here.
BONUS SCANS:
From The Odd Comic World of Richard Corben, here’s a short Introduction to Corben’s work by Will Eisner himself:
Obviously, the copy editing and proofreading at Warren were not the best…
I don’t often buy Western paperbacks, but when I came upon the Signet Brand Western edition of Ray Hogan’s The Hell Raiser (1980) at our local Value Village, I knew right away that there was an amusing blog post in it. So I bought it. But since I don’t own the Signet edition of Flashman at the Charge with the Frazetta cover, we’ll have to make do with a scan borrowed from Davy Crocket’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and the Wild West:
Is it mere coincidence that Signet published both Flashman at the Charge and The Hell Raiser? Or was the (uncredited) artist instructed by the publisher to do a Western version of a painting, Frazetta’s painting, that had sold a lot of books for Signet in the past? The answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the wind… the answer… is blowin’… in the wind…
Flashman at the Charge is one of the many paintings that Frazetta “improved” after he got it back from the publisher:
Nice hair.
In our collection of original comic-strip art, my wife and I already have several Miss Peach dailies by Mell Lazarus (see here, here, and here), but my personal grail has long been a Sunday strip from the 1960s, when Mell’s drawings of his cartoon kids were at their most expressive and his wit was always razor sharp. Well, my quest is finally complete! Because yesterday I won an ebay auction for a big, beautiful original Miss Peach Sunday strip dated 12-2-1962 with a great gag featuring Francine and Arthur. (And at a good price, which is important, because our budget for original art is currently stretched to the max!) I don’t have the artwork in hand yet, but here’s the image from the ebay auction, and though it looks pieced together from smaller scans, it is probably as good as or better than anything I could possibly produce with our little scanner/printer:
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The strip is a whopping 24 inches wide by 18 1/2 inches high, and it comes with a tissue paper overlay roughly festooned with Mell’s crayon colour notes, intended as a guide for the printer:
And you know what? At this moment I feel like I never need to buy another Miss Peach original. I have what I wanted. I’m happy. And I’m done.
Unless…
Ragged Claws Network 