Doohickamabob

this is my problem with giving grades-you end up having to undergrade just to be safe. Then the books don't sell for what they could. If only there were some service or business that would grade them for you to help you get an appropriate sale price.

One of my favorite pages: This strange puzzle in which 13 Chinamen turns into 12 Chinamen when the circle is rotated. WHERE DID THE MISSING CHINAMAN GO? (I used Photoshop to rotate the puzzle instead of having to cut out the puzzle, like I did when I was a kid, ruining the magazine.)

Marvel was aiming at the teen audience with its late 1970s magazine Pizzazz. The July 1978 issue is an embarrassing interesting snapshot of the times. The cover feature is about the "Sgt. Pepper" movie (the poorly received musical starring the Bee Gees, Peter Frampton, Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, Steve Martin, George Burns, etc.). Articles cover such important topics as: Suzanne Sommers, Leif Garrett, Star Wars, summer camp, monsters throughout history, Meat Loaf, Shaun Cassidy, and Stan Lee in the editorial offices. Here's the cover, and a few pages I found amusing:

If an order has shipped, I get a shipping notification at the end of the business day with tracking. If an order is sitting in the safe, a few reasons are; awaiting payment, awaiting another order for return shipping. Thank you. I have a "shipped/safe" item with a date, but it's been a couple weeks with no tracking etc. So I think CGC is just holding it until it can ship everything together. (I could call CGC to figure this out, of course, but figured it would be something people here would want to know.)

I like the close-up. He doesn't usually get in that close. The way the whole thing is inked and lettered looks like a UK version of one of Baker's covers.

When CGC posts "shipped/safe," does that mean the books are in the mail as of the date posted? If so, does CGC provide tracking information? If you have multiple submissions (using different tiers) and one is marked shipped/safe, but the others are still "verified," does that ever mean that the "shipped/safe" one is in holding until the others are finished, so they can be sent together?

At least this guy is polite and admits he's a bonehead.

No problem. It's still a great parody, like you said. They got Mort Drucker to do the Empire Strikes Back satire and he had a lot of fun with that (the final panel shows that they "fixed" Luke's severed hand, but they accidentally put a foot there in its place).

One of the actresses in "Split," Hayley Lu Richardson, is in another recent movie, "The Bronze," which is really funny.

The old "flood in the home" excuse. Reminds me of a friend who won an auction at a really good price, and the seller comes back with, "the comics were in my basement and there was a flood that ruined them." My friend asked, "Well, can I at least see a photo that shows the flood, or a pic of the comics that shows the damange?" and the seller wasn't very friendly or helpful after that.

Not sure of value, but it's super cool. Should be framed.

Generally speaking, using the initials L.L. to refer to a Superman character can cause some confusion... (Okay, so in this case it doesn't.)

Fortunately CGC now offers a solution for this problem:

Interesting thing about the Mad satire of "Star Wars" is they tried out a new artist, Harry North, for one of the biggest movies of that year. I was surprised they didn't get Mort Drucker to work his magic on it, but I assume Mort must have been tied up.

Those look great but with the little corner tear, the Mad probably isn't going to beat the highest-graded copy. What are the interior pages like -- much discoloration? I am not very good at the differences in high-graded copies. There is an area here where you can post pictures and people will estimate what grade you'd be likely to get. It's called Hey buddy, can you spare a grade? and you'll get some very helpful feedback, though you'll want to post additional photos showing the back cover, and some of the interior. Beautiful copies nonetheless!

I thought they were supposed to be stronger? Iv'e gotten 5 packages in the past couple weeks, 3 broken slabs. Maybe I just have bad luck. The old ones were never that bad for me. I'm hoping your situation is an anomaly. Or there's somebody at your local post office who sits on the packages during break.

I thought they were supposed to be stronger?

I did an eBay search on completed listings for that issue and it is not worth a lot even in the higher grades. One copy described as high grade sold in auction for $25. There was a CGC-graded 9.6 copy that was alleged to be the highest graded copy (and perhaps was, though it might be tied with other copies) and it sold for $125. My opinion is if you have an issue that stands out as being off-the-newsstand fresh, to the point where it could qualify as 9.6 or 9.8, it would be fun to grade it as an experiment -- if it's something you personally like and want to slab for the long run. If you're looking to make a profit selling all the issues, I don't know that slabbing would make a big difference if they graded 9.4 or lower. You might take a lot of photos of each in raw form, and put them on eBay as BIN's for $25 - $50 or something, because I think they would sell eventually due to the "Star Wars" connection. Not to put down the artist Jack Rickard, who was always a great artist (and did a respectable job of stepping into the cover-art role occupied by Norman Mingo), but this cover doesn't stand out as a Mad classic. I like the later issue with the "Mad musical" (with characters kind of dancing) a little better. Oddly enough, the giant Darth Vader helmet on Alfred E. Neuman makes me think of Rick Moranis doing the "Dark Helmet" character in the Mel Brooks movie "Spaceballs." Kudos on saving and storing all those "Star Wars" Mads, plus the Cracked issue. I also remember that I think the first issue of a magazine called Pizazz had a good "Star Wars" cover, and I know Crazy had some "Star Wars" issues. (And many other mags of course...) It would be cool to see a photo of your mags if you have one.

It's not a bug, it's a feature.

I'm not sure why but this cover reminds me of a famous quote, "only two things come out of Texas".

I mean, where are her legs? I think that thing that looks like a bow on her head if actually her feet. In defense of this creepy guy and gal, it looks like an overzealous touch-up artist added too much extra white to their eyes and teeth.

B.S. Nope. This is a very uncooperative person, so you probably won't get pictures. Feedback extortion. Call eBay. Sorry you got in the crosshairs of a scammer dillweed like this. It happens to all of us eventually. It never ceases to suck.

Yes, it is excessive. $100 on a $375 item is a pathetic lowball offer. The incessant emailing is a form of pressure, even if the words themselves are not pressuring. Just the excess of it alone is pressure. Always step back from a high-pressure person. In my experience, "I need it for my daughter" is code for "I want to make a profit and here's a story to make you feel like you're doing me a favor by becoming my sucker."

Can't rule out Cracked though the likelihood is very low as I was never much of a fan. My memories are very clear on these two parodies but as I said, memory is very fragile and fallible (To digress, I have a frequent argument over the "But there were eye-witnesses to the crime" belief that this is the sine qua non of guilt - sorry for the digression). I agree, memory is an unreliable thing. One of the most unrealistic tropes of movies is when characters slowly regain their memories in vivid detail. The unfortunate truth is that with the right suggestion or imagination, people can "remember" things that never happened. Anyway, I'll keep looking for what you describe. Now it's a vendetta. I will take it slow though. This makes a good excuse to go back and read through Mad issues. One of the things about the older Mads is that I never had the magazines as a kid. Only later did I go back and collect them. Most of their material I only ever read via specials, or via paperbacks. There's quite a bit of great stuff in the earlier magazines that either wasn't reprinted, or that wasn't reprinted in anything I got a chance to read. The early era of the magazine, with Wally Wood and Joe Orlando art, has a different and more anarchistic flavor than the heyday when editor Al Feldstein had a more regular stable of "insufficiently_thoughtful_person" contributors. I often lose my knickers. P.S. Here's a graphic from 1954 where Mad is making fun of all its imitators. I read that William Gaines put each competitor on the wall and would write an "X" on it (or something -- put a dart in in?) whenever each title went bust. This piece cleverly builds a line of text around nearly all of 'em....in alphabetical order!

This artist is not from the era of my most fervent Mad-reading, so I don't know much about him. But RIP nonetheless. Here is what Mad posted on their Facebook page: ------------------- Classic MAD Dept. GERRY GERSTEN, MAD ARTIST, RIP We’re sorry to report that 2017 is picking up where 2016 left off, with the passing of yet another MAD contributor. Gerry Gersten, one of MAD’s most talented caricaturists, passed away over the weekend. With his pencil on vellum technique, Gerry produced many full-page impact pieces of art for MAD, including memorable drawings of Ronald Reagan, Dr. Ruth and Elvis Presley. Our condolences go out to Gerry’s family. We will have more on Gerry’s career in MAD #545. From MAD #285, March 1989 Artist: Gerry Gersten