[narfstar]

me too

[JVJ]

About 25 years ago, a guy named Mark Carlson brought these comics to my attention. The Rural Home, Rewl, Bard, Croydon, all the Baily Shop stuff, Red Band, Blue Circle, etc. I think it might have been through APA-I or perhaps just a personal contact. Whatever. If anyone knows Mark and knows how to contact him, I would love to rekindle the correspondence.

Anyway, I was playing around with computers and dBase at the time. This was about the time of the first Macintosh. I had an HP 150 touchscreen at the time with about 5 megabytes of hard drive space. Big time. So I put together, with the help of Karen (currently recovering from knee-replacement surgery in the other room) a database to handle all of the addresses, characters, publishing company names, etc. The actual data bases are long gone, but I have a set of 25 year old printouts of them, sorted by address, character, artist and publishing company.

A while back there was a thread about Baily Shop comics and in one of the postings I mentioned to Ken Quattro that to go further into the history of those comics was to open a can of worms. THIS is the can of which I was speaking. It's a fascinating and convoluted mishmash of titles and interrelated companies - many fly-by-nighters. Mark has copies of press clippings documenting folks like R.B. Leffingwell getting busted by the paper rationing "police" and other crimes and misdemeanors by guys who published some of these comics.

If we try to sort it out  here, we'll all amazed at the connections. I hope we can work through them all. I don't own all the comics, but I have enough to get us started. Archiver - it's all your fault, so I hope you're up to the challenge. It's going to be a crazy ride.

Let's go...

(|:{>

[OtherEric]

Oh, yes.  I'm finding the discussion here fascinating, even if I have very little to contribute.

I think the plan is to reorganize the books once we can access the database again, assuming there's a consensus on HOW to reorganize them by then!

[kquattro]

A while back there was a thread about Baily Shop comics and in one of the postings I mentioned to Ken Quattro that to go further into the history of those comics was to open a can of worms. THIS is the can of which I was speaking. It's a fascinating and convoluted mishmash of titles and interrelated companies - many fly-by-nighters. Mark has copies of press clippings documenting folks like R.B. Leffingwell getting busted by the paper rationing "police" and other crimes and misdemeanors by guys who published some of these comics.

I credit you, Jim, and this GAC site with providing the "hard" information (that is, the comics themselves) for making the research and this discussion possible. Too often comic book history has been written by use of second and third-hand information, opinion and speculation. The opportunity to see the actual comics via the GAC is an incredible boon. It would take a lifetime of collecting--as Jim has done--to accumulate enough comics to make the research possible and now it's available by turning on a computer.

The whole discussion of Croydon, Rural Home and these other small publishers ties in nicely with a project I've been working on for a while. Jim has alluded to my interest in the Baily shop. The past year-and-a-half I've devoted to intense research regarding the life and career of Bernard Baily and his shop. I'm nearing the end of the research necessary to complete the resulting article (ongoing research will probably never end), which I hope will see print in the future. Without Jim's help, and the help of other generous historians and fans, I could never have gotten to this point so quickly. I spent ten years compiling and researching the info for a St. John article I wrote. If the GAC had existed at the time, it would have taken a fraction of that time.

So, thank you GAC and thank you Jim V!

--Ken Q

[John C]

I had an HP 150 touchscreen at the time with about 5 megabytes of hard drive space. Big time.

Heh.  I actually have one of those in my basement.  My college was dismantling an abandoned lab and throwing a bunch of similar gadgets away, so the touchscreen and two of the old IBM "luggable" computers (the fifty-pounders with the five-inch screen and detachable keyboard) ended in the trunk of my car.

It was a pain getting the cables for them.  It was long after they were in common use, but shortly before most stores had an Internet presence.

The actual data bases are long gone, but I have a set of 25 year old printouts of them, sorted by address, character, artist and publishing company.

Hm.  Might some kind JVJ scanning volunteer be interested in taking on THAT job?  It's guaranteed to be boring (absent a sheet-feeder), but there's not much editing involved, and the data could be widely useful, since this kind of research (tracing the "archaeology" of the publishers) seems to be increasing in popularity.

To sweeten the deal, if anybody does, I'll OCR and proofread the scans and turn them back into a database again.

I think the plan is to reorganize the books once we can access the database again, assuming there's a consensus on HOW to reorganize them by then!

For what it's worth, I agree with Ken, I think, in that all publishers should probably be separate, demonstrable links or not.  Let the descriptions (or cross-links) carry the burden of "this is an imprint of that," or "this, along with that and the other, were all owned by the same people."

[narfstar]

I have a sheet feeder that has served me well. Many of the books I have done lately have been through the sheet feeder. So I would not mind scanning them.

[Yoc]

Oh-oh... I smell a New Project coming on!!

And for those people who haven't read the EXCELLENT history that Ken wrote of Archer St. John you owe it to yourself to go HERE and check it out!  There's also a very good article on Fox and many other fascinating features hosted on the same excellent site - www.comicartville.com

-Yoc

[narfstar]

Yeah but Yoc I spend way too much time on the computer now. Are you trying to make sure I never get offline?

[Yoc]

I'm that transparent eh?
(Note to self, develop devious plots better.)

[narfstar]

I know the plan but still can not resist the pull. Too much to read and too little time. BTW Yoc I downloaded the Frankentstein this morning before going to school. You got it online already before  I started to begin the upload.

--------

No problem Narf, I had some free time today.  Note the new FH books from Freddy.


-Yoc

[JVJ]

I had an HP 150 touchscreen at the time with about 5 megabytes of hard drive space. Big time.

Heh.  I actually have one of those in my basement.  My college was dismantling an abandoned lab and throwing a bunch of similar gadgets away, so the touchscreen and two of the old IBM "luggable" computers (the fifty-pounders with the five-inch screen and detachable keyboard) ended in the trunk of my car.

Yeah, John, but I bought mine the week they were introduced. I worked for HP for 22 years and was a member of an HP club that was BUILDING a computer (soldering circuit boards and all) when the 150 was introduced. We all just threw up our hands, disbanded the club, and bought our 150s.

The actual data bases are long gone, but I have a set of 25 year old printouts of them, sorted by address, character, artist and publishing company.

Hm.  Might some kind JVJ scanning volunteer be interested in taking on THAT job?  It's guaranteed to be boring (absent a sheet-feeder), but there's not much editing involved, and the data could be widely useful, since this kind of research (tracing the "archaeology" of the publishers) seems to be increasing in popularity.

To sweeten the deal, if anybody does, I'll OCR and proofread the scans and turn them back into a database again.

I'll send you photocopies to OCR, John. They are actually LaserJet (the FIRST one) printouts that I formatted with some report software and landscape fonts (you used to have to have a font cartridge in a slot in the printer to access all but the most basic typefaces. Those were the days. Send me your mailing info and I'll photocopy the printouts and you can do whatever you like with them...

Peace, Jim (|:{>

[John C]

Yeah, John, but I bought mine the week they were introduced. I worked for HP for 22 years and was a member of an HP club that was BUILDING a computer (soldering circuit boards and all) when the 150 was introduced. We all just threw up our hands, disbanded the club, and bought our 150s.

In addition to being an interesting artifact, it's a nicely-made product, I have to say.  After many years in a dusty chemical engineering lab and a few years in my basement, it not only works fine, but looks pristine.

To sweeten the deal, if anybody does, I'll OCR and proofread the scans and turn them back into a database again.

I'll send you photocopies to OCR, John. They are actually LaserJet (the FIRST one) printouts that I formatted with some report software and landscape fonts (you used to have to have a font cartridge in a slot in the printer to access all but the most basic typefaces. Those were the days. Send me your mailing info and I'll photocopy the printouts and you can do whatever you like with them...
Peace, Jim (|:{>

I would have offered myself, but after a computer crash, I packed up the scanner and doubt it'd even work with the netbook I'm using now.  So I'd be hand-typing it, which...yow.  But if it does get scanned with someone's batch of comics, I'll definitely get right on it and make sure the content is widely accessible.

And yeah, I remember those font cartridges and the whole PostScript shebang.  It's interesting to see the industry swing from "we don't have the time and bandwidth to render the page, so we'll just tell the printer to do it" to "let's turn everything into an image and just send the pixels to the printer," and back to "wait, maybe some of that text was useful..." as the PDF format evolves.