Thursday, November 04, 2010

Rip Kirby collections

Back in the 1940s/50s, Associated Newspapers published five collections of Rip Kirby strips in various-sized reprint volumes, anywhere between 16 and 84 pages. I recently saw three of the volumes and, as I had my camera with me, took some pics. The books were badly yellowed - they were upwards of sixty years old, after all - but a bit of TLC and colour correction in Photoshop has... well, you can see the results below.

(* And since the original post, Richard Sheaf has sent over a scan of the two missing titles to be added to the gallery. Cheers, Richard.)

Rip Kirby: The Menace of the Mangler [front and back cover]
Associated Newspapers, n.d. (1947), 16pp, 6d.

Rip Kirby: Poison and Paradise [wraparound cover]
Associated Newspapers, n.d. (1955), 52pp, 9d.

Rip Kirby: Moray's Last Gamble
Associated Newspapers, n.d. (1955), 52pp, 1/-.

Rip Kirby: The Man Who Stole a Million
Associated Newspapers, n.d. (1955?), 44pp, 1/-.

Rip Kirby: The Beaumont Case / The Faraday Murder
Associated Newspapers, n.d. (1956), 84pp, 1/6.

5 comments:

  1. Am slowly collecting these but they come up very infrequently, in fact I'm just waiting for one to arrive in the post as I type this. Sadly I don't have the missing ones that you are after.


    Richard Sheaf

    ReplyDelete
  2. Steve,

    Thanks for your post.

    Of the four images you posted, I had never seen "Poison and Paradise." Nor have I seen the other two you asked about.

    I was unable to acquire scans of any of these reprints to include in my book, "Alex Raymond: His Life and Art," so it's great to see the booklets get some attention.

    I do have somewhere around here, deep in the depths of the Acme warehouse, a xerox of a newspaper article about Rip Kirby running in the Daily Mail circa 1948.

    "The Beaumont Case / The Faraday Murder" I have seen offered for sale on several occasions but the remainder seem to rarely turn up. And least on my side of the world.

    Tom Roberts
    Black Dog Books

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Steve,
    We recently acquired 4 of the 5 Daily Mail Rip Kirby collections and we stumbled across your page when researching them as we intend selling them through ebay. We have listed one and intend listing the others in due course. If you need any scans from any of the insides of the collections, I would be happy to oblige before I (hopefully) sell them. I am half minded to keep them as the artwork is so impressive, so I have started them at a high price to soften the blow if they do sell! I noticed that the original owner had written the date 15/12/1947 in the inner cover of the Menace of The Mangler book, so it looks like this collection was issued in 1947 not 1948.
    Thanks for the page which gave us some useful info on the collections.
    Mike Davies

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi I've recently discovered the Beaumont Case / The Faraday Murder edition , it's in an ok condition for its age , do you have any idea what it could be worth

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I haven't kept track of pricing on comics since the late Nineties, so I don't have a clue. EBay is usually the best place to start, but even that's not always accurate on items that are quite scarce.

      Delete

BEAR ALLEY BOOKS

BEAR ALLEY BOOKS
Click on the above pic to visit our sister site Bear Alley Books