Continuing a four-part Comic Book Cover Gallery celebration of the long-running DC Comics title The Brave And The Bold. Part 1 gathered covers from B & Bs I picked up as back issues, and Parts 3 and 4 will spotlight issues I acquired when they were fresh and new. Meanwhile, this week's gallery turns its attention to issues of B & B I originally acquired without their covers.
It used to be very common to see coverless comics for sale at various stores. Here's an excerpt of something I wrote on that subject (discussing my 1966 acquisition of cover-compromised copy of a Superboy 80-Page Giant:
"...A brief history of comic book distribution before the rise of the direct market: For the first several decades of comic book publishing, comics (like other magazines) were sold to vendors on a returnable basis. Unsold comic books could be returned by the vendor, and then by the distributor, for full credit from the publisher. To save time, tumult, and money, distributors were not required to return the entire, intact book for credit; they were allowed to return just the cover, or even just the top part of the cover (i.e., the book's title), and the distributor was then expected to destroy the coverless comic books that remained.
"It was, of course, a system rife with abuse. Were any of these stripped comic books, magazines, or pulp paperbacks ever destroyed? One presumes there must have been some honest soul somewhere in this chain, I guess. But thousands and thousands of coverless and 3/4-coverless publications were re-sold, illegally, at deep discounts. A 12-cent new comic book became, say, a five-cent or eight-cent coverless comic book, a windfall profit of which the publisher received bupkis.
"At six years old (and for a long time thereafter), I had no idea that I was purchasing illegal contraband. I just knew I was getting more comics...."
My first coverless B & B was the Batman and Green Arrow team-up reunited with its original cover up top. The rest of the gallery is listed in order of publication.
Across the four parts of this Brave And Bold cover gallery, we'll be sticking exclusively to the '60s-'80s era of acquisition I've established for these galleries. The selections include books I bought new, back issues I acquired after the fact (but within the timeline), and B-stock contraband originally purchased without their covers. These aren't actual photos of comics in my collection; most images are courtesy of the Grand Comics Database, which is grand indeed. But I did have each and every one of 'em at some point in time.
B & B seeing you!
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