Category: Books & Comics

Antiquing

September 20, 2025

We visited an antique show and a couple of antique shops today. I’m feeling poorly and tired since I got my Covid shot yesterday but there was a lot of cool things to see and that energized me. Here’s most of what we bought:

The left is a (wooden) box of postcards that was tied in such a way you couldn’t see the cards. For $5 I (of course) took a risk and it turned out to be a good buy since it was about 20 cards that will all be good for postcrossing. The right was a set of 12 ‘hotel’ cards that only cost a few dollars and will also be sent via postcrossing.

We bought these great stickers from an artist that specialized in dark and hellish art. If you want one of these let me know. I probably should bought a t-shirt…

More postcards, in this actual autographed cards from DJs of a NYC radio station. They seem quite old (1980s?) and the guy on the left is well-known enough to have his own Wikipedia page! I’ll be sending both of these home next time we go to NYC 🙂

This lot of old (70s and 80s) comics cost me $20, which is a good price considering they’re all in good condition and are even bagged and boarded. I think the seller just didn’t want to carry them back to his car after the show! I’m especially looking forward to reading the Godzilla ones.

This is a photo of two guys in a field – from May 1980 – that has been printed on the back to be a postcard! I wonder who these people are, and how their private photo ended up in a random box of stuff at an antique fair? Even though it’s flimsy (as old printed photos were) I’m certainly going to mail this one day and see if it arrives.

Kristin purchased this silver ‘uranium glass’ ring. The girl that crafted this gets her glass from the Czech Republic and the ring came with a black light so we could appreciate how it glows (photo on right).

It’s quite a niche: specializing in jewelry using uranium glass. And selling it outdoors on a sunny day is its own challenge, but hers was a unique display and KLS likes it even when not ‘glowing’.

Look at this weird puzzle postcard! The puzzle is inside a shallow plastic tray which is sealed in plastic and has a space to address and write on the other side. It’s hard to believe this would ever arrive safely, but of course I’m going to put that to the test.

The same guy I bought the comics from had these ten RPG handbooks, and I was interested in the GURPs Horror one. When I asked how much he said he’d sell me all ten books for $5, a deal so insane I couldn’t open my wallet fast enough. I like reading old RPG sourcebooks and these will last me years.

Last but not least is this set of 10 postcards that the seller described as ‘Chinese propaganda’. Of indeterminate age, they cost me only $2 and they are all printed on the front with the label ‘female Chinese soldiers‘. I took the seller at face value, but when I got them home and opened them I’m really wondering what these actually are.

The back of each – they are all unique – seems to have a short piece of fiction printed on it. The above screenshot is a translation and I’m sure you agree this doesn’t exactly seem like propaganda. Whatever these are, they’re strange and I love them. Want one?

I’ll end with an item I didn’t buy: this laughably long matchbook from Santa’s Workshop, which is a Christmas-themed ‘theme park’ north of hear close to Canada. Look at the length of this thing! If it was a third of the price, I probably would have bought it just because of how silly it is 🙂

As I said this was most of what we bought. I also picked up a couple of gifts that will remain secret, and KLS got some vegan cake and a cookie 🙂

Con Haul

August 26, 2025

Here are some of the items I got at the con. I’m not including the half dozen or so volumes of manga (mostly isekai trash) or the many stationary items (postcards and stickers) since I haven’t yet decided which will be gifts and you may even see a postcard in your mailbox one day.

The above is an English ‘special edition’ of the Weekly Young Magazine, a Japanese manga weekly from Kodansha. This is a hefty (1000+ pages) volume containing the first chapters of 14 series translated into English. Readers can vote on which ones they want to see serialized, but it’s unclear whether this format (an anthology magazine) will continue or if they’ll be serialized online.

This is a beautiful book, printed in Japan and with the same feel as the Japanese anthologies. I had to join a longish line to get one (for free) at the con, and the next day I saw a big pile just sitting around for the taking at Kinokuniya in the city!

This is a vinyl figure of a kaiju that I bought from the designer. The monster itself is from an old (1980s) Korean film which I’d never heard of, but the guy who designed this figure also designed two of the kaiju in the recent Godzilla x Kong film and had a few impressive 3D prints of his work on display. His was a somewhat out-of-place booth for an anime con but I’d been looking for a vinyl kaiju figure and this one wasn’t expensive and scratched the itch.

There were hundreds of anime figures available, almost all of the prize variety. I’ve got loads of these BiCute girls, and picked up the above two at the con. Prices were extremely good – possibly due to competition? – and had I more space I probably would have bought more.

Bandai had a display and shop for Gundam kits, as well as an area where you could sit and make a beginners version for free. I charmed the dude into letting me take one! I like that it’s on a single runner, and will certainly assemble it one day.

I got the above clear file at the Japan Tourist Board exhibit. I was just throwing all the free handouts into my bag and didn’t even notice it was a clear file until I got back to the hotel. It promotes a 2022 short anime that reimagines Japanese castles as transforming robots, which was partially funded by local tourism agencies.

Loads of exhibitors were selling TCG cards, mostly Pokemon and One Piece, but one booth seemed to specialize in Weiss. I’d been considering buying a Weiss box for a while, they had them for a decent price, so I bought this Nikke one. I’ll let it age a year or few before opening.

Speaking of TCGs there were also a few being launched at the con. They all had the whiff of scam about them – companies wanting to cash in on the current TCG mania – but I wasn’t going to decline a free promo card. Maybe I can sell it for a fortune and retire one day. Or maybe not 😉

I’ve put most of ‘the cute stuff’ together. This is what I bought specifically for Kristin, and all of it came from artist alley booths. The envelope with Korean text is a blind pack of animal stickers, and the frog pin was also a blind box item. The bottom left is a capybara coaster. Had KLS been with me we would have purchased much more like this!

Even though it wasn’t a con purchase, here’s a bonus pic: dollar-bin comics purchased at Midtown Comics. I have no interest in recent superhero comics, but always find the late 80s and early 90s stuff a fun read. I wonder which of these will be best and which worst?

Japan Pickups: Gamebooks

June 27, 2025

It was a good Japan trip as far as my gamebook collection goes, with both old and new products found. This post lists everything I bought.

I’ve got a lot of Japanese Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (about 2/3rds of the original run) but somehow the third book – Forest Of Doom – had eluded me. I was surprised to find a copy for very cheap (¥1000) at Mandarake.

According to the publication history, this is the 17th edition from March 1986. For a nearly 40-year-old book it’s in astonishingly good condition, as if it just came off the press.

Japanese FF books included pull-out adventure sheets and this is perhaps the best example I have yet seen. I don’t think this book was ever opened, much less read, and it’s now got a permanent home in my collection.

I also bought the book on the left, which shares the cover art of Dungoneer, the first rulebook for the Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG. The Japanese book has a different title (Advanced Fighting Fantasy volume 1) and is slightly shorter, with some material removed. It seems Japan compressed the three AFF volumes into two, but there’s detail here I have yet to discover. Again this book was extremely inexpensive (¥500!) which shocked me since I wouldn’t have hesitated to pay twenty or more times as much.

I finally found the 4th Group SNE FF reprint box set, which allegedly published early in 2024 but I had never seen in my previous three trips. This collects the Sorcery! set and Secrets Of Salamonis, which receives its first Japanese printing here.

These trade-sized reprints continue to be definitive, with beautiful presentation, paper quality and reproduction. The bonus book in this set is unsurprisingly the Sorcery Spell Book.

Even though I already owned five (!) complete sets of the Sorcery series (including the Japanese versions from 1985 and 2004) I’m happy to add this new set to my collection.

To my surprise there was also a fifth reprint box set available! I later learned this one was only just released, which explains why I saw it in many bookstores. It contains a collection of five books, including two new to Japan: Howl Of The Werewolf and Crystal Of Storms.

Two of these are particular interesting. Starship Traveler hasn’t been reprinted in over two decades, and it’s long been rumoured the reason was due both the cover and internal art. This reprint seems to confirm both, with a new cover and new internal art:

The copyright page reveals the art was taken from the TinMan digital version of the book, and while the style is different from the line art common to the series, the reproduction is excellent and overall I think it suits the book well.

Scorpion Swamp has never been reprinted (in any language), and there have been a few theories as to why including art or the author not allowing it. And yet here it is, with a new cover and internal art:

The above picture contains the original art on the left and the art from this reprint on the right. As you can see the artist (who also did the art for Secret Of Salamonis) has drawn new versions of all the old pieces, and his style matches the series perfectly. The art is copyrighted 2025 to Ian Livingstone and I suspect this was done to enable future reprints, possibly including in the new American Steve Jackson Games versions? Let’s hope this means the other books that have never been reprinted will see new versions as well.

Moving away from Fighting Fantasy, to my surprise I found this:

This is a gamebook based on the Xevious arcade game! I would have thought this was somewhat well-known amongst hardcore gamebook collectors (how many exist?) and therefore I was surprised it only cost me ¥1000.

Flipping through it is most definitely a robust gamebook with inventory and systems, almost certainly modeled after a FF book. Even though it’s a different publisher, the back of the book even includes ads for other gamebooks including FF and the Back To The Future one I bought a few years ago.

What a strange beast this book is! The art inside shows almost no space battles, instead seeming like a standard adventure with fights against monsters and villains. Xevious also had some novels written about it, but I don’t know if there’s any connection between those and this gamebook.

Speaking of space-themed Gamebooks, the above was almost inadvertently found in a bargain bin at BookOff and cost a mere ¥100! I thought it was Star Wars related at first, and was shocked to realize it was a gamebook.

This is an interesting CYOA style book where each section has at least a half-page illustration. The text seems simple enough that I think this will be playable with a translator. While it’s not licensed item, the Star Wars ‘homages’ are obvious, from the cover to the hero’s robot which looks exactly like R2. Based on an add on the final page, this seems to be the first in a series of two books; I’ll be looking out for the other on future trips!

And lastly we have a Queen’s Blade book, Alicia the Dark User of Wonderland. I’ve got a lot of these two-player books which sprung from a US series called Lost World but took on a life of its own when rebranded with anime girls in Japan. I see these occasionally in Japan but often skip them since they’re a bit heavy and I don’t want to fill my suitcases with them 🙂

Robot Claw