Kid Colt Outlaw #5: Unintentionally unnumbered

This digest-sized Yaffa issue of Kid Colt Outlaw does not have an issue number, nor a cover price, so I have always deemed it an unnumbered issue similar to many one-off recycled digests issued by Yaffa after the original run of the series expired.

I now believe it is #5 in the series, incorrectly unnumbered and also missing the cover price due to a printing or editing error.

The first indication of this is the 1981 indicia date, which sets it in the first phase of the Yaffa Marvel digest editions,

The second indication is that it fits in the gap in the Ausreprints.com cover gallery between #4 and #6. Kid Colt Outlaw #4 is a $0.60 issue, Kid Colt Outlaw #6 is a $0.70 issue. And assuming these issues were published in sequence, then a comparison with the Grand Comics Database cover gallery for the Kid Colt Outlaw series confirms this issue belongs between the covers selected for the Yaffa issues #4 and #6.

I'll be on the lookout for a legitimately unnumbered $0.75 recycled edition.

Speaking of which, I expect that the digest-sized Wild West Action is the unnumbered retitled edition of Kid Colt Outlaw #3 which is also missing from the Ausreprints.com cover gallery. I assume that this is a regular-sized issue but it's possible that it is a digest-sized issue. I look forward to pairing Wild West Action with Kid Colt Outlaw #3 and adding them to my Yaffa gallery of such pairings, which does include Kid Colt Outlaw #2 paired with Kid Colt Evens The Odds .

Update: I can confirm Wild West Action is indeed a reprint of Kid Colt Outlaw #3, a digest-sized issue.

The Tomb of Dracula: The complete Yaffa cover gallery

May I present, for your pleasure and edification, a complete cover gallery of the Yaffa/Page Publications The Tomb of Dracula series:

The series started c.1978, reprinting the main feature from the US The Tomb of Dracula (1972 series), and ran for 11 issues, the last of which was a reprint of the first issue, with a $1.10 cover price - a well-established pattern by Yaffa.

The first 4 issues and the last issue are regular sized, with 6 digest-sized issues filling out the series.

Newton Comics published a run of this series prior to Yaffa, but Yaffa did not replicate the Newton editions - and I'm glad they didn't, as it meant we got a #1 issue with the classic Neal Adams cover, albeit with an idiosyncratic colour scheme. I like the ghostly white of the castle and the red moon in the background of the Yaffa edition, compared to the dark grey castle and white moon on the original cover.  (And my inner Beatles geek cannot resist pointing out that the castle appears to be floating on a "sky of blue and sea of green"...)

It is possible there is another numbered issue in this series, say a reprint of #2, but I don't think so. More likely to find a retitled, unnumbered, digest-sized edition of #2 or another issue, as per the reprint of #3 as Night of the Vampire.

Thanks to Mark Cannon for supplying a couple of cover scans to complete my gallery, and as always AusReprints from which I sourced the cover to #11.

Yaffa digest gallery: Pairing up the retitled Yaffa digests - or, The centre is everywhere and no circumferance can be drawn

To state the obvious, collecting a complete run of a series is a challenge. Sure, some may take as little six months, but as serious collectors understand and accept, many take ten or twenty years or more.

I have full runs of titles running over 100 issues. I also have incomplete series with stubbornly elusive issues which have thwarted me from completing runs of less than 20 issues.

But at least they are a known quantity -  finite series with a neat, orderly number of consecutive issues, generally with a regular publishing frequency.

Collecting unnumbered or one-off issues is a different matter altogether. Firstly they need to be sighted for their existence to be confirmed. And you need to weave around dead ends such as dodgy databases or inhouse advertisements for non-existent issues. Then you need to secure a decent copy. Think Gredowns. Think Murray digest romance or western comics. Think some Newtons.

Then consider one-off, unnumbered, retitled digest Yaffa/Page issues. Random issues published towards the end of the licence, with no apparent schedule, no unifying volume number or series, and no existing complete checklist or index.  

You can draw a loose circle around, say, a couple of dozen or so, without knowing the full circumference.

I've posted on a few of these before, but I wanted to bring together in one place as many pairings as I could recall and identify. So, for the moment, enjoy this gallery of one-off, unnumbered, retitled Yaffa/Page digest issues, paired with their mother, and I'll add a few more notes at the end.

Still with me? Cool. Allow me to say some more about these images.

1. This is obviously not a complete gallery. I do have a few more one-off, retitled issues - or cover scans of issues - for which I have not yet identified matching original sources. I wanted to survey confirmed pairs only in this post.

2. There may also be a large range of Yaffa/Page issues and pairs with similar qualities to those above, but which are beyond my radar, such as Archie comics, which don't interest me.

3. Generally speaking, the covers and other images I post on this blog are from my own collection. I would say more than 90% are my own. Having said that, many of the images in this post in particular are from various sources, such as AusReprints, GCD, eBay, private collections, and other miscellaneous sources from ages ago too.

4. Given I don't have my usual access to all of these issues, I cannot guarantee that every retitled issue above is indeed a direct reprint of the original as far as the inner contents are concerned. I believe they are, given the track record of the issues to hand, but I must, in good faith, add the qualifier that I haven't confirmed it to be so for every single issue.

5. I'm aware that some of the Yaffa issues above had subsequent reprintings by Yaffa quite apart from the retitled digest editions eg. Master of Kung Fu #1. Such reprintings have been covered before and are a separate albeit related topic.

6. I alluded at the top of the post to the apparent randomness of the retitled issues. At times I've sensed or hypothesised an underlying order of sorts - that retitled issues followed directly from the end of the parent series, and were maybe even published sequentially sans numbering following the reprinting of the first issue as say the 10th issue of the regular series. This kind of makes sense, but there are examples where this does not apply so neatly. However, if and when these retitled issues are fully indexed, a pattern may become evident, and the circumference drawn.