Blondie Daily Strip, 14 Jan 1933, The Twelth Day of Dagwood's Hunger Strike

Collecting Blondie, cont.

At some point in the early 1990s, things really began to pick up when it came to finding Blondies by Raymond, in particular hunger strike dailies. I had met Scott Dunbier in person at the 1991 San Diego con ... I had previously only bought a page from Demon No. 8 from him through the mail. In the course of buying many Infinity Gauntlet pages from Scott, he started to learn what other comic art I was looking for and we soon became friends. Scott found my best Blondie Sunday page by Raymond [art-wise, if not in subject]. which was owned by Jeanette Kahn, the publisher of D.C. Comics at the time. I bought it during a break in a deposition on one of my cases. Not long after, on a trip to NYC in the spring of 1993, Scott took me to meet with Kahn in her office, and she sold me the Blondie for the day after the hunger strike. She had bought both the Sunday and the daily from Russ Cochran; how, I don't know, since I don't believe that either ever appeared in a Graphic Galley or auction catalogue. After my first trip to D.C.'s headquarters [which just didn't impress me as much as it would have if it had been 10 years earlier, when D.C. comics meant so much more to me], Scott and I went by Sotheby's, where Jerry Weist showed me the Justice Society pin-up from JLA #86. Scott ended up bidding and buying the Anderson for me when it came up at auction a few months later.

And then the floodgates opened. No longer worried about either Blondies by Raymond or Barney Googles being a bit overpriced [they had both gone from around $350 in the late 1980s to the special price range, just for me, of about $3,000 each by the early 1990s. Great examples were being offered to me all the time. One day, I was innocently sitting in my office when two faxes arrived close in time to each other. They both showed the Blondie for January 27, 1933, which would become one of my favorites of the 24 strips in the series. One of the faxes came from Jack Gilbert, who had by then become aware of my existence and of my interest in Blondies. The other came from Bruce Bergstrom, a major dealer in comic strips from Florida, who I believe Don Phelps had told that I was collecting the strip. Bruce was the actual owner, and he was asking somewhat less for the daily. I called him, and Bruce told me that the guy with the first two Blondies was interested as well. I thought he was talking about the first two hunger strike dailies, which was impossible, since I had owned the first one for several years. In any event, I bought the strip from Bruce. When I later spoke to Jack, he clarified that the other interested collector was the guy who owned the first two Blondies, not the hunger strikes. I believe that Jack was the one who gave me the name and number of my previously unknown competitor. Continued...