Adventures of the Jaguar #9 p1 (1962) John Rosenberger Jaguar flying towards monstrous threat

Adventures of the Jaguar #9 p1 (1962) John Rosenberger

This original art is especially precious to me as it comes from the first part of my comic collecting origin story. When I was very young my introduction to comics came from my ventures into the basement closet located beneath the steps leading downstairs. It housed all the toys and treasures left behind by my older brother and sister (we are separated by over a decade). It was full of games and boxes and toys. Being located under the steps some things were far out of reach initially as the area got smaller and smaller with many boxes and the descending steps. As I played as I got older, I began to pull out and explore what was further into the closet. Along the way I found remnants of comic books that my brother read when he was young. They ended up just thrown in there on the top or sides or inside of the boxes. My love of those comics was immediate, and I read them over and over. I can remember going down there pulling out more and more boxes over time always hoping to find more comics although I think in the end there were only a dozen or so. What a sad day it was when I got to that last bottom step in the closet with nothing more to explore and no hope of further comic treasures. And not even knowing that they still made new comic books (which would eventually lead to part two of my three-part comic collecting origin) Somewhere in my comic collection I know I have a small bag with some of those original issues.

Among those treasures I found was a coverless copy of the comic that contains this artwork. And since it was coverless, the image in this artwork is the image I first saw and is burned into my mind, along with the other pages from this comic. I believe this is the oldest comic found, and they ranged until 1966. Most of them were DC Comics but this one is from Archie.

This past year or two Heritage began regularly selling pages from the Archie Comics superhero comic line from this time period. I regularly checked them hoping to see a page... any page... from this comic go up for sale. None appeared. Then in a specialty auction I saw an image from this issue pop up and nearly stroked out when I realized all the original artwork from the entire issue up for sale broken up into stories. Frankly I wish it had been spread out over multiple auctions and by the page, but I just hoped I'd be able to win at least one lot. I believe going into the auction this story had the highest bid already on it, but I just started bidding and it closed with me winning!!! Hooray!!!!!

These are big art pages and will not fit on my scanner, so I downloaded the Heritage pics. I've included a second scan that contains pages 2-8 which perhaps I will list separately when I have time to scan them individually with a scanning app. Jaguar appears prominently in every page of this story using his powers, savings innocents, confronting monstrous animals and fighting a rock creature culminating with a light-hearted silver age ending... everything a young tyke would love. I know I sure did.