Dear Santa Week, Part 7: More Fun Comics #73

We end Santa Week where it all began for Aquaman: More Fun Comics #73, November 1941, where he debuted (as well as Green Arrow and Speedy!), created by Mort "Really Unpleasant" Weisinger and Paul Norris (who now gets a "created by" credit on Aquaman solo stories, which is pretty cool).

Oddly, for being such a big Aquaman fan, I'm not all that interested in collecting his comic appearances--I don't have full-runs of any of his solo series (except the current one), or his long runs in Adventure Comics or Action Comics. In any case, collecting the More Fun appearances would be financially prohibitive, so I've never even tried.

I used to have a comic collection that hit around 15,000 books, and I had some real heavy-hitters, too: Avengers #1, Spider-Man #2, Daredevil #1, X-Men #1, old 40's issues of Detective Comcs, Action Comics #252 (first appearance of Supergirl), Showcase #34 (first appearance of Atom), Teen Titans #1, etc., and I sold them all to help pay for art school (except for my complete run of Justice League of America--they are what one friend called "the Kelly Family heirlooms"), so ever since then I've been out of the whole comic-collecting-as-a-hobby thing.

The one exception I would make is for this book. To own this issue, where Aquaman first debuted, so quietly and unassumingly (he never even appeared on a DC cover until the 60s), would be, to me, the topper to my collection. I believe the Overstreet Guide lists it as "rare" and worth somewhere around $75,000, I think, so the odds I'll ever own even a very beat-up copy are slim, but if Santa wants to be really nice to me this year...