Introducing the Bottorff Comic Backs Price Guide & Checklist 2025 Edition

 Years ago, Ray Bottorff, Jr and I were members of the Grand Comics Database, and wrote a paper on the origins of the group. Years have gone by since we've worked on anything together, even though he lives about 10 miles from me. Recently I reached out to him with a question about his longtime bibliography which he's been working on for a long time. We chatted on the phone for almost an hour and put together a version for distribution on the Internet Archive. Here's the link, and an excerpt from Ray's introduction.

 The Bottorff Comic Backs Price Guide & Checklist 2025 Edition
Ray Bottorff, Jr.
Greenbelt, MD: Ray Bottorff, Jr.
https://archive.org/details/the-bottorff-comic-backs-price-guide-checklist-2025-edition

What Exactly Is a ComicBack?

Basically, it is a neologism meaning a cartoon or comic related mass-market-sized paperback. In 2001, I was going through my two boxes of comic paperbacks and discovered that no one had done anything cataloging them. A little bit of brainstorming later, I came up with the term for them, ComicBacks. 

I decided to record all printings and editions that I could. I began with the obvious choices, comic strip and comic book reprint paperbacks, which are still the vast bulk of my listings. Then it became clear I needed to add new and reprint cartoon paperbacks. Then prose novels of comic characters which had been in vogue then. With a bit of mission creep, that was followed by prose novels of those proto-superheroes, pulp hero reprint paperbacks, which expanded to include new paperback stories of those characters, and then new prose novels about non-comic originating superheroes or superhero themed paperbacks. Then I added movie and TV show novelizations based on comic characters. Dime Novel hero reprints joined the list. I was adding joke books with cartoon or cartoon-like illustrations and paperback books about the history of all of the above and animation. That led to adding animated-related paperbacks and paperback comic book price guides. As I write this, there are over 9400 entries in my ComicBacks listings, with probably hundreds, if not thousands of titles and printings, to still identify and add to this list.