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.
