La Reina de la Costa Negra

Here are some scarce covers of a mexican adaptation of R.E Howard's hero, Conan (with Belit). 60 issues from 1959 by Joma publisher. I found 2 of them in a Paris bookstore. True!

Nintendo toys pre-1980

Here you have a cool collection of nintendo games, years before they date their first video games. Nintendo started as a small Japanese business by Fusajiro Yamauchi near the end of 1889 as Nintendo Koppai. Nintendo was originally named Marufuku. Based in Kyoto, the business produced and marketed a playing card game called Hanafuda. The cards, which were all handmade, soon began to gain popularity, and Yamauchi had to hire assistants to mass produce cards to keep up with demand. In 1933, Sekiryo Yamauchi established a joint venture with another company and renamed the company Yamauchi Nintendo & Company. The name “Nintendo,” means “entrust luck to the heavens” and “do what is humanly possible and leave the rest to fate". Since the original owner of the company is deceased, the exact details of the name are not clear. Around 1965, riddled with debt, Nintendo struggled to survive in the Japanese toy industry; it was still small at this point, and dominated by already well established companies such as Bandai and Tomy. Because of the generally short product life cycle of toys, the company always had to come up with new products. This was the beginning of a major new era for Nintendo.

Paris catacombs flyers

Like most cities, at least in Europe, Paris has huge subterranean cavities, built in 2000 years of history for many purposes: quarries, religious hideout, beer cellars, subways and bunkers. Most of the excavations are located at the base of the three "mountains": Montparnasse, Montrouge and Montsouris. There are approximately 300km of galleries all together, not all of them are connected. The most extended connected system of tunnels is located under the 5th, 6th and 14th districts, and is about 100km long.
The name catacombs is derived from the usage as graves. This name is sometimes used for all the underground caverns of Paris, but the tourist spot, open to the public, are the graves. They do not really promote them to tourists, but they are open to the public.
At the end of the 18th century, the government began converting several subterranean rooms into mass graves. This was necessary to meet desperate overcrowding in the medieval cemeteries in the center of Paris, which also became a hygienic problem. From 1785 to 1786, in 15 months, millions of bones and rotting corpses were tranported from the unsanitary city cemetery in Les Halles to this place. It was a monumental project to transport the bones in huge carts at night across the city.
And here they are, in huge piles, arranged as crosses, as faces and in other different configurations. Above the door outside are the words (in French): Stop! This is the empire of death. This bone collection of 5 to 6 million people has 11,000m².
Just before the Revolution, Charles X threw wild parties in the catacombs. During World War II the French Resistance set up its headquarters here. Today modern troglodytes "cataphiles" (cave dwellers) again have parties in the underground. There are raves and restaurants, and of course all kind of subculture you may imagine. Regular patrol of the police is futile, as there are virtually hundreds of kilometers of underground tunnels. These flyers are from various french cataphiles.

Johnny Ryan's horror art

Cartoonist Johnny Ryan has an exhibition, "Horrorshow", featuring almost 50 paintings inspired by a variety of whacked-out horror, cult and exploitation films. Johnny first developed his hilarious drawings in the self-published title Angry Youth Comix. Now published by Fantagraphics Books, Ryan's AYC has become the international bastion of lowbrow humor cartooning. Ryan's utterly unpretentious taboo-tackling is an infectious bombardment of political incorrectness.

Good taste postcards

Go directly to the kitsh postcards kingdom. Mainly french but still a universal message!

Vault of Evil comics

This was a 1970's horror comic book series from Marvel Comics with twenty-three issues in total. The series ran from February 1973 to November 1975 and is but one of several reprint Horror and Monster comics that Marvel published after the Comics Code Authority, (CCA), loosened its' stringent rules and policies. Several of the stories reprinted were from pre-Marvel Comics days, when the company was known as Atlas Comics. I'm collecting them, so...

The Invaders - Gold Key

Gold Key Comics published four issues of an Invaders comic book based upon the TV series in 1967-68, years before Marvel Comics published their own, unrelated Invaders superhero series. Here they are!