The Bottorff ComicBacks Price Guide & Checklist 2025 Edition
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A wonderful and much needed comics information source is now available to the public at large!
Years (decades) ago Ray Bottorff, Jr. began compiling a list of comic-related mass market paperbacks, for which he coined the term ComicBacks™, and sharing his findings with others interested in that specialized field.
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.
Now, aided and abetted by Mike Rhode, Bottorff has produced and published online at The Internet Archive The Bottorff ComicBacks Price Guide & Checklist 2025 Edition!
While the price guide portion may be the attraction to some it is the wealth of information about “ComicBacks” that Ray has assembled that fascinates and draws me to this encyclopedia.
So while it is easy for Peanuts and MAD fans to find bibliographies of those books and other popular comic strip “pocket book” reprints, here we can find Channel Chuckles, Big George, Saturday Evening Post, True, Mr. Mum, and a host of other obscure cartoon mass market paperbacks.
I still have one of Ray’s early lists saved on my computer’s drive, but this is much expanded and updated.
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