Posted in: Comics, Current News, Heritage Sponsored, Marvel Comics, Vintage Paper | Tagged: All True Romance, davis crippen, don heck

Don Heck's Substitute Bride in All True Romance #13, Up for Auction

All True Romance #13 from Allen Hardy's Comic Media cover features the story Substitute Bride by the legendary Don Heck.

Published Sun, 04 Feb 2024 09:47:09 -0600

by Rich Johnston

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Article Summary

All True Romance #13, illustrated by Don Heck, is up for auction in a CGC 6.5 grade.
Comic Media's titles featured Heck before he joined Marvel and co-created icons.
The issue comes from Davis Crippen's "D" collection, one of the largest Golden Age archives.
Discovery of the "D" comics solved a theft mystery, though the perpetrator remains unknown.

Comic Media was a fifties comic book publisher owned by former Harvey Comics circulation manager Allen Hardy that mostly published action-adventure, Western, and horror comics, including Johnny Dynamite, created by Pete Morisi. Morosi and fellow Comic Media star Don Heck had also come from the Harvey Comics production department. Heck worked across all the publishers' titles until 1955 when he was headhunted by Stan Lee to Atlas Comics, the forerunner of Marvel, where he would co-create Iron Man, Hawkeye, and Black Widow. Comic Media sold its titles and characters to Charlton Comics. However, All True Romance would be sold to Farrell Comic Group, who would publish it from 1955 to 1958. But up for auction at Heritage Auction is one of those earlier All True Romance #13 comics from 1953, drawn by Don Heck. With a CGC slab in 6.5 condition.

All True Romance #13 Davis Crippen ("D" Copy) Pedigree (Comic Media, 1953) CGC FN+ 6.5 Cream to off-white pages. Don Heck and Kenneth Landau art. Overstreet 2023 FN 6.0 value = $42; VF 8.0 value = $80. CGC census 1/24: 1 in 6.5, 1 higher.

Part of comic book collector Davis Crippen's "D" Golden Age collection, it was second in size only to the Edgar Church/Mile High collection, 13,000 issues that included near complete titles from every company and genre between 1940 and 1955, from when he was a young boy until he entered the army. Discovered en masse in 2005 by Davis's son Tom Crippen when he was cleaning out his parents' house in Piermont, New York, he came upon thousands of books from the 30s, 40s and 50s. But, while cataloguing them, also that around two thousand of the comics were stolen from the collection. In 1991 they were sold to a number of New York dealers, each copy identified with the penciled letter D at the top of the first page of each comic, as well as a code as to how it sat in the collection. Once Davis Crippen died and the rest of his collection was sold in 2006, that theft and the origin of the D pencil mark, standing for Davis, was revealed, and the mystery was solved. Though not who stole those comics; that is believed to be contractors who worked on Crippen's property.