Saturday, January 30, 2010

Three Psycho's for the price of three...




If you're a reprint content reader/collector rather than a series completist, then I offer a small word of caution: Don't buy any Yaffa/Page Skywald reprints without a checklist, or at least without checking the contents between the covers, otherwise you'll find yourself with a mass of duplicated material.

Page Publications Pty Ltd published over a dozen issues of the Skywald series Psycho, but many of these issues were recycled copies of previously published issues. Generally you could assume an unnumbered issue with a $1.00 or $1.10 cover price had an earlier numbered counterpart. Yet even a high numbered issue with a $1.00 cover price was just as likely to be a reissue of an earlier 50c cover price edition (for example #'s 12 and 4 respectively).

However, even these two rules of thumb are not enough to guide the intrepid collector. Take the case of Page's Psycho #8. This is virtually a facsimile of Skywald's Psycho #14 (with some minor re-ordering of contents and omission of a text piece).

This 60c cover price issue was actually published earlier by Page as #6 in the series, with a 50c cover price under a different cover (see above). I'm not sure where this other cover was sourced from - it looks like the work of Mario Nava based on his art in this issue, so maybe it's from another Skywald issue - but it doesn't end there, for Psycho #6 was later reissued as an unnumbered edition with a $1.10 cover price. This latter edition by Yaffa Publishing Group Pty. Ltd. has bare inner covers and rear cover, but apart from this and the price and the altered indicia, is identical to Psycho #6.

In other words, the one Skywald issue was reprinted three (if not more!) times within the one nominal Yaffa/Page series.

This is sport, or fun and games for those of us curious about these Australian reprints from the 1970's/80's, but something of a minefield for the unwary seeker of cheap reading reprints.

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