A few years ago I began what was essentially a report on comic book pedigrees. Most of the information is collected "second-hand", which is why it is a "report". Here is the first installment; the River City pedigree!

Below is a Marines in Action #12 CGC 9.0 from the River City pedigree; check out the Devil Dog in the background slugging the Red right in the face! YEAH! "Classic left uppercut cover" if I do say so myself.

River City

The River City collection primarily consisted of comics from the 1950s, covering a wide variety of titles with an emphasis on horror and sci-fi books. The collection is largely unaccounted for, but is estimated to have numbered over 4,000 books. In addition there were also various toys, pulps and comic strips. The books can be identified by a mark most of them carry which is a distribution marking on the front cover. The marking is handwritten in pencil, blue ballpoint or grease pencil and is an “S” or an “L” followed by month and day separated by hyphens. Due to being stored in an outdoor shed some of the books show wear from exposure to the elements, most often with tanned edges.

The River City collection first surfaced in early 1998 when a widow in Sacramento, California contacted Charlie Zimmer and Ed Hanson (two local estate dealers) to sell some “stuff” that her late husband had accumulated. The woman initially wanted only to sell some of the collection, so only a portion of the collection was sold. The two bought a chunk of the collection, and then referred her to Brian Peets of A-1 Comics in Sacramento, who eventually bought the remaining comics. The books were made public by Peets in 1998 at the WonderCon convention. Unfortunately, both this collection and the generally higher prized Spokane collection surfaced at about the same time which hurt the recognition this collection received at the time. While the River City collection is not the overall best when compared to other pedigrees such as Mile High and Spokane, it does have some of the top tier books, such as its famed copy of Startling Terror Tales #11.