No… not some designer drug of the week confiscated by Crockett and Tubbs, this ‘Peruvian Blue’ refers to a great collection of South American Blue Demon comics that came and went quietly on eBay several weeks back.
You guys know that I love eBay because you can find so much amazing vintage stuff on the site for a low price! On top of that, I usually have an eBay coupon I can use to save even more money – it’s brilliant! I find it to be brilliant since you not only have the option of buying vintage items but also selling them and making huge profits if you have a good collection. Well, you may need not worry about calculating how much profit you made as you can take advantage of eBay profit calculator by simply entering a few required values. Someday, when I’m ready to get rid of my vintage possessions, I might try that out.
I’ve shown you guys a bunch of comics and wrestling memorabilia that I’ve gotten from eBay in the past and hope to show you more in the future. The only issue with eBay is that the moment you stop looking, something you want will get put up on auction and you’ll miss it! Just like I missed the bidding for this Peruvian Blue collection, and the only one that sold was issue #1, for a single opening bid, so I wasn’t alone in missing this golden opportunity.
I did, however, manage to snag the images from the auction pages, and they’re just too good not to preserve here.
The seller had frustratingly little info in their broken-English descriptions, so I don’t even know what era these are from. They seem a decade or so older than the more familiar 70s/80s fotonovela fare from South America.
Just like his first film in Mexico, this comic series offers the redundantly translated “Blue Demon: Demonio Azul” title — I always got a kick out of the ‘Blue Demon: The Demon Who Is Blue’ deal.
The seller scanned back covers as well, but alas no interior pages. This leads to A LOT of questions arising the more you look at these, too. Take the below backs, with colorized fotonomontaje art from inside as excerpts:
Colorized panels like this must have lent promise to color interiors, but I’m assuming the insides were single color — likely sepia-toned — if not plain black.
In contrast these covers feature line art comics, rather European-looking too. Wondering if these books mixed lucha-hero adventures with reprinted crime comics from elsewhere around the globe?
But… BUT… Note the line art towards bottom right of the cover above, with wrestling masks that look like they were drawn OVER an illustration of characters not previously masked. Were pages and panels lucha-hero-ized for this series???
These particular illos of Blue look original, rather legit…
…but several other covers have somewhat dubious illustrations, with slightly out of scale heads on the hero, elements looking cobbled together, etc.
What was going on here?
Then there are other covers with artistic, photographic and even cinematic elements:
And other covers were just… bad, and even downright scary wrong!
Cover techniques and medium mixing all over the place. I’m so confused… and SO PISSED OFF I didn’t score any of these, dammit!!!
Look at how cool some of these back cover souvenir mask ads are:
Fan letters and fan art too! What kiddo wouldn’t want to write a heartfelt letter to Blue Demon’s amazing taint? And evidently identity theft wasn’t an issue in Peru…
I love posting these to share with all my fellow sufferers who missed this auction, but man putting this together is kind of bumming me out. That’s what I get for taking my eye off of eBay for a few days. Sniff…
