Dark Horse Comics has released the second volume of Little Annie Fanny, collecting the wonderful feature that Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder did (with the occasional help of others) for Playboy. It's kind of hard to believe that this was once a naughty comic strip but it was. Back in our old Comic Book Club, circa '68, we used to have contests, in game show format, of funnybook knowledge. The prize was always some old comic of modest value and, one week, one of our members won a copy of the first Annie Fanny paperback collection. Problem: The member was 14 years old and, though he loved the thing, he knew his folks would regard it as hard-core pornography since, after all, it had the occasional naked woman in it.
His folks also routinely searched his room so he dared not bring it home. The solution? He immediately offered it up for sale to any other club member. New problem: Since our members knew he had to sell it, they all made lowball offers. I think the book retailed for around $9.95 and our members — who wanted the book but more wanted to see this guy squirm — offered him fifty cents for it, escalating to about a dollar. "But it's worth ten dollars," he kept pleading, as if we were somehow obligated to pay him that or something in the vicinity. He actually got mad because none of us would make him what he considered a real offer.
This went on all afternoon. He had to sell it but he got increasingly upset that he couldn't sell this book — which had cost him nothing in the first place — for what he believed to be its true value. Finally, if only to put him out of his misery, I made him an offer: Three dollars…but my offer was only good for two minutes. He threw a tantrum, accused me of shamelessly exploiting him, begged anyone else to offer more…and then, one minute and fifty seconds after my timed offer, he took my three bucks.
I still have that copy and it's quite nice…vastly superior in its reproduction to the current volumes. The first of the new ones was disappointing and this one is actually poor in some places. But unlike previous reprintings, these collections are complete and feature articles and examples of preliminaries and other bonus materials by Elder and Kurtzman. The supplementals are worth the price, just by themselves. So I bought the books and you might want to, as well. You can give us a cut by ordering from Amazon.Com. Click here to buy Volume One or click here to buy Volume Two. And if you look around, you'll probably find one of those zowie Amazon offers to purchase both at the same time for a savings of one cent or less.