STAY TUNED FOR RIPLEY'S BELIEVE IT OR NOT! WEEK. The mammoth "Joker July" feature is over. Now it's time for the comic cover of the day feature over on the right hand column to focus on the classic Gold Key comic book "Ripley's Believe It Or Not!". As a kid, very early I somehow managed to pick up several of those beloved Ripley's Believe It Or Not! paperback books reprinting the classic old newspaper comic strips done by Robert Ripley himself; so I was certainly familiar with Ripley before I first encountered the Gold Key comic book based on the same feature. The comic book, of course, dealt with ghost stories and sported those delectable painted covers. The very first issue of the Gold Key Ripley comic I ever came across was issue #52 pictured below. This issue featured the cover story of the "Beggar Woman of Locarno" which made quite an impression on me: a ghost story with a moral. I still have this issue and I bought it when I was nine years old in 1975. My grandmother and I used to walk from their huge Victorian house in Pennsauken, NJ up Westfield Avenue (past the old Walt Whitman Theatre built by my great grandfather) for untold blocks until we'd reach Thor's Drug Store. There I would buy candy, Black Jack gum, "You'll Die Laughing" monster bubble gum cards, Wacky Packs, and comic books. Here is where I snatched RIPLEY'S BELIEVE IT OR NOT! #52 off the spinning comic rack. I remember taking it upstairs to the second floor of my grandparents' house where my great grandfather Poppie Bear lived and reading it on his scratchy green couch. There is Poppie Bear. And there is the green scratchy couch. And there is me looking slightly younger than 9 but you get the idea.

Anyway, starting Sunday the Daily Comic Book Cover feature over there on the right will be dedicated to Gold Key's "RIPLEY'S BELIEVE IT OR NOT!" comic covers all week. Don't miss it. . .or you may be haunted!