Tuesday, September 27, 2011

October 1971: Avengers #95

Courtesy of The Warrior's Comic Book Den, where the entire issue was recently reposted, I'll take the opportunity to actually re-read this one for this look back.
But before I do, let me try to remember what attracted me to this, my first sampling of Marvel Comics.
Actually, it's pretty easy to remember: I opened it up and took a look inside, and there, on the splash page, was a gorgeous rendition of a superhero that looked like the freaking Creature from the Black Lagoon! I'd eventually learn that this was Triton, one of the Inhumans, a secluded tribe of superpowered beings created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee years earlier in Fantastic Four. I didn't need to know that, now, though, all I needed was artist Neal Adams' irresistible rendition of the character to make the sale.
Despite the overload of colorful characters, which I surely appreciated, I remember being disappointed to read it and find that this was not only a middle chapter of a continued saga, with no satisfying resolution, but that it also continued from a different comic book that I'd never heard of or seen before (that is, the Inhumans series that had recently been dropped from the Amazing Adventures comic book series). From what I could piece together, I wanted to read this Inhumans lead-in, but I knew that there was no way for me to get it now.
Despite the disappointment, I must observe that I had been pretty lucky so far in my selections of first comics, sampling some of the best artists--Kirby, Adams, Anderson--ever to work in the business. And art would always be a primary point of interest, although I certainly would pull lots of third-rate examples off the spinner rack in years to come.
And now, off to actually read the comic again...!

September, 1971: Justice League of America #94

JLA #94 must have arrived in early September, because I remember reading it on a very sunny summer day. I read it out loud to my friend Kevin Quinn who lived down the street, while we played in a large cardboard box in his back yard. I remember being a bit scared and a bit emboldened to have the excuse to read the word "hell" out loud, because it was in the script to this issue.
This comic book confused the heck out of me. It was my first DC comic that wasn't self-contained, as this issue, as I was later to learn, was wrapping up loose ends from the Deadman backup in the cancelled Aquaman comic. This "Deadman" character impressed me a lot, probably in part because all of his appearances in this issue were drawn by Neal Adams, who was obviously a step above the less dazzling Dick Dillin, who drew all of the non-Deadman pages in the comic. But besides the art, the idea behind Deadman (a ghost who could possess living humans) and the audacity of his name (seriously, "Deadman"?! That's a real superhero?!) struck my fancy.
I was less impressed with Merlyn, an archer villain who debuted in this issue (although I remember assuming he had been around already; I wasn't accustomed to the idea that actual new characters could even be introduced to the comic books!).
In the back of this 48-pager were reprints of the first appearances of Starman and the Sandman, both from the 1940's. I know that I wasn't the only young reader who absolutely loved the Sandman's unconventional "costume", which consisted of a mismatched double-breasted business suit and hat with a gas mask. Later, I could never figure out why they would have ever put him in a boring yellow and purple union suit. While I loved the Sandman's look and gimmick (he put his enemies to sleep with a gas gun), the story wasn't impressive enough to stick with me, and this first appearance, contrary to the cover, wasn't really an "origin" story. The Starman story, though, was a geniune origin, the first one I got to read! "Origin" stories, which tell who the hero is and how he came to be, have always been important ones to comic book fans, maybe the most important, when routine adventures fail to live up to the initial promise of an exciting concept. Anyway, the Starman tale told me how Ted Knight invented his incredible "gravity rod".  Well, I guess the tale just told me that he invented the gravity rod, but that was good enough for me, that and seeing a hero debut in a newly-designed costume (although the maskless red-and-green outfit with the boring star as a chest emblem didn't exactly thrill me).

Thursday, September 1, 2011

September, 1971: Action Comics #406

As the summer vacation came closer to its end, and I prepared to enter 6th grade at Whitney Elementary School in Memphis, Tennessee, it was becoming apparent that more and more of the spare change I could get my hands on would be going toward comic books. With this purchase, I was staying in familiar territory: good ol' Superman, but with my favored monster-leaning touches, in this case, the headless ghost of the Man of Steel, and, once again, I took advantage of the more generous DC 48 page package to insure that I got plenty of reading material. I plucked this one off the spinner rack of the Big Star supermarket on the corner of James Road and Overton Crossing, while my mother did some quick shopping. I remember that place fondly; in the 60's and early 70's, there was not only the comic book rack to tempt a restless child, but at the checkout, there were displays of lots of goodies: Bubblegum cards featuring Wacky Packages, Batman, and sports stars, paddle balls, monster finger puppets, plenty of Wham-O products like the Wheel-O and Monster Magnet, Superballs, Clackers, yo-yos, and candy. And of course if you couldn't afford any of those, or talk mom into buying them, there were machines ready to accept any pennies you might have saved up for jawbreakers and gumballs.
I don't remember much about the lead story here, "The Ghost that Haunted Clark Kent," but I do vaguely recall the effective atmosphere generated by artists Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson. I flipped for the backup reprint, featuring a team-up of Flash and the Atom, from an old issue of The Brave and the Bold. I really liked the Atom a lot; his unique power of shrinking fascinated me, and between him and the Flash, we had two of my favorite costume designs of the Silver Age. There was also something that always intrigued me about one of the visual effects that was prominent this story, when the Flash was being absorbed into an "expanding planet", that is, as drawn by artist Alex Toth, the Flash being sucked bodily into a large sphere, sinking beneath its surface, like Patrick McGhoohan's The Prisoner being overtaken by the sinister "Rover". Those kinds of images would often prove an irresistable and haunting draw to my young eyes, and would crop up in more than a few comic books. In fact, a similar image had already been burned into my mind, in a comic book I had glanced at years earlier: Strange Tales #157 was a comic that I flipped through back in 1967, while waiting on my mother to pick up a prescription at the Rexall drug store (Stage Road & Whitney: you can see this drug store in the movie The Firm!). I didn't know any of the characters then, but in a Dr. Strange story, his mentor The Ancient One was absorbed into one of the stones of Stonehenge, leaving his disciple with the advice to "Remember the forelock!" That image gave me the heebee jeebies, and I remember the episode not only for that imagery, but because, upon returning to the car, I remember asking my mother the meaning of the word "forelock".

Friday, August 12, 2011

August, 1971: Justice League of America #93

Evidently armed with a generous bit of change, I was again able to buy one of the heftier, more expensive comics on the rack, with this "Giant" costing a dime more than the standard DCs of the time. I was becoming more enamored of the many costumed heroes, and with the JLA, I saw I could sample even more of them.
The robot duplicates were an essential part of the appeal, too. Close enough to "monsters" for my tastes (I'd been conditioned by Famous Monsters of Filmland to consider them near-equals to the likes of vampires and werewolves).
The artist on these reprints was Mike Sekowsky, whose work didn't have the "wow factor" of a Jack Kirby or Neal Adams, but had an appealing clarity and efficiency. His style made it easy for me to get comfortable with new characters like Green Arrow, Green Lantern, and the Martian Manhunter, all of whom I was encountering for the first time here. And despite the lesser flair of his work, he produced some sequences that cemented themselves in my young head: I can still see the images of Green Arrow and his sidekick Speedy being ejected from their "Arrowcar" (I probably assumed that all of the heroes shared heroing tips, thus the similarity between Green Arrow's gimmicks and Batman's, which were familiar from the tv show).
This comic was where the disconnect between reprints and current stories caught my notice. In the letters page, there was a masthead proclaiming this page the "JLA Mailroom", and it featured a picture of the Justice League members sitting around a table opening letters. But the membership was slightly different: there was no Martian Manhunter (he had, unbeknownst to me, resigned a couple of years earlier), and there was a character that I would learn to recognize as "Hawkman", who wasn't in any of these stories, and there was no Wonder Woman at all, instead some blonde (who I would learn was "Black Canary"). And Green Arrow's costume was different, as was Green Lantern's if only slightly. I remember composing a letter to the editor asking about all these mysterious differences. I don't think I ever mailed the letter--I probably figured it all out before I got around to posting it--but that was a sign that I was beginning to invest in these comic books a bit more seriously than the casual reader. I wanted to know all about these guys; their fictional histories, their powers, their secret identities, everything. And the only way to learn was to keep heading back to the spinner rack.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

August, 1971: World's Finest #206

I'm a little bit surprised that I bought this comic so early. As I've established, I loved monsters, but that goofy beaked monster wouldn't have enticed my interest; it certainly couldn't compare to Kirby's dramatic vampire or Adams' Superboy/Bat creature monsters. I would have found the cavemen the most visually interesting aspect of this cover, but even that's not much of a draw. I was probably going for:
1) Economic value: even though this comic was 10 cents more expensive than the other DC comics I was buying, I could do the math and realize that i was getting more story for my money.
2) Familiarity: I was comfortable with the characters.
3) Satisfaction: I could tell that all the stories in this one were complete, unlike the as-yet-unsampled Marvel Comics that I must have at least been glancing at, but which all seemed to end on cliffhangers.
4) Oddballness: Besides monsters, I dug weird situations, and that was something that World's Finest delivered in droves, at least in the era from which these stories were being reprinted. Hero vs. villain slugfests were a harder sell (to me) at this point. Funhouse mirror distortions to Batman's real body? Cool!

This was a good transition to mainstream superhero comics for me. I didn't need to know a bunch of supporting characters or back-story or history. Stories plainly told with a generous helping of unconstrained imagination. The Superman/Batman team would never become one of my favorite combinations, possibly because the contemporary team-ups were less wild than these older stories.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

August, 1971: Superboy #178

Encouraged by my previous purchase of an issue of Jimmy Olsen, I began trying some other comic books. One of those that followed in August, 1971 was this issue of Superboy.
Remember, I was a monster fan, not a comic book fan, so it was definitely the vampire bat angle on this terrific Neal Adams cover that attracted me, as well as some familiarity with the Superboy concept, thanks to his TV cartoon adventures from a few years earlier.
Although I was not, in general, interested in the humor comic books, at the age of 11 I still had plenty of appreciation for the lighter stuff, and I think the Superbaby story had more of an impact than the forgettable Super-Vampire Bat lead. I was fascinated by the range of "Superman Family" characters that evidently had their own comics--Superboy I'd heard of, but Superbaby?! Just how far did these superhero families extend, anyway? I didn't know...I had no comprehension of the shared universe of comic book characters, but I was soon to learn how far and wide the threads between characters and titles spread.
Also in this issue, I encountered, for the first time, the Legion of Super-Heroes, in a reprint story that featured the debut of "The Lone Wolf Legionnaire," a.k.a. Timberwolf. I don't remember being at all put off by the massive roster of the Legion, and I absolutely loved this "Timberwolf" character. He was kind of like a werewolf (appealing to my monster-loving nature) and he had a brownish-orange costume, which seemed unique to me, and he had a great code name.
The lead story in this issue was scripted by Leo Dorfman. He died a few years later, and so his work never made enough of an impact on me for me to form an impression of his talent. Bob Brown pencilled the Superboy story, and his name was one I soon became quick to recognize, as he drew several of the earliest comics I bought. Brown looked better in this, my initial impression, than he did in later comics I would sample, thanks to the inking of Murphy Anderson, whose polish here set the standard for me. It would be a little while before I really started paying serious attention to the art credits, and even longer for me to learn to spot inkers, but Anderson's lush work must have made some impression, as I've ever since felt very comforted by his linework. (The same three-man team did the Superbaby back-up strip.)

Monday, August 1, 2011

August, 1971: Jimmy Olsen #142

I was 11 years old in 1971, and, like many boys my age back then, I was crazy about monsters. The only thing on the newsstand that I was interested in was Famous Monsters of Filmland. The only problem was that the legendary Forrest J. Ackerman's monster magazine wasn't easy to find on the racks of my local retail establishments. And so something led me to look over to the spinner racks full of comic books on that day in August 1971, but when I did, I discovered that there was no shortage of comic books designed to appeal to the monster fan. The first one on which I risked my 25 cents was this one, Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #142.
Superman and Jimmy I knew well from watching plenty of reruns of the George Reeves tv series. Dracula and the Wolfman, or reasonable facsimiles thereof, I also recognized. Writer/Penciller/Editor Jack Kirby? He meant nothing to me. Inker Vince Colletta? Not on my radar. Cover inker/refinisher Neal Adams? Non-entity to young MWG. But this comic? This was something to satisfy my monster fix. I would have it.
As important as this comic book is, being the first of a huge number of comics I would buy over the next few decades, I don't remember where I bought this one. There are others, that we'll cover soon, the circumstances of purchase of which I remember distinctly, but this one? It could have been several possible places: the Navy Exchange in Millington, Tennessee, where we did our shopping (my father retired from the U.S. Navy), or maybe the Big Star grocery story on Overton Crossing (the line of local Memphis groceries from which the legendary pop band took its name), or maybe the 7-11 down the street at the corner of Delano and North Watkins?
It doesn't matter where I bought it, though...what matters is that I spent my own quarter on this, the first comic I picked out to buy with my money (I'd previously been given two comic books that I remember: a Gold Key Golden Comics Digest in 1969 or thereabouts, and an issue of the notorious Captain Marvel from MF Enterprises in 1966.).
This comic book hooked me. Although it was chosen in an issue of Amazing Heroes as one of the worst Jack Kirby comics, the King, even at his arguable worst, was good enough to seal the deal with an eager young fan. I was disappointed that the story was continued to the next issue, and I didn't understand a lot of the subplots, but I liked the monsters, and I liked the presentation, and I could feel the energy. The addiction began.
Almost 20 years later, in, I think, 1990, I met Jack Kirby for the first and only time at a convention in Atlanta. Astonishingly, the King was not being mobbed by fans, nor was he surrounded by people trying to get autographs or sketches (not that he was offering either). He was just right there, ready and willing to talk, and I had the chance to chat with the great man for about 20 minutes. He talked about Stan Lee and Joe Simon (referring to both men in glowingly positive terms), kid gang comics, science fiction, and imagination. It was a great joy to spend time with him. I was excited to see a stack of original art at his table, and I began thumbing through them. And guess what I found? A page of art from that first comic book I picked for my self, Jimmy Olsen #142! The first page of a 2-page backup about "The Hairies", called "The Mountain of Judgment". When I saw that page, there was no question but that I'd buy it. They could have asked any price, and I would have paid.
The price? $50. Fifty bucks. Wow.
There was a friend of the Kirbys there at the table, Mike Thibodeaux, I believe, who was handling the transaction, and he suggested that maybe if I left the page there for a while that he could get Kirby to sign it (Kirby was wearing a wrist strap that, I assumed, allowed him to graciously beg off from autograph requests). I didn't take him up on that. Come on, Jack's "signature" was already all over that page, and I didn't need to impose on him for his scribbled name, because I was never going to forget the circumstances behind getting this page of art.
While Jimmy Olsen is probably not the best place to go for a science education, this comic book was my first exposure to the idea of DNA and cloning. I wasn't fooled into thinking that these were scientifically accurate treatises; I recognized Kirby's imaginative spin on the possibilities that were on the fringes of our knowledge. But with this first comic book, I was learning bits and pieces that my non-comics-reading friends would not be exposed to for many years to come.
This comic book also had a reprint of an old Simon and Kirby Newsboy Legion story, which would, therefore, be the first Golden Age comic book story I ever read. Later I would discover that a lot of the older stories didn't hold up will in comparison to the standards of the 70's, but to me, this story was just as good as the lead, even without monsters. I'm pretty sure I didn't really even grasp the idea that this story was some 25 years old. I remember months later one of my few comics-reading friends talking about "old" heroes, and having to get clarification that he didn't mean that the character (in that case, Plastic Man) was supposed to be an old man.

New Link Added: Over at Comics Should Be Good, Brian Cronin spotlighted this issue and its followup. Head over there if you want an alternative take on this legendary issue, and get a look at a few of the pages that drew me in.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

1970: Golden Digest #8

I was sick. I'd come down with mononucleosis, and I'd missed months of school. I don't have much recollection of what happened during those months; Mama told me I'd slept most of them away. But I know that on the way home from the Naval Hospital in Millington, Tennessee (my father's veteran status allowed us to use the Navy hospital), we stopped at some small store and she bought me this:
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I remember very little about this period, but I do remember sitting on the floor of my bedroom, reading this digest while the small TV that Mama had set up to also keep me company was tuned to the PBS station, WKNO in Memphis. That was the only moderately kid-friendly programming one could find midday in 1970. As I tolerated the puppetry antics of "Mr. B", I found much more pleasure in the familiar comic antics of some of my favorite TV cartoon characters in this Gold Key publication. Its best feature was that it was relatively thick, so the stories lasted a while.
And that's the last of the comics before the big one, the first one I bought for myself. In one short year, I was going to finally take that big step, and pick a comic book off the spinner rack...

Summer 1966: Captain Marvel #3

Before I bought my first comic book, I had been given at least a couple of others. One of them was Captain Marvel #3, published by M. F. Enterprises.
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I wasn't yet in school when my mother bought this for me (no kindergarten for me!). As best as I can recall, it was a treat for having suffered through an inoculation at the Health Department, probably getting some required shots for the upcoming first grade. I remember looking through this in the back seat of our old Nash.
I can't imagine why my mother would have picked this comic out for me. She must not have given it too much thought, and, I'm happy to say, she was never too concerned about protecting me from "violent" entertainment, so the punching on the front probably wouldn't have fazed her.
It would be great to be able to say that I kept and treasured this first comic book forever, but it disappeared quickly from my world. Lost, destroyed, stolen, thrown away, who knows? In my short time with it, it made a small but powerful impact on my young mind. I was in awe of the concept and the images of Captain Marvel's powers in action: he could split his android body into multiple, separate flying parts, independent and autonomous (note: I didn't know any of those big words then, and I doubt any of them were used in this very juvenile comic). I remembered the name, and I remembered the flying, unattached hand, and that's all.
Nowadays, you can surf and find several web pages discussing this incarnation of Captain Marvel. Here's one spotlighted courtesy of my cartoonist pal Scott Shaw!, of the legendary Oddball Comics slide shows, card set, and website. But in the dark ages, what little comics history was available to the average fan was usually focused on the greater lights of the medium. Jim Steranko didn't waste space on this guy in his History of Comics, Don Thompson and Dick Lupoff ignored him in All In Color For a Dime, and even the fan magazines of the 70's and 80's had better things to talk about. So for about 15 years, I half thought that my memories of this comic were the muddled confusions of a preschooler's mind.
Then, in the early 80's, my favorite comics dealer, Kendall Carnes of Memphis Comics and Records, pointed out his new box of "Esoteric Comics", and there I rediscovered my old friend! I was right! There was a Captain Marvel that could split!
Eventually, I bought back issue copies of all six issues of this wonderful turkey. It's not quite the same as having my first issue, but it's the best I can do.

Setting the Stage

As I prepare to begin the look back at the comics I bought, I find myself wondering: "Why hadn't I been reading them earlier?"
Well, of course I had read them earlier. We'll be looking at those comics before we begin the journey proper, but why wasn't I already reading them? Why start when I did?
I was surely a child receptive to the medium. Like most kids my age back then, I was hooked on TV cartoons, a close relative to comic books. But I remember that I avoided many of the adventure cartoons that were most akin to the comics I would come to love. I couldn't sit through Jonny Quest, or the Lone Ranger. But I did like Superman, both the George Reeves reruns and the late 60's cartoon, and I remember getting a big kick out of the Aquaman cartoons. I was angry that my school hours prevented me from more than an occasional viewing of the short Marvel cartoons--I was interested in Captain America because of the shield-slinging, Thor because of the hammer-striking, and Hulk because of the transformations, but I was turned off by Iron Man's mustache, and Sub-Mariner just looked awful to me. I had loved Adam West's Batman, and fought for tv rights against my brother Frank so that I could catch Mr. Terrific and Captain Nice. Frank liked Green Hornet, but that was too conventional for me to appreciate.
Comic books weren't common in my neighborhood, despite the many kids. I remember glancing through a neighbor's issue of The Three Mouseketeers, and a boy I played with in my grandparents' neighborhood had a hefty collection of Sgt. Rock comics, which didn't interest me at all. I remember one Halloween being enthralled by the image of DC's The Spectre on the packaging of a Ben Cooper Halloween costume, and I surely would have begged for the mask and outfit if it had actually been available, but it was apparently never actually made. And there was one summer night at a block party where I got a too-short look at an issue of Teen Titans; I wanted to read that whole thing, but I had the opportunity only to look at the first page. Another neighbor girl had a DC comic with an ad for an issue of The Atom--I would much later learn that that was issue 32--and it fascinated me with the promise of The Atom grown from his usual tiny size (I must have been aware of the character's usual schtick via catching his appearance in a solo cartoon during the Superman show) to colossal size! Neat! I had coloring books with comic art in the "non-cartoony" style: My Favorite Martian and Valley of the Gwangi. I read the newspaper comics page, so I had a handle on the conventions of the art form: caption boxes, thought balloons, speech balloons, panel-to-panel continuity, continuing stories. My brother had several Tom Swift Jr. books around the house, with their intriguing science fiction inventions dramatically depicted on the covers. And I had graduated from G.I. Joe to Captain Action, with his many superheroic identities--even knowing nothing about The Phantom, I wanted that outfit for my action figure (I never got it).
And there were a few more vital ingredients. I was really into continuing characters. If possible, my choices at the library were always series: Beverly Cleary's Henry Huggins books, Thornton Burgess's anthropomorphic animals series, Eleanor Cameron's (very) juvenile Mushroom Planet science fiction. I was a good reader, and, contrary to common wisdom, you needed to be a good reader to fully appreciate a comic book. And I loved art! I was drawing constantly; one of my parents' routine and highly-anticipated Christmas gifts to me was always a roll of butcher paper that I could draw on for months. And while I didn't have a regular allowance, my parents could usually spare a little money for me to pick out something--candy, or a small toy--on our trips to the grocery, where comics were usually available, even if I didn't pay much attention to them (although a few did manage to draw my eye; Superman #204 in 1967 had me wondering about the giant burning letters "LL" on the cover, for example).
All those pieces were there, swirling about my young life in short bursts and more extensive exposures, priming me for the good stuff.
But there was that one time in 1968, waiting for someone to arrive or depart at Memphis International Airport, when I begged for a comic book. When I really, really wanted one. It was Aquaman #42, on sale at a magazine kiosk, and it had one little feature that I remember blew my logotype-ignorant little mind: up in the left corner, it had the word "Aquaman" twice, horizontal and vertical, with the initial "A" shared between them:
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Little did I realize that the artist who drew the interior, Jim Aparo, would one day be my favorite comic book artist. Alas, my parents didn't see fit to shell out the 12 cents for this diversion, and I went home from the airport disappointed. I put the notion of obtaining comics out of my mind for a few years. But I was fertilized, much more so than I realized.

Welcome to Off The Spinner Rack: What Is This All About?

In August 1971, as a child of 11 years in Memphis, Tennessee (United States of America), I picked out and bought my first comic book. It wasn't the first comic book I had read, nor was it the first comic book I had been given, but it was the first comic book that I made the choice to buy with my own precious pieces of change. What followed was nearly four decades of routinely buying comic books, on an increasingly frequent, eventually weekly basis (because in America, throughout those decades, a newly-published set of comic books would (generally) be released for sale once per week).
Although I'm no longer regularly buying comic books, I still participate in the wonderful online community, the Classic Comics Forum at www.comicbookresources.com (or CBR, as we regulars like to abbreviate it). There, many knowledgeable, courteous, helpful, and intelligent fans participate in ongoing discussions about comic books of the past. I've made some terrific online friends there, and I encourage fans of old comics to join in the forum; it's very friendly to new members.
A few months ago (as of this inaugural posting), a thread was started: "Forty Years Ago This Month", in which we looked back at the comics on the stands four decades back. Since that was just a few months before I started buying comics, I didn't have much to add (although many of the comics from that month I have since read or obtained). But the thread got me thinking, as I often have, about the early days of my comics buying.
It baffles my wife, but I share with many longtime comics collectors the ability to remember most of the thousands of comic books that I've bought. I should clarify: I don't have total recall of the contents of every issue, nor if you asked me something like "Did you buy Captain America #243?", I won't always be able to tell you, blindly, whether I did. There are plenty of exceptions: if you ask "Did you buy Swamp Thing #12?", I can answer "yes" easily, because I know that I bought every issue of Swamp Thing. And there are some issue numbers that are easily recalled because of special significance: yes, I know without checking that I do own Captain America #200, because I remember co-creator Jack Kirby had returned around that time, and that he had definitely written and drawn the 200th issue in the 200th year of America's existence, and that I had bought all of Jack Kirby's issues when he returned to the title in 1976. But what I can almost always do (and again, this is no particularly special ability among long-time collectors) is remember whether or not I bought a comic book with just a glance at its cover. (For example, I just glanced at the cover of the aforementioned Captain America #243, and it turns out that no, I didn't buy that one).
The thread I mentioned above, "Forty Years Ago This Month", alerted me to the existence of a terrific online resource that I had somehow missed: The Newsstand. The Newsstand is an extension of Mike's Amazing World of DC Comics (no relation), a website that I've enjoyed for many years now, but I was unaware that he had added this section, which allows a user to look at most of the comics that were on sale in the USA in a given month (he doesn't have every one of the many comic book companies' titles, but for those early years in which I began my collection, he has all the publishers that I would have selected from). With the aid of the newsstand, I am able to travel back in time, looking at what I had to choose from, and recreate, as nearly as possible, the specific chain of purchases as I went from sampling a few comics now and then, to buying every issue of favorites, to sampling lots and lots of different titles, as my comics habit grew bigger and bigger.
And that's what I'm going to share with the world here. I'll be looking at each comic, in roughly the order that I bought them. Sometimes, of course, I'd buy several comic books on one day, and sometimes, I'd buy comics that had already been on sale for two or three months or more; when I can remember specifically buying a comic book that had already been out for a while, I'll try to factor that in to my ordering (that's another fairly common trait of collectors that baffles my wife: the ability to remember when and where we bought some specific comic books).
I don't plan to reread each comic book before I post about it here, although sometimes I may (and yes, most likely I do still have it in my rather large collection--I haven't lost, traded or disposed of many of my comics). Rather, I plan to look back at what inspired me to pick out particular comics from the many that were available, and to focus on what I remember about them rather than do detailed reviews. What was really hooking me, what was a disappointment, what was I excited to discover, what artists I really loved...there's lots to reminisce about and ponder over, and I hope readers will find something to enjoy as I recreate those trips to the spinner rack, beginning back in August, 1971.