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:

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.

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:

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.