Secret Origin!

That's not me ... but it could have been!
[Source]

For virtually as long as I can remember, I have been a comic book fan. But exactly how did I come to such a lowly state? Except for their reading me the “funny papers” in every Sunday's newspaper, I did not “inherit” this devotion from a comic book fan parent unlike some lucky kids of the 1950s and later – I was born in November 1961. Sure, from as far back as I can remember my father and mother … well, moreso my mother … indulged me in my reading of “funny books,” but they certainly did not push me toward them. My suspicion is that, comic books being much more available during those days – virtually every grocery story, drug store, convenience store, what have you, had a spinner rack or a comic book stand – plunking down a bit more than a dime (I'm too young to remember 10-cent comics; for most of the 1960s most comics were 12 cents – I considered naming this blog “12-cent Memories”) to quiet a whining kid was easy enough to do. – Or as a reward for being a good little boy at the doctor's office. – Of course either case then necessitated her taking the time later to actually read the story to me, but I guess that was an acceptable trade-off because I well remember sitting on her – or my grandmother's – lap following along as they read the adventure … sometimes over and over again. – But whence came the urge to tug on their skirts and beg, “I need this!”?

Given the timing, I suspect that like most other comics fans who got their start in the 1960s the ultimate source of my addition is, for better or for worse, the infamous Batman TV show that debuted on 12 January 1966. I would have just turned four years old. I didn't know it was camp. I was caught up in it, sitting mesmerized through each half hour, desperately wondering how the Dynamic Duo were going to get themselves out of the latest villainous trap the current cliffhanger ending had left them in. And when it had all inevitably worked out for the forces of good, running around the house shadow boxing to imagined placards of “Biff!” “Bam!” and “Kapow!”

In the fall of that year there debuted the 1960s cartoon version of The New Adventures of Superman, consisting not just of shorts about the Man of Steel but also his exploits when he was a boy! The wonderful voice of Bud Collyer dropping an octave as Clark Kent pulled open his shirt to reveal the S-shield – “This – is a job – for Superman!” The melodramatic announcements by Ted Knight (no, not Starman – the actor who would later be best known for The Mary Tyler Moore Show)!

The next year, 1967, Superman was joined by Aquaman in a full hour of goodness, The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure – which included as well a rotating number of shorts featuring the other heroes of the DC Universe: The Justice League of America, The Teen Titans, Hawkman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Atom. Wow! – Aquaman! 

 Exactly why they decided to make him the other anchor for their Saturday morning cartoons I'll never know, but I am glad they did. As lame and limited as many people might consider the King of the Seven Seas, from then until the present Aquaman has been one of my favorite super-heroes.  I remember being crushed the next year, 1968, when Aquaman was relegated to Sunday mornings with his place beside Superman being taken by a new animated Batman on Saturday mornings – the live-action show's popularity was truly a short-lived phenomenon although its pop culture significance endures to this day. Now there was a dilemma! – How to get out of going to Sunday School so I could stay home and watch Aquaman?

But what about comic books themselves? Well, the fact is that the barber shop in Monroe's Eastgate Shopping Cinema that my father frequented – where for years I would receive my crew cut as well – kept an ample supply of funny books to occupy kids as they were waiting. I have many memories of sitting there waiting on Daddy and even reading – by which I mean simply looking at the pictures at first – scores of comics in various states of tattered glory, many lacking covers and outer, sometimes even innermost, pages. Here I could see in print the adventures of those same heroes who fascinated me on the TV screen.

Yeah, I'm sure I had a lot of kids' comics, i.e. Gold Key, including Walt Disney and a lot of other licenced TV tie-ins; Harvey such as Richie Rich, Casper, Hot Stuff; Archie (maybe a little later, but not sure). Of these, the first of these type comics that I'm reasonably certain I had it is Super Goof #8, o[n-]/s[ale] 1 July 1967 (I well remember that image of Goofy floating ass-up in the air, with an invisible telescope coming out his eyes!) I'm sure I must have had some before that. A lot of those earlier covers look familiar, but who knows? Frankly, they all look much the same to me now. I might have continued reading those kinds of comics occasionally – especially Archie and TV and movie tie-ins – for several years, but in my memory I graduated to what would be my enduring comic-book love very quickly – DC Comics' super-heroes.

From where did I acquire my comics? These were the days before the comics specialty shops, a wonderful time when, as mentioned above, virtually every grocery story, drug store, convenience store, what have you, had a spinner rack or a comic book stand. Comic books were everywhere! My specific memories from late-1960s Monroe, Louisiana, have me picking up most of my comics from the following locations:

• The Piggly Wiggly Grocery Store
• The 7-11 Convenience Store
• Pieron's Rexall Drugs
• The Fill-a-Sack Convenience Store

The first three of those were all in Lakeshore, the northeastern end of Monroe coming in on the Old Bastrop Highway (Hwy 139) from the community of Swartz where we actually lived. Seven-Eleven and Rexall Drugs were right next to each other. I got a lot of consolation/reward comics from the drug store while my mother was filling a prescription after taking myself or my brother to the doctor. Piggly Wiggly had a nice big magazine section just to the right of the entrance, with not a spinner-rack that I remember but rather the comics taking up about the rightmost part of the magazine stand. A bit further down the street there was also a Davis' Grocery Store that I hated my mother going into – because oddly enough it didn't have comics at all! They lost a lot of 12-cent sales to me.... The Fill-a-Sack was directly across the railroad tracks from my maternal grandparents' house in north Monroe on Hwy 165. Momma would take us over there to visit them every Sunday, as I recall, and stopping at Fill-a-Sack was a necessary stop before visiting them. As I got older, I might be allowed to walk across the tracks by myself to go get my funny books. It seems like there was also a store over on Forsythe Avenue, perhaps another 7-11 – they were all over Monroe – but I'm not sure. I distinctly remember picking up at least one comic off a stand in the Otasco Store on Louisville Avenue.

But exactly what comics did I get? More importantly, what is the first DC super-hero comics that I had of my own? Answering that question is tough. Even though the virtual newsstand provided by Mike's Amazing World of Comics, via what he calls variously his Newsstand or Time Machine, is a wonderful aide-de-memoire, being filterable to the comics released during a particular calendar month (or, you can sort by cover-date if you prefer, but for my purposes here I prefer release date), all it shows is a gallery of covers. I can't necessarily trust my memory of covers, especially the more famous ones that I have seen over the years in books, on the Internet, in stores, who knows where. A number of Superman and Batman comics' covers were printed in the great hardcover “From the Thirties to the Seventies” volumes that I (actually, my brother and I, but he never really got into comics and I eventually bought his Batman book from him) received in 1973. A lot of covers would have been printed in cross-promotional house ads within the original comics. Given the uncertainties of newstand distribution in the 1960s, just because I saw a comic in an ad didn't mean it would ever show up on a spinner-rack in any of the stores I went in. Or maybe I just missed them. Who knows. And, frankly, just because I have a comic now doesn't mean I had it then. Especially for Adventure Comics with the Legion of Super-Heroes as well as for Aquaman, I later (mid-late 1970s) filled in runs back to 1967. I know I had some issues, and am reasonably certain I can identify the earliest I had for both these series and will identify them below, but others I know I didn't have then and only got later. At this remove, it's impossible to know for sure for most. So I have to depend on my most vivid memories of any particular issue, not just whether I'm familiar with the cover.

As a digression, What about Marvel Comics? Frankly I don't remember buying or reading any Marvel that early. I have no memories of the various cartoons based on Marvel super-heroes during the 1960s, although I'm sure I must have watched them too. The Spider-Man jingle became such a part of our culture that it seems like I've always known it. For whatever reason Marvel didn't capture my imagination like DC did. 

The earliest Marvel Comic I am sure that I had (based on Mike's Amazing World) was Fantastic Four #120 o/s 28 Dec 1971, although I am surprised it would be that late. I didn't have many Marvel comics at all until starting in 1974. I think I started looking Marvel's direction first with the publication of the black and white magazine Planet of the Apes #1 o/s 25 June 1974 – my pals and I were all caught up in Apes-mania. I picked up occasional issues – a couple that stick in my mind were Avengers #129 o/s 13 Aug 1974 and Giant-Size Avengers #2 o/s 27 Aug 1974 with art by Dave Cockrum, who had recently left his short but momentous run on DC's Legion of Super-Heroes. I'm sure there were some Spider-Man and Fantastic Four as well. 

If I recall correctly, though, it was the discovery of the X-Men with X-Men #95 o/s 25 July 1975, again with Cockrum art, that swept me big-time into Marvel … well, as big as I ever was, always being more of a DC guy. (Sometime around then I found a rather battered copy of Giant-Size X-Men #1 o/s 1 Apr 1975 on a spinner-rack in a store I rarely frequented. I never could find an X-Men #94 in a store and within a couple of months had paid premium money – a dollar or so – to get it from a mail-order house.) In any case, all of that is outside the scope of what I conceive this blog to be, which I am arbitrarily limiting to the 1960s. As can be seen by perusing my little walk down Memory Lane (see below), by the end of 1969 the number of comics I remember is starting to grow beyond any practical limits to cover here. And at that point, I'm being pretty selective, because I have vague memories of practically every cover to be seen.

One thing I found interesting in this little exercise is how many of these comics spark clear memories of specific times and places where I was reading them, or found them on the spinner rack.  Probably not a majority of them, but more than I would have expected.

In any case, if you're so inclined, you can follow me down Memory Lane via an annotated list of the comic books I remember from my childhood by clicking [here]....