Did you collect comics as a kid ?if so what were they???
Never collected until I was in college.
My mama would buy me the occasional “Casper the Friendly Ghost” comic, and I loved 'em, but I didn’t keep 'em.
The first comic I bought as a young adult was “Marvel Feature #5” – a Red Sonja comic. (And no points for guessing what it was about that comic that caught my attention.) I still have that’n!
Never collected. Subscribed to Uncle Scrooge around 1957-60.
Started buying Superman and such around 1953. But read them and then didn’t care where they went.
As a kid? Yes.
As an adult? Still yes. And original artwork, scripts and so forth.
As a kid I had a ton of Superman-related titles, from circa 1963-1972 (at which latter date I discovered National Lampoon). I did refer to it as ‘my collection’ but made only half-hearted attempts to classify and organize them. I did get my hands on a very few issues from the 40’s and 50’s too.
The only comic book remaining to me now is my Superman #17, featuring Supie grabbing both Hitler and Tojo by the neck on its cover.
In high school and college, yeah. DC & Marvel Superhero-type exclusively. Gave it up when I got married.
The only collection I had as a kid (as opposed to selling them back to the store and using the money for buying more comics) was Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew. (No relation to a certain dwarf-raised human who I kind of resent for being the more famous Captain Carrot.)
Yup. Started buying Fantastic Four, because I liked the TV cartoon (the original one, not the one where Herbie the overly-cute robot replaced the Human Torch). Became a hard-core collector and amassed a collection that went back to issue # 100. Got disenchanted with Marvel in the late 80’s and migrated to DC, with a heavy focus on Legion of Super-Heroes, and later, the James Robinson Starman and Geoff Johns JSA.
Didn’t stop collecting until a few years ago, when the “New 52” brought all of the storylines (and many of the characters) I’d been following to a complete stop, eventually my pull-list dwindled to three titles, all of which were cancelled the same month.
Threw 'em all away.
Including Daredevil #1.
Thought they were all disposable.
After selling off more than 300 issues with what I considered inferior art some years back, I still have a modest collection of over 700 comics from various publishers. I was fortunate to be into X-Men and Iron Man decades before the movies came out and obtained first and other early issues not too expensively. These issues have since become quite a bit more valuable. I also have a few dozen obscure titles from the '40s and '50s, e.g., Black Terror, Green Lama, Strange Tales of the Unusual, etc. My copy of Devil Dinosaur #1 is autographed by Jack Kirby.
I stopped collecting around 1980. Sometime in the early 2000s, a friend and avid collector of new comics started loaning me the issues he bought, allowing me to gain an appreciation for how much comics had changed. Even better, I could once again read comics, but without having to pay or store them.
My older brother had Mad Magazine #1. Emphasis on “had”, past tense…
Mom was the one who collected comics. I remember Sugar & Spike, Sad Sack, and various other Harvey titles plus some Terrytoons. Kept all us kids occupied on the long trips up to the Dunes, Chicago, and Racine.
If we include MAD, my brothers and I had subscriptions, we’re spaced about ten years apart so when one left home the next would take up subscribing. Pretty sure they didn’t get taken on family trips.
A sequence of images and text that told a story. But that’s not important right now.
I wasn’t much of a comic book collector since I mainly collected baseball cards. However, my father had a large collection of comics from the late 40s and early 50s that mainly consisted of crime/detective stories, science fiction, Classics Illustrated, and the first MADs. However, as was often the case, my grandmother sold them for some extra change.
As a kid, I collected the various Harvey comics (Richie Rich, Little Dot, Little Lotta, Casper, etc.) I had a lot of them–during the mid to late '70s, there were over 20 titles of Richie Rich alone (coming out on a bimonthly schedule). I had a ton of these, and sold them when I was in college. I’m still nostalgic about them.
In college, in the mid to late '80s, I collected various Marvel titles: X-Men, New Mutants, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, etc. I think I still have most of them in my storage locker somewhere.
I gave up collecting when there just got to be too many separate titles to keep up, and the individual comics got more expensive than I wanted to devote my discretionary income to.
I collected everything, but my favorites were:
Fantastic Four – the Jack Kirby/Stan Lee issues were the best and filed with cosmic art and concepts, especially from about issue #30 (before that some issues were actually embarrassing – it took a bit before they hit their stride) to about #100 (shortly after that, Kirby left, but before he did, his work was becoming unimaginative. Some folks think that was deliberate)
(For some reason, I didn’t get into Thor in the same period, even though the same team was doing it, and the comic introduced equally impressive stuff, like the character of Ego the Living Planet, which was featured in the recent Guardians of the Galaxy II)
Classics Illustrated - including The World Around Us series and the Special Issues. The art was frequently seconf-rate, but it was a great introduction to literature. Without it, I’d never have known about all those more obscure Jules Verne novels
Spiderman – the Steve Ditko years
Walt Disney Comics and Stories and Uncle Scrooge – especially when they were reprinting Carl Barks’ stuff (and they were still running some original stuff in those years)
Superman, Action, Batman, Detective comics – the DC classic stuff.
The Flash and Green Lantern
Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact – a Catholic comic that managed not to be cloying and overbearing. Great historical and scientific features, as well as stuff I never thought I’d be interested in. The serials drawn by Frank Borth were priceless – gorgeous stuff that still isn’t properly appreciated. I learned how to draw from Frank Borth’s, “How to Draw Cartons” series, which taught you the basics of perspective and shading and anatomy. You can actually find the entire run of this comic online.
Conan the Barbarian – this debuted in comic form shortly after a friend introduced me to the Lancer reprints of Robert E, Howard’s stories, and I really got into Barry Smith’s (later “Barry Windsor-Smith”) artwork, which (after the first couple of issues) was incredibly classy. If you contrast it with that of John Buscema, who immediately followed (continuing the same serial) and compare their treatment of the same subjects, it’s clear that Buscema might have been the more commercial and standard artist, but Smith had more style. sadly, Smith left after the first 16 issues, but he came back to [Savage Sword of Conan* to do a first-rate adaptation of the Howard story “Red Nails”. (He also illustrated The Frost Giant’s Daughter in the first issues of Savage Tales. Others hasve illustrated the story since, but, even in its bowdlerized version in the straight “Conan” comic, I prefer Smith’s version)
I got this in school, too. I even wrote an article about it for The Comics Journal once! It holds up as a general-interest anthology title; a typical issue would have 6 features, only one of which was aggressively Catholic (By comparison, Spire and Jack Chick did nothing but proselytize on all cylinders). I got this during the 1970-71 school year. When I resumed collecting in 1973, it was Defenders, Avengers, Marvel Team-Up, and before long all things Marvel and many things DC and Atlas/Seaboard. I’d missed the Lee/Kirby revolution by a few years and had no idea how crappy the stuff I was reading actually was by comparison, but I honestly felt like this was being made for me, and that I was into something the rest of the world had no idea about.
Oh yeah, I bought comics and kept them as a kid (I was born in 1960). Mostly Marvel – Thor, Avengers, Fantastic Four, X-Men, etc. Also some DC titles. I bought them sporadically in the 1960s, and began collecting in earnest around 1971. Had a blast reading and re-reading them!
My family moved to Nashville in 1977 and I soon discovered an actual comic book store, the “Great Escape”. I then started collecting back issues. Great fun!
I don’t buy comic books anymore (stopped around 2007), but I still have a whole room full of thousands of them. About eighty “long boxes” full of graphic literature!
I collected all the comics I bought as a kid (though I have lost a lot of them). All DC, since Marvel didn’t exist.* Superman and the Flash were my favorites, though I eventually discovered the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series (I think Neal Adams is the best comic book artist ever).
I was smart enough to get Swamp Thing #1. For our first Christmas together, my wife filled in my set of the first run of both that and Howard the Duck. I also collected Sandman starting with issue #50, though I now have the entire run in book form.
*At least, now where I was, about 80 miles from NYC. I was considered a Marvel expert because I had heard of Spider-Man, courtesy of my neighbor who had moved from out of toen.
I was enamored of Marvel comics - all of them! - in the 60’s. I loved the Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Thor, though I bought every single one I could find. (I remember nagging my mother to take me to the drugstore the day after a blizzard, I just had to get Spiderman and Iron Man.). I was the only girl I knew who was into comics. Remember the Merry Marvel Marching Society, and the letters to the editor? (I didn’t care for DC comics, I thought the stories were stupid - Super Dog? Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen in a fix, again? Another ‘death of Superman in an alternate universe’? Or boring - Batman bored the H out of me with his endless gangsters and the poor artwork.) I also loved ‘Millie the Model’ and just learned the other day that Jack Kirby and others drew and sold millions of those silly ‘Romance Comics’ in the 40’s and 50’s before going into the superheroes. So, I still have a handful of comics I saved, some with Submariner (who I had a little crush on). … My mother actually DID throw all my comic books out, a huge 3 or 4 foot box of them… Years later, we were walking through a department store past a table with t-shirts piled high: Spiderman, the Hulk, the Avengers. I said, ‘look mom. All my comic books you threw out, I coulda been a millionaire, they’re more popular today than ever. See? See?? Here we are two old ladies and there’s the Marvel comic books characters that never went away.’