For those who don’t know the publishing industry: when a publisher writes off a book and wants proof that the copy was taken off of the market, they ask the seller to mail back just the covers. It’s cheaper, and they have evidence that the seller supposedly isn’t turning around and selling the book anyway, since they’re getting credit for the covers. Selling the cover-less books is pretty sketchy.
If you don’t have your old comics (I don’t) and want a trip down memory lane or a glimpse of things you’d never seen before, I can’t recommend spending some time at misterkitty.net’s Stupid Comics enough. It’s a page maintained by a Doper, but I’m too much of an airhead to remember who. I wouldn’t know Fantomah or Fletcher Hanks ever existed if I had never visited there.
One of my fond memories as a kid was Whitman’s “Dynabrite” comic reprints. They were 48 pages with a cardboard cover and better quality paper. Out of the list below, we definitely had the Bugs Bunny (“Magic Mischief Makers”, etc.), Uncle Scrooge (“The Golden Fleecing”, etc. – my favourite!), the Donald Duck (“The Golden Helmet”, etc.), the Mickey Mouse (“Mickey’s Sky Adventure”, etc.) and the Gyro Gearloose (“The Gab-Muffler”, etc.) but all of the covers look familiar (Star Trek, Super Goof, et al.).
I would love to get my hands on all of those, since I had most of them in the original as a child.
Carl Barks in particular elevated comics to a high art form. I would sometimes take a sketch pad and painstakingly copy images of Donald, Scrooge, and other characters freehand until my drawings were indistinguishable from his pictures in the books.
“The Golden Helmet” will always be one of my all-time favorite stories. Does anybody remember the one where Scrooge got locked out of his Money Bin and Gyro Gearloose took him to the Moon in search of minerals dense enough to breach the building’s walls?
One of the oddest comics that I remember from my childhood was a one-shot from Harvey Comics, starring Casper the Friendly Ghost, Wendy the Witch, and Richie Rich, traveling through time to celebrate the history of baseball. Specifically of the National League. Given my age and the date that the National League was founded (1876), it was most likely a centennial celebration of some kind. It may or may not have been tied in with Bicentennial celebrations.
I remember the characters went back to various important dates in baseball history, met and interacted with famous historical players, and eventually returned to the present with a new appreciation of our national pasttime. Most fascinating to me as a kid was a feature at the end giving information on each National League team (at the time), including a little diagram of their ballparks.
I was a kid during the Silver Age (about late 50s to late 60s) and I really feel privileged to have “been there” for the introduction of many of the most well-known heroes. I was never big into the non-superhero comics, like Classics Illustrated, Archie, or Casper.
For some strange reason, the absolute best place to get new comics was the liquor store (which also sold tons of cigarettes, since nearly everyone smoked back then). Nowadays, a 10 YO probably couldn’t get into one unescorted. But I swear that the distributors filled up those comics racks before hitting any other stores in town. Plus, they were right next to the pulp novels and men’s magazines…which probably explains why they got filled so efficiently.
Back in early 1964, I had a DC comic about a group of wanna-be superheroes whose powers were too arcane for them to join the Justice League of America. They were all teenagers, I guess in an attempt to appeal to a younger audience. Sadly, the only one I remember is The Chlorophyl Kid, who could zap plants to make them grow faster.
No, but I recall another where the same group traveled back in time searching for something. Sadly, I don’t remember what they were looking for, but I can see myself reading the story under the Sun in the front seat of my dad’s car. I was six or seven at the time, so it must have come out during the summer 1961 or '62.
You’re thinking of the Legion of Substitute Heroes, who showed up a number of times back then. They consisted of heroes who had tried to join the Legion of Super Heroes, but had been rejected. They were always at least a bit comedic, and consisted of folks like Chlorophyll Kid, who you remember, along with Color Kid (who could change the color of any object), Stone Boy (who could turn to stone, which also rendered him completely immobile, as stone tends to be), and the unfortunately named Infectious Lass (who made people sick).
The market for unusual comics was different here in the UK, but I distinctly remember this bizarre Captain Marvel from M.F. Enterprises, who had detachable limbs
Somehow we got Magnus the Robot fighter as well, probably as a reprint. But the DC and Marvel comics were available too.
UK comics had their own range of strips, like Desperate Dan, Dennis the Menace (a different version to the US one, and much naughtier) and Minnie the Minx, most of which are still in publication. Superheroes included the Steel Claw and Billy the Cat, aimed at a slightly younger audience than the US superheroes. In 1977 the first issue of 2000 AD came out, and British comics suddenly became excellent.
I should mention the French and Belgian Bande Designee comics like Asterix and Tin Tin, which were sometimes reprinted in UK comic books with translations. These also made a quantum leap in the 70s when Metal Hurlant came out.
I remember the second version of The Three Mouseketeers in the 1960s, but wasn’t there another in the Tom and Jerry comics where T&J were actual period musketeers with some words in French thrown in?
I don’t recall ever seeing the first version from the 1940s anywhere.
When I started reading comics in the 1980s, my options were mostly limited to DC, Marvel, Archie, and Walt Disney. I stuck with Marvel and DC considering myself too sophisticated for the other two. I had no idea Gold Key even existed until the 1990s when Valiant started publishing Magnus, Robot Fighter and Turok: Son of Stone.
One comic I’ve been nostalgic for in the last few years is Marvel’s Savage Sword of Conan. It was a black & white series in magazine format. Technically it was published by Curtis Magazines at first, but their parent company was Marvel, and it ran from 1974 until 1995. Since it was a magazine, it didn’t adhere to the Comic Code Authority, so it had a lot more sex and violence than Marvel’s other publications. It was great.
When I retire I’ll probably get a subscription to Marvel and DC’s online archive so I can go back and re-read those comic books and get the ones I missed.
The original Magnus of the early-to-mid '60s was excellent because it was illustrated by the brilliant Russ Manning. The quality was never as good after another artist took over around 1968, which is when I largely stopped buying comics. (Manning’s women in particular were always stunning!)
I don’t think I’ve ever seen comics like Asterix and Tin-Tin on sale in the US except in specialty bookstores and news stands. I was introduced to the former around 1975, when a collector let me read some of his copies. I got hooked on them and bought a bunch on my first trip to Europe that year. Sadly, this was about the time Rene Goscinny died, and the quality of the stories declined considerably. Uderzo’s art remained as brilliant as ever, but there was none of Goscinny’s hilarious dialogue in either French or Bell and Hockridge’s English translations.
I had a lot of Disney comics, primarily Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, in the 80s and early 90s. We’d go to the mall most weekends and our meetup was always the Waldenbooks. I knew that if I asked my dad for a Batman or Punisher comic book, I had about a 50/50 chance of getting it at best, but if I asked for a Disney comic book, it was almost always a “Yes,” so I mostly asked for those.
I have since been re-collecting those stories in the Fantagraphics Carl Barks Library and Don Rosa Library series.
In Joliet, my dad had an assistant who would sometimes take me to the supermarket to buy comics. He adamantly refused to let me have any war comics, which pissed me off no end. (This was in the early-to-mid '60s, long before Vietnam became an issue.) After I complained, my dad told him to knock it off and let me buy whatever I wanted.
