My prime comics reading years were a few years in the mid/late 70s followed by a 3 year gap until the early 80s, with the 80s being my most prolific reading/collecting years. I’ve read comics since then, with some gaps here-and-there, but not nearly as much as I did then.
My comics reading started with my uncle’s hand-me-down collection from the early 60s. He was a big Marvel fan. At Our block ended at one of our town’s shopping districts and on the corner was a lunch counter/newsstand/sundries store where I would walk with loose change in my pocket to buy comics. With it’s art-deco metal sign and it’s senior-citizen lunch counter customers, Aignello’s was already an anachronism in the mid-70s (and would be replaced by a fried chicken joint in a few years). It’s also the place where I first heard the phrase “Hey, kid! This isn’t a library!” To be fair. My mom didn’t let me spend much on comics, so I had to be selective and was indecisive over what to buy.
I also got comics when I went with my mom to the supermarket. My folks picked them up when I was sick or for road trips, or wepicked them up at newsstands on vacation. There was a store in town that sold the coverless three-packs as well.
The mid70s to the early 80s is when the newsstand-distributed comics companies other than Marvel and DC went to die. (Archie survived, but mostly because of its small-sized digest editions, which could be displayed and sold at checkout counters). I don’t ever remember seeing Atlas, Gold Key, Dell or most of the other companies mentioned above.
There was Harvey and Archie, which is what my parents tended to buy for me. Even as a pretty young kid, I didn’t like Harvey much at all, especially the non-magical titles, which I thought were really lame and one note (Richie Rich is funny because he’s RICH! Little Dot is funny because she’s OBSESSED with DOTS!). Archie was OK, but I didn’t have any strong attachment to those titles.)
Charlton, with its cheapjack production values, was limping along. Charlton had one of its brief mini-revivals in the 70s, led by some creators who went on to have careers at Marvel and DC, but that was all gone by 76. Just some lame titles like The Fighting Five (military commandos), Yang (kung-fu), and Baron Weirdwulf’s Haunted Library that I might have picked up once and never tried again.
My comic-buying philosophy for this first phase (roughly ages 6-9) was as follows:
-If one superhero in a comic was good, then move superheroes in a comic are better
-When in doubt, choose the book with the most promising cover.
I don’t think I had processed the idea of making sure to buy my favorite titles every month. What do I remember reading? Despite my Marvel headstart via my uncle’s hand-me-downs, I don’t remember reading a lot of Marvel outside of Spiderman, who was in multiple titles by then. Marvel put out these tabloid-sized treasury editions. Some were just reprints of older stuff but I remember film adaptations of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, plus the first Spiderman/Superman crossover. I remember more DC, specifically Superman and Batman titles, Justice League, Legion of Super-Heroes, Teen Titans and Flash. I think I liked DC more because they were experimenting with books with more pages and backup features. I remember reading Superman Family and Batman Family.
At the end of third grade, my family moved and Mom took the opportunity to throw away all my old comics, thinking it was time for me to stick with real books. We didn’t move all that far and were still living in the same town, but in a Moore residential area with no newsstand on the corner or stores nearby. Stores that had comics in the past were either closing down or stopped carrying comics, so I was out of comics for a few years until…
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