A Comic Lover’s Memories: Part at least 20 (Actually Part 26)
Why I Remember My First Marvel:
Maxie, Marge, and Sgt. FuryMemories are like tattered flags at times, vivid, but incomplete. You’re left trying to complete the patterns with your imagination, and sometimes the pattern is too complex and your memory too hazy to fill in.
I feel like the chorus in the prologue to
Henry V, who warns the audience that the players’ attempt to re-create Agincourt on the stage of the Globe is doomed unless, he tells them, you “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts…”
That’s what I have to do when I reminisce about my comic book history, and despite the invaluable help and memory-jogging supplied by Mike’s Amazing Newsstand --
Lo, I pray there shall not be an ending! -- and various sites, articles, and books, I do find it frustratingly difficult to piece out the imperfections of my own memory with my thoughts.
That’s how it is with my initial forays into the world of Marvel Comics. However, thanks to Mike’s visual aids, I am fairly confident that I’ve been able to recall the provenance of the first Marvel comic I ever read and ever bought, which owes a great deal to the less than tidy magazine rack of a guy named Maxie and the newspaper love of my Aunt Marge.
It was very cold, not bitter, but the kind of in-your-face, bright and shiny cold. For some reason, my Aunt Marge was in the back seat with me; my father was driving. Don’t know how many of my siblings were in the car, but at least one brother and sister must have been, because I think we’d been to church. But it wasn’t a Sunday, I know that. Almost positive it was a Saturday. That never stopped us from going to church, though, because my family was (and almost all still are) Catholic up the ying-yang. You just never knew when we’d have to go.
Aunt Marge was a bright, incredibly hard-working woman who didn’t go to college, didn’t drive, didn’t date, didn’t go anywhere but to her job in New York City. She left at 6 AM and never got home to my grandmother’s house until at least 8 PM, when she would eat a warmed-up dinner by herself in the kitchen. She spent her one day of rest, Sunday, reading every newspaper she could buy front page to back in her giant recliner on the back porch. Then she watched “Perry Mason” and went to bed in the room she shared with my grandmother. This was her life for at least 40 years.
I have her to thank for my love of newspapers in general and of the funnies in particular. She “took” all of the papers, as we used to say, and growing up in what was called the “New York Metropolitan Area,” that meant the Journal-American, the Daily News, the Post, the Herald-Tribune, and the Times. Not to mention the Newark Evening News and the Newark Star-Ledger.
When we went to my grandmother’s house on Sunday afternoons, I would lie on the porch floor surrounded by, immersed in, and completely absorbed by the funnies, page upon page of adventure, cops ‘n’ robbers, satire, slapstick, science-fiction, cowboys, and derring-do. It took me hours to read them all and I loved every minute of this heaven-on-earth.
On top of that, Aunt Marge bought me Hardy Boys books now and again, and, for better or worse, she bought me a few comics, including my first comic ever (
SSWS 105, which I’ve mentioned before). I was the Pip to her Miss Havisham.
But like Miss Havisham, she felt insulted by the world.
She doted on me, the fortunate first grandchild, for several years. However, vicious, deep-seated family conflict steadily drove a deep wedge between her side of the family and mine, and she was responsible for much of the vitriol that tore my parents asunder for many years. Ironically, the comics she got me started on played a large part in helping me to cope with a protracted siege of bitterness and strife.
Even then, in the years before psychology was something kids studied in elementary school, I could see that Aunt Marge could barely contain the anger, resentment, and jealousy that burned within her. She didn’t drink, she ate her anger, and she could unleash a torrent of bile without warning, on anyone. I guess I feel sorry for her, but I have a difficult time forgetting the wounds she gashed into the life of my family, and into my mother’s heart in particular.
But, on that cold winter day, for reasons unknown, Aunt Marge was with us, and she asked my father if he would please stop on the street next to Maxie’s so that she could send me in for the papers. Neither my father nor my aunt would have called the store Maxie’s, of course; that’s what kids called it. To them it was just “that candy store near the dry cleaners."
Maxie's old place is on the right. The dry cleaner (new name and ownership) is still there.And neither my father nor my Aunt Marge had ever been in there, and I’ll bet, never even went near there ever again. So, for some bizarre reason, my aunt was with us, we were near Maxie’s, she wanted her morning papers and she sent me in to get them. The clouds of serendipity were gathering.
Maxie’s was a classic corner candy store and therefore, it was also a luncheonette: coffee, sodas, burgers, dogs, soup. Nothing fancy. Maxie was always behind the counter schmoozing with regulars. He yapped when he spoke, but not unpleasantly. He was funny, really, and tended to be more easygoing and friendly with the kids who stopped there for candy and baseball cards.
Maxie looked a little like a cartoonist’s version of Larry Fine, with a halo of coarse ‘n’ curly hair surrounding his squared-off baldpate, always wearing his white shirt, pants and apron. He had an accent, and he worked damned hard, and though I never saw a tattoo on his forearm like the one I had once seen on a lady in Macy’s in New York City, I always suspected that Max was a Holocaust survivor, and at the very least a refugee.
Maxie’s was the go-to place for us to stock up on candy when we went to the movies (you were a dope if you paid movie prices for Raisinets), which was just down the block from Maxie’s.
Maxie’s was second only to the Hy-Way Sweet Shoppe, aka “Tony’s,” which I’ve mentioned before, as the weirdest place in town to buy comics. Tony’s place was poorly lit, nearly always empty, had a magazine rack where there were always some comics and magazines scattered about, giving it the look of the gap-toothed grin of a Jack o’lantern. The decidedly customer-unfriendly atmosphere of Tony’s joint arose from the fact that (unbeknownst to us kids) Tony was making book behind the curtain in the back room where he was always hanging out. (For all I know, Maxie was making book, too, because it never seemed terribly busy there.)
Maxie’s was a different kind of weird, though. First off, he was always, always there, no matter what time of day you happened by, seven days a week, all day and late at night. I think he lived behind the store.
And when it came to comics, you never knew what you’d find or when you’d find it. There’d be three or four comics lying around over near the newspapers. And in fact, as time went by, Maxie wouldn’t have any comics lying around, so I dropped his store from my comics-buying rounds not long after I first made mine Marvel that cold winter morning.
A few years later, I was surprised to see Maxie taking the same bus sometimes when I was coming home from high school, obviously coming back from work. I thought he probably was working at the Charms candy factory a couple of towns down the Avenue, because that’s where I remember seeing him get on the bus. I figured he must have lost his store, and it made me feel bad for him.
When I ran over to the low shelf where Maxie kept the daily papers. I knew I would be tempted by the few comics he displayed scattered about on another shelf. Who could have known just how tempted I would be when I saw my first Marvel.
Now I knew how Eve must have felt.
There before me was
Sgt. Fury 16!
I had no idea who this Sgt, Fury and his Howlers were, but I was immediately entranced. Like the serpent, that comic whispered to me. The startling mix of muted orange and blazing yellow that made me feel the desert heat, even on a cold winter’s day. The faces on those commandos that bespoke agony, pain, defeat. Who were these ragged, demoralized Howlers? What hell had they endured? What pain had they suffered? And how dare those lousy Nazis sneer and jeer at them from the safety of their desert stronghold?
Larry "Buster" Crabbe as Captain Gallant with his son Cullen as "Cuffy," the Legionnaires' "mascot." (Gotta be a tough gig.)(Straight out of “Captain Gallant and the Foreign Legion”… another crucial selling point to a 10-year-old lover of TV adventure shows.)
The story title was the final hiss of the serpent’s tongue.
“In the Desert A Fortress Stands!"*
Wow! Just wow!
No story title I’d ever read had evinced such power, such grandeur, such Biblical syntax!
It was done. I had to have this comic! There in Maxie’s, I was seduced by evil.
(It would not be the last time.)
Now I’m almost positive that on the day I bought
Sgt. Fury #16, there was another, more recent issue of Sgt. Fury. But I had no money except for what Aunt Marge had given me to buy her papers. I figured out that if I didn’t buy one of the papers she wanted – they were all about 10 or 15 cents each then – I could score one comic. I’d just tell Aunt Marge that they were out of one of the papers; I knew she wouldn’t bother to ask me for any change. One comic was all I dared to buy, however damned my soul would be.
Cagy consumer that I was, I grabbed the earlier issue.
Lucky for me that Maxie was so careless about pulling old issues off the shelf.
The clouds of serendipity filled the sky.
I forget which paper they were “out of,” but I grabbed that
Sgt. Fury, and most of the papers my aunt wanted and then hid my newfound treasure in the sleeve of my heavy winter coat. All I remember from there on is my aunt’s puzzled look when I lied to her and told her that they were out of whatever paper I didn’t buy. Worsened by the theft of twelve of Aunt Marge’s cents, that lie had doubtlessly negated any sanctity I had absorbed as the result of my reluctant churchgoing, and I think I felt a moderate sense of shame.
I wish I could say that I later on confessed the gravity of my sins to God and Father Morris, admitted my crimes and compensated Aunt Marge for the 12 cents that enabled my first step toward becoming a Real Frantic One...
and donated the fruits of my wickedness to a more deserving comics fan, but I have no memory of the former and can swear on a stack of Baltimore Catechisms that I never accomplished either of the other tasks that might have helped me to atone for my sins.
Whatever little shame I felt must have disappeared as I became enthralled by the Howlers’ desert adventure and the adventures of the redoubtable Sergeant Fury, who immediately became one of my favorite comic book characters and opened the portal to a brand-new comics universe, and perhaps the gates of hell,
all thanks to a sloppy storeowner and my newspaper-loving aunt.
* Inside, the title is reversed to “A Fortress in the Desert Stands.” Not nearly as epic.