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Post by Prince Hal on Oct 3, 2018 9:39:56 GMT -5
October, 1968Not quite the haul I usually made. Not sure why. But here's what I remember buying: DCAdventure 375 Atom and Hawkman 40 Bat Lash 2 Batman 207 B and B 81 Captain Action 2 Challengers 65 Detective 382 Flash 184 GI Combat 133 GL 65 Hawk and Dove 3 JLA 68 Showcase (Dolphin) 79 Superman 212 (Annual) WF 181 Two of my own Hall of Fame covers are among this batch. Two all-time greats, AFAIC.   (We've seen that Atom and Hawkman popping up on various threads lately.) Marvel
Cap 109 Captain Savage 9 Daredevil 47 Dr. Strange 176 FF 82 MSH (Guardians) 18 Marvel Tales 18 Spider-Man 68 X-Men 51 Love this cover -- and the recap story, too. (It's hanging on the wall to my left on a "wooden" plaque I picked up at Bed, Bath and Beyond, of all places. I guess it comes from the "beyond" department.  And this one, too... Yet another of the great bargains in Silver Age comics.  I now I grabbed these, too, that year. The third definitely came out that month, and I think the others had come out in the summer. Whatever. Except for the disappointing absence of Frazetta, I was a happy Hyborian Age camper reading these... Even as a kid, though, the difference between the non-Howard stories was very obvious. (Could never look at the Isles cover and not think Conan was wearing a gray helmet. Didn't look like hair at all, IYAM.)   
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Post by brutalis on Oct 4, 2018 8:18:56 GMT -5
October 1968 issues bought in the 80's as back issues to complete series collections:
Avengers 59: Hank Pym gone wild/mad/mental breakdown: Yellowjacket is cool no matter what.
Captain Marvel 9: Colan has left and Heck has begun so still interesting sci-fi fun.
FF 82: more Inhumans fun from Jack and Stan so of course its great!
Marvel Super-Heroes 18. Guardians of Galaxy Premiere and picked up cheap since they had been reappearing in MTIO and Defenders during the 70's.
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Post by Farrar on Oct 8, 2018 20:37:56 GMT -5
On sale in October 1968DCWell, for me the only DC I managed to get off the stands at that time was Adventure #375. I believe the story included all of the then-fulltime members of the Legion, always a plus in my book--I liked large casts. But I still was not a fan of Win Mortimer's art. 
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Post by Farrar on Oct 13, 2018 15:34:28 GMT -5
Marvel - what I bought off the racks in October 1968 Bought these all on separate occasions, the X-Men and Avengers at the same candy store though. Great covers, right?  Avengers #59: in this issue a newcomer named Yellowjacket claims to have offed Goliath. At the end of the issue, the Wasp announces  The story continues into the next issue. While it was pretty obvious (although not revealed until #60) that YJ was Hank Pym, some readers wrote in and expressed how much they liked this new character YJ and that they hoped he would stick around. I recall one letterwriter said YJ had a Kirk Douglas quality to him. Great Buscema-Klein art. Fantastic Four #82: always glad to see the Inhumans. But once again, no Sue at all in the story, third issue in a row.
X-Men #51: the symbolic Steranko cover had nothing to do with the story. Erik the Red shows up in the last panel of #51. But I was getting more used to the interior Steranko art with its elongated physiques for the characters. So different from the sunny, romance comic-esque Werner Roth art.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 13, 2018 16:02:37 GMT -5
Farrar ... I got the Fantastic Four a month later and that's a beauty of a find featuring both the Inhumans and the fabled Fantastic Four together.
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zilch
Full Member
Posts: 244 
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Post by zilch on Oct 22, 2018 11:38:58 GMT -5
For October ...
Marvel Tales #18
Metal Men #35 (with some creepy-ass Sekowsky art and some very stupid story)
... and a couple of years later, my grandmother moved to a new apartment building and a corner store had some older comics; multiple copies of Captain America #109, Amazing Adventures #11 and surprisingly, Green Lantern #40. Picked up one copy of each... wish i'd bought all of 'em!
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Post by Prince Hal on Nov 1, 2018 13:12:23 GMT -5
November 1968
 
Action 371 Adventure 376 (The great Legion run is coming to a less than glorious end; the bland Winslow Mortimer interior art doesn’t help.) Anthro 4 (Another fun new title from DC. Charming Howie Post art and stories. Like so many of the new DC titles, doomed to be short-lived.) Batman 208 (Big change for DC Annuals, following Superboy 147 in March 1968 with a new framing story around reprints whose unexpected ending packed a good jolt.) Creeper 5 (Superb cover… I loved reading the Creeper stories. Again, different from what DC had been putting out. This was one of several new titles and new directions in established titles that made 1968 a mini-Renaissance for DC.) Detective 383 Green Lantern 66 Spectre 8 (The bloom starts fading from the rose.) Superboy 153 Tomahawk 120 (Frank Thorne did a great job drawing Tomahawk, and the stories became increasingly “relevant” without being too obvious. The Vietnam comparisons were inescapable given the setting of the comic.)   Spider-Man 69 Captain America 110 (Steranko drops in to give us a combo 40s serial, 60s spy story, and Marvel melodrama. That humongous Hulk alone is worth the price of admission.) Captain Savage 10 (I’m a sucker for Alamo stories.) Silver Surfer 4 (This kind of grand-scale story in an extra-large book was a gift from the Marvel gods. Buscema doing what he did so well.) 12 @ .12 = $1.44 + 2 @ .25 = .50 = $1.94 Comics I wanted but couldn’t find: Avengers 60; Dr. Strange 177; X-Men 51; Mighty Marvel Western 3 (Never saw any after #2) Two paperbacks I remember picking up at some point that fall: The Labors of Hercules This may have been my last fling at Agatha Christie, whose mysteries I found increasingly gimmicky. I liked the premise and its mythological allusions, though.
Swords in The Mist Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. I’d heard about them and gave them a try. Never quite cottoned to them the way I did to Conan and the other Howard heroes. Did enjoy the comic book version ( Sword of Sorcery) a few years later, though.  ![]() 
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Post by berkley on Nov 1, 2018 23:16:52 GMT -5
Fantastic Four #83 - remember very clearly reading this and wishing I hadn't missed the earlier part of the story
I'm pretty sure I also read:
Amazing Spider-Man #69
Beware the Creeper #5
at least, the covers look very familiar, and I think it's because I remember them from back then, not from having seen back-issues or online images years afterwards, though I can't say for certain. I haven't read the Spider-Man issue since then, and if I saw it now I might be able to say with more certainty whether I actually did read it at the time or not.
I should have been keeping up with this thread more diligently because 1967 and especially 1968 are the years to which I think I can trace back most of my earliest Marvel-reading memories. I already missed a lot of personal "firsts" for various favourite series and characters like the FF, Thor, etc.
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Post by Farrar on Nov 3, 2018 11:28:24 GMT -5
On sale in November 1968
The only DC I bought off the racks back then was this one: Adventure #376. As I have mentioned, I seemed to have good luck finding the latest Adventure issues in my neighborhood candy stores.  This issue featured the concluding part of a 2-issue story. As was the case with several of the Legion stories that spanned two issues back then (written by Shooter and/or E. Nelson Bridwell), the second part often veered off into an unexpected new direction from the first. For example here with #375 and #376, in #375 we'd seen a competition among the members of the Legion, but then #376's continuation of the story focused primarily on Chameleon Boy. In this case, the conclusion was a let down for me. Then as now, I hated it when the LSH stories focused on one or two characters. It was a team book, dammit, about a legion no less. The LSH appealed to me because of all the different characters, all the different costumes--what great visuals!, all the the different powers, all the different personalities, even if at that time there was a lot less character differentiation going on. Really a disappointing issue for me--can't you tell I'm still po'd about it all these years later?   But even though Adventure #376 was the only DC I actually bought back then, in November 1968 I must have looked through some other DCs in the stores, because I vividly remember reading that "next month" Batgirl was going to get her own very back-up feature (alternating with Robin) in Detective Comics. I was ecstatic, as she was one of my favorite characters. So now in 2018, doing a bit of, er, detective work online, I see that this was announced in the lettercols of Nov. '68's Detective Comics #383 and Teen Titans #19. I'm sure I did not own or buy either comic back then. But I usually spent time flipping through other comics that looked interesting (paying particular attention to the lettercols, house ads, the Direct Currents and the Bullpen Bulletins) in the stores and this is how I kept up to date on various developments.
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Post by brutalis on Nov 6, 2018 8:25:40 GMT -5
November 1966 doing my back issue fulfillment in the 80's!
Avengers 60
Captain Marvel 10
FF 83
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zilch
Full Member
Posts: 244
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Post by zilch on Nov 7, 2018 18:45:06 GMT -5
Maybe...
Action Comics #371 (cover looks very familiar, and both features are not something i would have picked up in scrounging around at the flea market)
Not Brand Eech #12
Superboy #153... wonder why i got this? I remember reading a lot of Superboy from this period.
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Post by Farrar on Nov 10, 2018 13:39:43 GMT -5
November 1968 was a watershed month for me in terms of MarvelA couple of classmates invited me to go bowling. The plan was we'd meet at their neighborhood bowling joint, which was about a mile away from where I lived. My mother gave me money for this excursion; it could have been 5 bucks, maybe 7 dollars or even 10. Point is, I had some discretionary money on me. You can guess what happened. As I was walking to my friends' neighborhood to get to the bowling alley, I espied a candy store. Of course I went in and there, displayed on a wall rack that I can still see oh-so-clearly in my mind, were the Marvel comics I loved! The latest issues of the FF, Avengers and X-Men. And since I had enough money with me, I bought all three of these comics at one time! This had never been the case for me before; I'd always had to buy one comic at a time, due to lack of money or issue availability in my own neighborhood stores. Here's what I bought on that monumental day:  I'm telling you, the best part of that bowling excursion weren't the strikes I got or the delicious mini-pizzas the size of my hand at the alley's food court or the many Cokes we guzzled--it was these three comics. In between my turns to bowl I read bits and pieces of these comics--I wanted to save the real readthroughs for later when I got back home. It was such a great day for me, something that all these years later still makes me feel deliriously happy. Some weeks later...Unconnected to the above, I also got this comic that was published in November 1968, though I am sure I actually got it a month or two later. I remember on the day I got this that the weather was really really cold. Now I was not a Silver Surfer fan; I'd bought issue #1 because of the novelty but it had bored me so there was no real reason for me to look out for issues #2 or #3. This must have been a case where I couldn't find anything else I liked, so I reluctantly bought Silver Surfer #4.  I'm sure many of us have read the anecdote about how John Buscema poured his heart into this particular issue, and then how a careless, offhand remark from Stan really took the wind out of JB's sails (the remark was along the lines that Asgard should look more like Kirby's Asgard or something like that...then years later Stan told John "What? I said that? I loved your work here!" ). Back in 1968 I didn't know any of this, of course; I only knew that SS #4's art was really something special, so lush and detailed at the same time. I wasn't a Thor reader but I loved how JB depicted Asgard and Sif and Balder and Thor's supporting cast. I mean come on, it's John freakin' Buscema, whose work I knew from the Avengers. Here JB's work looked somewhat different from the (usually) Klein-inked clean and neat work in the Avengers; here the inker was Sal. Sal's inks gave John's work an electricity, a different polish, one that was really suited for otherworldly beings like Thor and the Surfer.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 10, 2018 23:19:06 GMT -5
That's some haul Farrar -- I also got the Fantastic Four too ... like pictured here. I would loved to get a hand on that Silver Surfer book too! |
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Post by beccabear67 on Nov 11, 2018 13:56:20 GMT -5
There are a lot of those comics I had as back issues, but the ones I feel most nostalgia for were the ones reprinted in the late '70s and early '80s Marvel reprint titles. I loved the golden age reprints though in the '60s Marvel 25 cent reprint titles like Fantasy Masterpieces vol. 1 which became Marvel Super-Heroes, my only chance to read much classic Bill Everett Sub-Mariner alongside the others.
Yes, 1968 DC had so many new creations... Secret Six, Dolphin, Anthro... and the Mod go-go checks had gone by then too!
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Post by Farrar on Nov 11, 2018 15:57:06 GMT -5
The reprint in one of the Spidey Annuals shortchanges readers...I never knew that until I got one of these magazines. Yeah, after 1970 many of the reprint books like Marvel Tales, Marvel's Greatest Comics, Marvel Triple Action, etc. contained reprints in which some of panels were cut out (from the original issues, some of which I had at the time so I could see what was cut out). I imagine the cuts were (usually) done so as to fit into the reprint books' page count, make room for more ads, etc. |
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