Nothing off the stands, but a few years latter bought every Marvel mail order back issue.

Sadly, it will be about another 2-3 years, before I am ready for this thread. Even then it will be Super Goof.

No, my first comics were Super Goof (Goofy as superhero) and Uncle Scrooge.

April 1969

MARVEL
I kept stopping by the Friendly Shop to see if they had my Marvels (FF, Avengers, X-Men) but alas, they didn't. My dream of finding that one, perfect store that carried the monthly Marvels I liked went up in smoke. So I was forced to return to the various dilapidated old candy stores in my own neighborhood to seek out these comics. It was always a crapshoot; if I was lucky, one store would have the FF, another the Avengers and maybe another the X-Men. And it always took several days before I was able to buy all 3 comics for any given month. 

Anyway, this month I managed to get all three of my usual Marvels (at different stores) plus Marvel Super-Heroes #21, which featured two of my favorite teams!



Avengers #65: Conclusion of a three issue story arc featuring Hawkeye-now-Goliath II. Colan's Swordsman was a force of nature. 

Fantastic Four #88: The FF return home from Latveria--it was about time! This issue was a set-up issue in that the team didn't really fight anyone; the battle with an antagonist would come next issue. I liked this type of pacing (the "action" in my first FF issue, #68, was similarly set up). Also loved the opening sequence with Reed, Sue, Ben, Alicia, Johnny, Crystal, and Franklin: the FF as family.

Marvel Super-Heroes #21: I was always a sucker for covers with white backgrounds, not just FF #88 but also this giant-sized comic that featured the Avengers and the X-Men. It's funny but I can remember just where this comic was situated in the wall rack when I first saw it, in the little candy store across the street from where I lived. The issue reprinted Avengers #3 (they face Sub-Mariner) and X-Men #2 (against the Vanisher). Both stories had Kirby-Reinman art and I remember liking that there was a consistent "old Marvel" look (the stories were from 1963, or six years earlier). These were probably the first older Avengers and X-Men stories I'd ever read and I felt like an archaeologist on a dig. In a few months I would start to buy back issues. 

X-Men #57: Lorna Dane, who'd last appeared in #52, returned to the series so I was very pleased with this issue!  Alex Summers was also still part of this story so there was a larger cast of characters than just the O5. Plus Roy Thomas had returned to the series (last  issue), and I was getting used to Neal Adams's craggy art. I know many people point to this era as an upswing in the X-Men book and I can tell you as someone who was there, it's true: all of the sudden the X-Men book had heft and weight and was exciting. I also liked the back-up feature about Marvel Girl's powers; next issue though the back-up feature would be gone and the whole book would be devoted to the work of Messrs. Thomas and Adams.

Plus:
A Marvel bonus for me! Earlier in the month, before I'd bought any of the above comics, my mother gave me a comic: Captain America #115. I remember being somewhat pissed about it; I would have preferred that she'd given me a comic from a series that I regularly collected such as the FF, Avengers, or X-Men (would have saved me 12 cents). Didn't she know I didn't read the Cap book? Didn't she pay attention to my comics reading habits? I guess not. Anyway this was the first and only issue of Cap I ever had as a kid. And even though I had never read an issue of Cap before, I had no trouble following the story; I knew about Cap's then-supporting cast, Sharon Carter and Rick Jones; and his arch enemy the Red Skull, thanks to info gleaned from the Bullpen Bulletins pages.  And then there was the great John Buscema art inked by brother Sal; an unbeatable combo IMO (I loved their work on Silver Surfer #4). So the comic wasn't a total loss 

And look at this memorable cover by M. Severin/F. Giacoia...not that I knew their names at that time.   

My allowance had started out as a quarter a year or two earlier but during this time it was probably--like yours--50 cents a week. So I was usually prepared to pick up the comics I liked, that is once I could find them (that was the hard part for me back then). 

And any time we kids visited our paternal grandparents--they lived a few blocks away from us, so we were over there a lot--I could expect a trip to one of the two candy stores on their block. My grandmother always let me pick out a comic to buy (her treat). 

April 1969

My infatuation with Marvel is dying out. Looking back, I think I was actually turned off by the “to be continued” style that was what had long differentiated Marvel from DC.

Miss an issue (and distribution, while much better than it had been two years before, which was still a problem) and you missed a lot. Plus, there was an inescapable feeling of soap operatic stasis. Granted, change in DC‘s comics and characters was seen as glacial by Marvelites, but Marvel suffered in its own way form the practical truth that nothing could really change where commercial properties were concerned.

Thus, as in soap operas, melodrama reigned, and the same problems and predicaments reappeared over and over. How many times were the FF going to break up? How many more times were the Silver Surfer, or the Hulk, or Namor going to be misjudged by humanity? Why did Galactus keep returning to Earth despite being frustrated so many times before? And couldn’t the Avengers get along for at least one issue?

 

Anyway, I would still buy Marvel comics, but only on occasion. The stories just never seemed to end. Even the reprint titles became blander. The reprints were too recent and the original stories vanished.

I forget when I first heard that they were going to publish Conan, which I know made me happy indeed, but between 1969 and the summer of ’70, I would buy Marvels only if they were a bit more offbeat – a Western here or there, the new horror titles, and the “split” titles (Amazing Adventures and Astonishing Tales).

Over at DC, I kept up with JLA, Batman and Detective, but for the most part, I was interested in their new and different titles: Bat Lash, Hawk and the Dove, Showcase (Nightmaster was the latest feature), Enemy Ace (in SSWS), and Sugar and Spike.

  

I remember waiting with great anticipation for Brave and the Bold 84, with the Batman-Sgt. Rock team-up. It didn’t disappoint. Batman was the Earth-One version, so Bob Haney had not even nodded toward continuity (I just pretended this was on Earth-Two), but Neal Adams nailed the shadowy creature of the night Batman. He also proved uncannily good at doing a dramatic, Kubertesque Rock. I have to say that even then I wasn’t as thrilled by the cover as I wanted to be; Rock seemed to be in rigor mortis, and Batman’s pose seemed just as stiff and his expression all wrong.

As a reader, I could sense that things were changing at DC; the old guard titles seemed old and tired. The gloss and glory of the Silver Age's sf-oriented stories and characters had at last disappeared. Despite a few excellent Kubert covers, obviously meant to lure readers, the post-Infantino Flash was bland indeed; Green Lantern was lurching from premise to premise; the Atom and Hawkman were on their last legs in their combined title; the Legion was gone; and the Weisinger titles just kept doing what they’d always done.

  

Part of my dissatisfaction no doubt arose from the fact that I, and many other fans, had stuck around longer than the average comic book fan had been expected to. But that was becoming the norm, not the exception, so I and thousands of other fans had seen these stories before.

The problem was that DC – and Marvel, too – had no level for fans to “graduate” to. To its credit, DC was trying, but within that old guard I mentioned, the domains of Weisinger and Schwartz, there was little hint that anything new (like the 60s) had happened. And many of the new titles were given little chance to survive, vanishing within just a few issues of their arrival.

It was in the out of the way corners of the DC Universe that anything new or different appeared: Joe Kubert’s often daringly allegorical war books; Dick Giordano’s experimental Creeper, Hawk and the Dove, and pleasant surprise Aquaman; and good old Murray Boltinoff’s eclectic stable (Challengers, Sugar and Spike, Tomahawk, B and B), where anything could happen. Even Mike Sekowsky and Joe Orlando got into the act with comics like the last-ditch attempt to save the Metal Men, the new Wonder Woman, and Bat Lash and Anthro.

Say this for the folks at DC in April 1969: they were publishing something for every kind of comics fan. The same was not yet the case at Marvel.