Along those same lines, I noticed when I checked the May 1966 covers in Mike's (thanks, Action Ace!!) that Superman #188 and Superboy #131 have similar cover scenarios. So I checked and I saw that both stories were written by Otto Binder. 

Binder: Here's my story pitch: Supes becomes a human punching bag!
Weisinger: Great idea! We can use it for both Superman and Superboy! Curt, get to work. 

May 66.

I can't believe I've still got Thor #128. Did a big sell off about 10 years ago but somehow this one stuck around. Thankfully.

The only May 66 I've got.

Can’t remember if there were any particular reasons why, but the month in which I celebrated my 12th birthday was not a big one for comics buying. I don’t think my interest waned; maybe the opportunities to go to the candy stores were few and far between. I know I was playing a lot of baseball after school in those days.

I may well have been in trouble at school and therefore restricted to quarters. That was always a good bet in those days.

More than a few of the DC books have found their way into my longboxes since, but the more I stare at Mike’s Amazing Newsstand (HUZZAH for Mike!), the more I think I didn’t even buy any DC comics that month.



I was usually good for any Batman 80-pager, even in a month when I didn’t buy many comics, but I have to confess that I don’t recall seeing this on the rack. The Batman TV show was beginning to take effect, with this one being the first of three 80-page Giants in the next six Batman issues. That would prove to be a bonanza for fans like me.



I guess the Weather Wizard’s appearance in Detective was meant to be a way to plug the Flash’s comic by showing him on that unique Infantino cover.





I would’ve bought Adventure and Superboy, too, in a typical month, but I don’t think I did. This, despite the blurb on the cover of Superboy about Krypto and the Dog Legionnaires, a story -- and a war cry -- that has become a favorite over the years.



“Big dog, big dog, bow, wow, wow!

We'll stop evil, now, now, now!”





I do remember how much the house ads I’d seen made me want to read the Steve Savage series in All-American Men of War, but I never saw even one of them, courtesy of the same distribution problems that were the bane of every comic fan’s existence back in the Stone Age.



I’m assuming that DC was using the Dial H for Hero strip (maybe the sales of House of Mystery had jumped enough to justify it as a place to show off Plas to a new audience) as a way to test a possible return for Plastic Man.



On a historical and perhaps too personal note, the third installment of Captain Hunter was featured in Our Fighting Forces.



I have to say, that as much as my friends and I were big fans of war movies, war comics, war books, war toys – GI Joe loudly excepted -- and playing war (or “army” as we called it), none of us was really interested in a comic about Vietnam. As paradoxical as it may seem, that war was quite real to us, even in the Edenic world of Twelve Years Old. People talked about it and debated it. It led the TV news every night. The casualties were

Even then we had relatives, older brothers, and brothers of friends in the service, and more than a few were in Vietnam.

Every day, and I mean every single day, the Newark Evening News, an excellent, lovingly remembered newspaper, printed the casualty list (from both sides) in the lower right-hand corner of the front page, a place where on 1,487 days was also printed the story of the death of a New Jersey soldier in Vietnam. We would see the first of three young men from our hometown who would be in that space just after we returned to school in September.



We were still young and stupid, and forgetful, but the spectre of that war hung over us, and none of us liked it. World War Two was comfortably in the rear-view mirror, displaced, ensconced, coped with in the memories of adults. This one was with all of us every day, and whatever glamour and excitement we imagined in a war and a time 20 years removed did not attach themselves to this one in Vietnam. The last thing I and my friends wanted to read was a comic book about a war we found  threatening and incomprehensible.

NB: The week of May 15-21 was announced the most costly thus far, with 146 Americans killed and 820 wounded. Meanwhile, LBJ vowed that we wouldn't leave because "This nation has never left the field of battle in abject surrender of a cause for which it has fought." To which he added, "We shall not do so now. We shall see this through." That was in his proclamation for Memorial Day.

That comic has such a great cover. I've always liked Colletta's inks on Kirby's Thor work.

The only book I own a physical copy of from June 1966 is...

Hawkman #15

-M

First things first--congratulations!

Thanks to Action Ace and the others who unfailingly get the ball rolling every month with the "Years" threads; and to everyone who participates in/reads/voted for said threads!


Okay, now onto June 1966: 

No longer own the actual issues, but owned back in the day, bought as back issues a few years after publication: 
Avengers #31
Adventure #347

In the Adventure issue, I remember being mesmerized by this particular panel in which it appears there's a traitor in the Legion's midst. Cosmic Boy's dramatic statement, and that art! Swan-Klein perfection. I assume Shooter did the very rough layouts for this issue (his second Legion issue, story continued from the previous issue) as that was how he wrote back then, by drawing the story for the artist to use as a"script"/guide.  
 


So here's the only actual comic I currently own today from June 1966, Fantastic Four #54: 


Years ago I'd bought this issue as a back issue, again a few years after its publication. I was familiar with the Black Panther from the Avengers and I'd read some FF-Inhumans stories, but I'd had no idea that at one time Johnny and Crystal had been separated when the Inhumans were imprisoned behind a barrier, so this issue provided a lot of backstory for me. This panel really got to me:

I have quite a number of the DCs and Marvels out in June of 1966, but I have no memory of buying any of them off the newsstand.

I know that I picked up virtually all of the ones I might have bought then much later in back-issue boxes, at yard sales, or comic shops.

In looking ahead on Mike’s Amazing World (HUZZAH for Mike!) to the summer and fall of ’66, I don’t see more than a couple of books that I distinctly recall buying at the time.

Don’t know or recall why I wouldn’t have been reading many comics that month. know that a friend of mine introduced me to the Lancer paperback Conan series that began in 1966 with Conan the Adventurer. (I still have that book; it doesn’t specify the month it was issued, though.) Maybe I was reading that Conan collection that summer and just didn’t have as much money to spend on comics.

I distinctly recall buying Conan the Adventurer (for all of 60 cents… but remember, that was five comics, which might well have been a month’s buying for me) in one of the stores where I bought my comics.



I think for some reason that it was the late summer, though. Conan the Warrior and Conan the Usurper came out in 1967, and I know I bought them and the succeeding titles as quickly as they came out. Just wish I could remember for sure if it was the early summer of ’66 when I got started. (I know it was no later than 1967, that’s for sure.) God, were they great!

What red-blooded 12-year-old could have stopped reading "The People of the Black Circle" after this opening paragraph?!

"The king of Vendhya was dying. Through the hot, stifling night the temple gongs boomed and the conchs roared. Their clamor was a faint echo in the gold-domed chamber where Bunda Chand struggled on the velvet-cushioned dais. Beads of sweat glistened on his dark skin; his fingers twisted the gold-worked fabric beneath him. He was young; no spear had touched him, no poison lurked in his wine. But his veins stood out like blue cords on his temples, and his eyes dilated with the nearness of death. Trembling slave girls knelt at the foot of the
dais, and leaning down to him, watching him with passionate intensity, was his sister, the Devi Yasmina. With her was the wazam, a noble grown old in the royal court."

And a few of Conan’s first words:

"Don't make a noise, or I'll send the devil a  henchman!"

"You are Conan?"

"Who else? You sent word into the hills that you wished for me to come and parley with you. Well, by Crom, I've come! Keep away from that table or I'll gut you."

I was hooked.

I would also have bought Sport’s July issue (on sale in June). Don’t have that anymore. I’ll pick it up someday. It’s more expensive because of Mantle.



Late that summer I also bought the Crown paperback of Batman reprints (50 cents), a natural for me because it reprinted a batch of 1940s stories and the only merchandising tie-in to the TV series I ever bought. I also picked up More Trivial Trivia (50 cents), a question and answer book about old movies, comics, TV, radio and so on, which also was right in my wheelhouse.

 
Even as a 12-year-old, I felt unexplainable pangs of nostalgia for the “old days” that I wished I could have experienced... and still do.