Hi! I’m gorillagrodd. I have been into comics since I was a wee one in the early 1980s. My first comic I remember picking off of a spinner rack at Sears was Weird War Tales featuring GI Robot, which had a Dinosaur on the cover. I was into Batman and loved the Superman movies, watching them non stop on our taped off of HBO Beta Max tapes, provided by my dad’s co worker.

Later, my older brothers and I would ride our bikes up to a used book store, which sold used comic books on a spinner in a far corner of the shop. Being the early and mid 80s, most of the comics were from the 70s and 60s. We would buy every Silver Age Superman we could find, particularly Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane, which some mother must have sold to the shop in a clean out of her house. We also bought many DC 70s horror comics, Marvel Horror comics, Giant Sized Kung Fu, the first two issues of Swamp Thing, as well as Barks Gold Key editions of his comics. I pretty much grew up reading comics made before I was born. I also read my brothers Mad Magazine comics from the 70s, which included the specials that had comic book reprints of Kurtzman’s Mad comics. I also had a paperback sized reprint of Ditko’s Spider-Man, as well as reprint issues of Kirby’s Fantastic Four run. I still have a lot of these dog eared comics left in a plastic milk crate in my closet, with the majority of covers hanging by a thread!

So I guess I am saying that my love for comics has always been a bit different than the comics that the majority of my friends bought in the 80s and 90s. I liked mid 80s Marvel, but was mostly buying Gladstone Disney reprints off of the spinner rack at the drugstore. This lead to me buying a Gladstone reprint of Tales from the Crypt, a comic I had longed to read after reading about the notorious EC horror comics in books that we got from the library. And in the back of the mag, there was an ad for Russ Cochran’s complete EC library, which blew me and my brother’s mind! Suffice to say, when my friends were buying early 90’s Marcel comics, I was saving money and purchasing the EC library, of which I now own all of them, except for the Pre Trend Romance and Cowboy volumes. Then I got into Robert Crumb, and any modern comic was a non starter for me.

I am mainly interested in the Gold and Silver age of comics, all comic companies, as well as my childhood like of 80s Marvel and DC. I am also a huge fan of comic strips, with George Herriman, Charles Schulz, E.C. Segar, and Walt Kelly being masters of their art form. I like my comics wordy, goofy, compressed and written and drawn by sons and daughters of immigrants, made for kids. I love the four color press look of the comics, and I wish that my Marvel and DC omnibuses were high quality photos of the actual printed comics, like the Smithsonian book of comics that I have, or the actual inked originals like the EC library!

Sorry for the verbose first post, but I joined this forum since I discovered it being cooped up from the coronavirus virus, and would like everyone to know what I love about comics! I will look and post in current threads, and I would love to start an EC appreciation thread eventually. Judging by the many great posters here, I’m sure that you will have many insightful things to say!