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Post by Cei-U! on Jul 13, 2014 10:33:13 GMT -5
There was nothing remotely like a comic book shop in Western Washington when I was growing up. If you wanted to buy a new comic, you had to go to whatever Mom-and-Pops or supermarkets carried the things and take pot luck. God forbid you wanted a specific issue or, worse, the next part of a continued story because the odds were not in your favor! Of course, you could subscribe, unless you had a father who considered subscriptions a pointless extragavance (knowing what I know now about the financial realities of our family life, I totally get it).
Fortunately, comic books were very much part of the zeitgeist and a lot of my friends were into it. I knew, for instance, that if I wanted to read the DC war titles or the latest Mad, I could go hang with the Cinq-Mars twins. Steve Rostkowski was a Legion fanatic and had several years' worth of consecutive Adventure issues. My cousin Avery had a prodigious stack of Dells, the only brand he was allowed to read. The Jones kids had lots of Classics Illustrateds and Treasure Chests (they had a subscription despite being Lutherans like us). And I was the Marvel kid. My mother ran a thrift store for United Cerbral Palsy for several years. Whenever a new donation of comics came in, she would set aside all the Marvels, bring them home and let me pick out what I wanted and return the rest to the store. Around the same time, my brother started making regular visits to the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store and doing the same. So even though my mobility issues prevented me from making the rounds of the local newsstands, I rarely had to go without "new" (new to me, that is) comics.
I'm sure I've mentioned before that wondrous summer of '68 when the new Piggly Wiggly opened just five blocks from our house. They had a HUGE comics display rack. All the Marvel and DC super-hero titles, plus plenty of Gold Keys, Archies, Harveys and the occasional issue of For Monsters Only (Cracked's Famous Monsters rip-off). At the same time, my father finally paid off the medical bills from my birth ten years earlier and I started getting an allowance, $10 a week, half of which had to be saved but the balance could be spent however I wanted. $20 went a looong way on my monthly sojourn to the Pig! Alas, the store changed hands after 18 months and the display rack was replaced with a couple of wire spinners that were always either half empty or crammed full of bent, creased, trashed funny books.
By then I'd started junior high, almost all my comics-reading friends had either moved away or given them up and my "collecting" was reduced to whatever hand-me-downs I got from my brother's friend, Dave. I would have to wait until college before I could begin once again acquiring new comics.
Cei-U!
I summon the GPS coordinates for Memory Lane!
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Post by Jesse on Jul 13, 2014 10:50:26 GMT -5
I received my first comic as a gift when I was in the hospital with a tonsillectomy as a child. I remember it was a Heathcliff comic but can't remember exactly which issue even after browsing through the run on comicbookdb. I'm pretty sure there was a Catillac Cats back-up though. I would also receive my first issues of Cracked and MAD Magazine which I would continue reading throughout my childhood. I would receive my first superhero comics as a gift when I was once again in the hospital, this time with a broken arm. I remember asking for Batman and Spider-Man comics and I received two issues of Detectives Comics featuring Batman and reprints of a Stan Lee story in Marvel Tales Presents Spider-Man. I still own those issues today although the covers are in pretty rough shape.  |
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Post by pinkfloydsound17 on Jul 13, 2014 11:47:37 GMT -5
As a kid living in a rural community, we enjoyed a simple family trip to nearby Kingston, ON for a weekend. There was a nice hotel with an arcade and waterslide....which I loved as a kid.
In addition, dad took us to a nearby comic shop where I made my first ever purchases. I wish I could go back with the knowledge I have now because I know there was stuff there then that I am dying to find and own now.
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Post by Randle-El on Jul 14, 2014 0:30:48 GMT -5
Reading this thread has really made me miss the days before direct market took over everything. Trips to the local drug store or 7-11, picking up some candy or soda and a couple of issues off the ol' spinner rack....
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Post by bashbash99 on Jul 14, 2014 19:54:04 GMT -5
Reading this thread reminded me of one (debatably) funny experience I had collecting comics as a kid.
Initially I bought comics at a convenience store within walking distance of home, but later I started going to my LCS which involved a bus ride across town. Eventually, the time came for me to purchase my first longbox for storage, which I carried onto the bus, with the comics I'd purchased placed inside the box so I could use both hands to carry the box itself.
Anyhow there was this sort of homeless/down-and-out looking guy on the bus a few seats away from me, and I don't know if he heard noises from the comics shifting around inside the box or if he just totally imagining things, but the guy was CONVINCED that I had some sort of animal in there that I was transporting and he kept bugging me about it the whole way across town. Being a nerdy 11 or 12 year old I just kept mum and tried to ignore him, but he kept eyeballing the box the entire ride and shouting out guesses what was in it. I remember a few of his guesses were "a frog!", "a rabbit", "a turtle", among others (the most implausible guess that I remember was a puppy). My last recollection about the episode is that the guy had a really disappointed, almost forlorn look on his face when I got off the bus without revealing what was in the box.
I kind of wonder if it would have been better to show him the relatively mundane contents or not, since he did seem to be enjoying speculating what was in there. Maybe if I'd been a bit older I could have come up with some clever comic-animal reference but at the time I was too (unjustifiably) nervous to say anything
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Post by dupersuper on Jul 15, 2014 0:46:50 GMT -5
This makes me so very very sad... I grew up in the 90s, the time where superheroes were better in cartoons than they were in comics. That's a common misconception among those who weren't reading the comics. Not everything was Image and X-Men. In the 90's I was reading triangle era Superman, Morrison JL, Waid Flash, Jones GL, PAD Supergirl/Aquaman/Hulk/X-Factor/Young Justice, Priest Steel, Kessel Superboy, Vext, the tail end of JLI, Morrison Animal Man and Ostrander Suicide Squad, Busiek Avengers, Gaiman Sandman, Abnett/Lanning Resurrection Man, LEGION, Peyer Hourman, Kingdom Come, Marvels, U.S., Enigma, Extremist, Hellblazer, Lucifer, Zot!, Astro City (?), Shade: The Changing Man, Superman Adventures... |
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Post by Deleted on Jul 15, 2014 22:10:12 GMT -5
This is the first graphic novel I took a fancy too, I must have been about 6 or so when I spotted in a book store.  It was a comics adaptation of the first (1981) movie...I read it before seeing the film sometime in the turn of the 90s...it was not religiously faithful to the film. One glaring variance was the way in which Perseus slays Medusa...he uses his sword in the movie but in the novel, uses his shield as a flying guillotine....there were also no naked bum scenes... |
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Post by speakerdad on Jul 15, 2014 22:43:18 GMT -5
Starting in the mid 70's, every Saturday my dad I and would head to the local dump and drop off grass clippings / yard waste as mowing lawns was my job back then. Anyhoo, on the way there we would hit two 7-11's and I'd grab all I could off the spinner racks. For $3, I could buy damn near every comic I wanted plus a slurpee (super hero cups no less!). Then it was time to huddle up and read them over and over and over and over....
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Post by The Captain on Jul 16, 2014 11:36:58 GMT -5
I wasn't into comics much when I was younger (it was baseball and hockey cards for me), although I had been given some comics by my parents and grandmother over the course of time. I still have the reprints of Star Wars #1-3 that my grandmother gave me back in '78 or '79 (the first comics I ever owned), while all of the others (Godzilla, Micronauts, Shogun Warriors) have been long gone.
My first real experience buying comics for myself was right before going on vacation to Ocean City, NJ in the mid-'80's. I was looking for something to read in the car, and I found a three-pack of GI Joe comics at the local K-Mart (or some such store); these were around issue #50 or so. While we were in Ocean City, I found a baseball card/comic shop that had some older GI Joe issues on the wall, and I wound up slipping over there almost every afternoon to just hang out and I would use my saved money to buy one book per day. I went home with about 10 comics, and from that point forward, I have been an obsessed collector, first of GI Joe, then Amazing Spider-Man, then pretty much any Marvel I could get my hands on in the past 35 years.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jul 16, 2014 12:01:24 GMT -5
Reading this thread has really made me miss the days before direct market took over everything. Trips to the local drug store or 7-11, picking up some candy or soda and a couple of issues off the ol' spinner rack.... Amen. I wish I'd been around for those days. |
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Post by DE Sinclair on Jul 16, 2014 13:35:03 GMT -5
Reading this thread has really made me miss the days before direct market took over everything. Trips to the local drug store or 7-11, picking up some candy or soda and a couple of issues off the ol' spinner rack.... Amen. I wish I'd been around for those days. When I first got really into comics, we were living in a trailer in various trailer parks across Florida in the early 70s. One thing that every trailer park had was a camp store, and everyone of them had a spinner rack. We didn't have regular allowances, so we'd beg to keep the change from errands like going to the store for milk, or we'd skip lunch and use our lunch money. My vice was comics, my brother's was gum. Didn't really "collect" them at first, but my mom gave me an old makeup case from Goodwill, which was the perfect size to store them in. Later I'd beg them to stop at convenience stores. From there it expanded to a 2nd makeup case, then random boxes, till now with a couple dozen long boxes. I didn't find my first LCS until the early 80s when I was in the Navy, stationed in Charleston, SC (Galaxy Comics). |
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Post by Randle-El on Jul 16, 2014 13:42:11 GMT -5
Reading this thread has really made me miss the days before direct market took over everything. Trips to the local drug store or 7-11, picking up some candy or soda and a couple of issues off the ol' spinner rack.... Amen. I wish I'd been around for those days. Shax, I gathered from your last post on the topic that you and I are roughly the same age. So you never bothered to check out comics between that first experience with Batman and your later re-initiation into comics as a teenager? I know for myself, my prime comic reading years were roughly 1987 to 1991, or ages 10 to 14. Although I visited a few comic shops, the majority of my purchases were from a haphazard melange of businesses -- the aforementioned "newsstand", drug stores, convenience stores, supermarkets, etc. As a kid, I always thought comic shops were cool (what kid nerd wouldn't have gone ga-ga over wall-to-wall superheroes, Star Wars, sci-fi, toys, and collectibles?), and the non-direct stores definitely had their flaws, but the one thing I miss is how easily accessible comics were. Even if we were traveling, there was guaranteed to be a gas station or small grocery store with a spinner rack somewhere. |
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Post by Deleted on Jul 16, 2014 14:53:39 GMT -5
I really enjoyed comics when I was a kid. The stories were all fantastic. Exactly the way I wanted them.
Then I learned to read and none of them made sense anymore.
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Post by Action Ace on Jul 16, 2014 19:16:22 GMT -5
Reading this thread has really made me miss the days before direct market took over everything. Trips to the local drug store or 7-11, picking up some candy or soda and a couple of issues off the ol' spinner rack.... Amen. I wish I'd been around for those days. Yeah right. All you'd have to do is miss out on the last issue of that big arc you HAD to read because it was sold out and you'd be running back to the Direct Market real quick. |
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Post by Prince Hal on Jul 16, 2014 21:18:53 GMT -5
Amen. I wish I'd been around for those days. Yeah right. All you'd have to do is miss out on the last issue of that big arc you HAD to read because it was sold out and you'd be running back to the Direct Market real quick. It was the thrill of the hunt that also made it worthwhile, though. There were frustrations, of course, but then again, there was much less neurosis associated with missing an issue. In my own very small hometown, at least seven "candy stores" sold comics back when I was in my comics heyday. I would haunt them all. Even at a young age I knew not only those stores, but ones in any town where my mother or other relatives drove. Buying comics when I had to go out with my mother somewhere involved reconnaissance, preparedness, and guerrilla tactics that enabled me to slip off and buy a few without her noticing. Yes, it was not nearly as efficient or predictable as "comic book stores" were when the direct market began, but it was fun. Somehow I survived without Conan 15. It wasn't the worst thing in the world to have to deal with that compare to a lot of other stuff that was happening. |
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