A Comic Lover’s Memories
Chapter One
"The Origin of Prince Hal"Sunday, August 26, 1962
The last-ever Negro League All-Star Game is played in Kansas City.
At the Polo Grounds, the Dodgers parlay 13 hits and five -- yes, five -- Met errors, including shortstop Charley Neal’s 2
4th of the season, into a 16-5 battering of Casey Stengel’s Amazin’s, the brand-new club’s 98th loss of the season.
And at Cohen’s, the candy store on the Avenue where Little Prince Hal’s maiden aunt buys her Sunday papers, she also lets him pick out a comic book. Back at his grandmother’s house, just a short walk from Cohen’s, both his maiden aunt and her younger sister, a new bride, are amazed (or pretend to be), at their firstborn nephew’s facility with the big words in the comic book.
Proudly the 8-year-old Princeling reads words like “THUD!” and “SKREE!” and cavalierly throws in “naturally,” “mammoth,” and “Zig-Zag Zack” with apparent ease. But the icing on the cake was that Li’l Hal could identify each of the dinosaurs lumbering through the pages of
Star Spangled War Stories #105, especially the stegosaurus shoving a tank into the ocean on the cover. (Andru and Esposito at the top of their game.)
From the Holy Grail collection...From its powerful, beautiful logo of a heroically unfurling pennon balanced atop the no-nonsense, formal, drop-shadowed “War Stories” (still one of the best logos ever, IYAM), to the drawing of that stegosaurus and tank in deadly combat, each perched at threatening angles, and the strong diagonals of the tank’s main gun and its machine gun slicing across the dinosaur leading your eye to the center of the action, that cover was perfectly designed to make it irresistibly enticing to hundreds of thousands of 8-year-olds begging their aunts to buy it for them.
Somehow, Bob Kanigher, like a master chemist, had combined seemingly disparate elements to create a powerful elixir in
SSWS: army men, dinosaurs, and a haunting title for the series: “The War that Time Forgot.”
Talk about your siren call.
Like so many other kids then and now, I had somehow fallen hard for dinosaurs (and prehistoric mammals, too) thanks to this:
Always loved that "Th' feck're you lookin' at?" Stare from the Apatosaurus formerly known as brontosaurus.
Read that thing cover-to-cover dozens of times, with special focus on the classic confrontation between the triceratops and the Tyrannosaurus rex.
Had the plastic figures, too: a blister card or two from Marx and MPC toys and the premiums in Nabisco Wheat Honeys. I know I picked up a couple of Smilodons from them. I recall seeing all the figures you could find in Wheat and Rice Honeys on the Howdy Doody Show. They had a sandbox on a table with plastic rocks and ferns and palm trees and what seemed like hundreds of dinosaurs and giant mammals (science and the fossil record be damned) scattered about. How I wanted those animals -- and that sand box!
Always wound up with the same dinosaur ("Frikkin' Trachodon again?!") Next bus for Dinosaur Island leaves in an hour!
But who cared? I loved “army men,” too. By that time I had become enamored of the Revolutionary War thanks to Walt Disney and the eight chapters of “The Swamp Fox” that had been the highlight of my TV-watching life from October of 1959 through January of 1961.
I wanted nothing more than to lead a band of guerillas who knew the woods like the backs of their hands against Redcoat oppressors. Marx (and Santa) made my dream come true with the Revolutionary War playset.
(Pretty sure it was this one.)
My one complaint back in around 1959: Too many of the Redcoats do nothing but march or run!I loved Roy Rogers and other Western stars, too, and thanks to the Civil War centennial, also couldn’t get enough of the Blue and the Gray, either. My parents and Santa were good to me in those days, and so, many a war could be waged in the cellar, on the floor of the bedroom I shared with my two brothers, or out in the dirt behind the house. (We never really had much of a back lawn, to my father’s everlasting disappointment, until the older of my younger brothers and I stopped playing baseball and football out there.)
Loved that bucking bronco!
Believe it or not, there was an even bigger set available!
The seed, as you can see, had been sown, and it had fallen on fertile ground. Army men + dinosaurs= heaven for Kid Hal.
One other reason that I and many other kids may have been predisposed to reading
SSWS? These:
Yes, the forbidden Mars Attacks! trading cards, which the year before, burst onto the scene at candy stores everywhere, and just as suddenly had disappeared.
Sure, we had watched monster movies on TV, and some could scare you out of your socks, but those movies were in black and white.
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The House of the Rising Sun for 8-year-olds in 1962...
And there were half-naked women, or what passed for half-naked women in 1962.
(Bless you, Norm Saunders! A thousand thousand little boys salute you!)
In short, these babies were gold, but they were very quickly as hard to find as a bologna sandwich on Friday. (I went to parochial school.)
What few you had you cherished.
You may be able to see now how
SSWS 105 tapped into a wellspring of enjoyment for me.
It may, may have been my first comic ever, but was no later than my second. Can’t quite be sure because I do know that I had a copy of an issue of
Rocky and his Fiendish Friends, too, and the one that tweaks my memory was the one that had come out earlier that summer.
If this was indeed my first comic, Nan broke the bank on it! I do remember that my grandmother, the mother of my maiden aunt, had taken me up the avenue to the next town, about a five-minute ride on the bus, and that one of our stops brought me face-to-face with a spinner rack.
"Spinner rack, Hal; Hal, spinner rack."
And thus a lifetime relationship between me and spinner racks began.
(“Nice rack!” had a whole different meaning for nerdy Hal back then.)
Not me and Nana.
It was there I saw a
Rocky comic. (Loved his cartoons.) I just don’t remember if this came before or after I plucked that beloved
SSWS 105 from its spot on Harry Cohen’s magazine rack the week before I was to start fourth grade.
Both memories still resonate, though, and whether it had been early or late in the summer of 1962 really doesn’t matter: Hal-Lad was hooked, and a batch of dinosaurs and a flying squirrel had landed him.
Next: My first non-adult purchases
