A Comic Lover’s Memories, Part 33 The Year of Few Comics (Part One)For reasons I can’t remember, but will do my best to deduce, I stopped buying comics on a regular basis for a long time when I started eighth grade. At least, I think I did based on the comparatively few jabs my memory feels when I check in at the invaluable Mike’s Amazing World site (God save it!)
I’d like to suggest that I was putting aside the things of a child and all that, but even though entire comics-less months flash by on Mike’s Newsstand, there was no way I made any kind of conscious decision to leave my childhood love behind. Even so, over the next 12 months, I can remember buying just a few DC Comics, a couple of Marvels, and a couple of Gold Keys.
Certainly my behavior in and out of school showed no indication of a sudden burst in maturity.
Long-suffering readers of this thread might remember that for reasons never well explained to Halbaby, he was sent off to start school a full year before he should have. Thus he was starting Grade 8 just three months after turning 12, and a few of his classmates would be turning 14 just a few months after that.
Looking back, Hal the Tween Tot was fighting a losing battle with puberty. One of my good buddies was growing sideburns, shaving regularly and dating a couple of ninth graders (YOWZAH!) while I was not yet quite five feet tall and weighing in at about 90 pounds. I was younger and smaller than a good many of the seventh graders, and looked it.
I was, as an old friend used to describe the process, coming out of my shell bass-ackwards. I was doing then what was called “acting up” and paying for it with well-placed swats and restrictions to quarters at home, various punishments at school, and the undying affection of the smattering of classmates who thought I was occasionally funny and irreverent.
Today it’s called “acting out” and you get a visit to a compassionate counselor to help you deal with it and acquire self-esteem and ego-boosts by the couchload.
What I remember from eighth grade is playing lots of sports, not on organized teams, but rec league basketball, and football and baseball around town. I was not too good at basketball, and no great shakes at baseball, but I did enjoy football, despite my lack of size. I think it was because I ran pretty fast and could go unnoticed downfield on both offense and defense.
Our school actually had a team for the first and only time ever and for the first time in my life got to be on a sports team; we wore helmets, but no other equipment, and I don’t think it was meant to be tackle, unfortunately, but we sure did hit each other and the ground a lot. I had become fight-happy in the seventh grade, so hitting was just fine with me. I had grown tired of being pushed around because I was small and became aggressive, throwing punches, getting in scraps with other kids, no matter their size. I was just very lucky that nobody kicked my ass; they were more mature and probably were just stunned that I would act that way.
Anyway, playing middle linebacker was the highlight of the fall for me, especially when I got to wear an Ace bandage to school the Monday after I sprained a wrist. I was hoping that my teacher would ask me in front of the class how it happened so that I could just shrug stoically and say, “Football.”
Not only did she ask, but she quickly added to what I thought was my budding reputation as an athlete by asking disapprovingly, “It was from playing football, right?”
Now all I had to do was rumble a gravelly “Yeah” as nonchalantly as I could.
I was in heaven hoping all the studs on the PBA team (105-135 lbs.) and unattainable girls (similar weight class) would raise their eyebrows and nod in newfound respect for my Spartan attitude and regimen.
I doubt they even noticed, but the whole episode made me feel like Sam Huff for a little while.
I never had a ton of spending money, so when I developed new interests in eighth grade, I had to decide where my disposable income would go, and comics were taking third place to baseball cards and SPORT magazine, that jam-packed, pulpy mix of insight and sports sensationalism which I’d been buying almost every month since mid-1965. Each issue was a 35-cent investment (And well worth it!), but that was three comics’ worth of reading pleasure I’d forgo whenever I bought it. Plus I was picking up other sports magazines whenever I could, too. At home we got SI, which I devoured every issue of, except for the one in February that always seemed to get lost in the mail. At least that's what my mother always told me.
This was the year of the merger between the NFL and the AFL; Notre Dame was in the middle of one of its great stretches under Parseghian; and it was the height and, as it turned out, the final years of the career of one of my forever idols, Sandy Koufax; and the twilight of Mickey Mantle’s as well. Not that I was a major Mantle fan, but every sports fan recognized his greatness, and Mantle and Koufax seemed to be on every other cover of SPORT that wasn’t dedicated to football.
Add all that to the cost of the three or four Conan paperbacks (that came out during ’66 and ’67 (60 cents each… that’s five comics, or two annuals!), and my comic book sending was hit pretty hard.
As I wrote about Conan a few years ago in the 50 Years Ago thread,
“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 so hooked.
The Frazetta cover alone would have been enough, but when I read the stories, I was knocked out. This was adult literature as far as I was concerned. Never had I read descriptions of bloodletting and combat like Robert E. Howard’s. I was fascinated right away by the geography, the maps, Conan’s long and bloody history, and his sheer indomitability. The descriptions of slave girls and princesses didn’t hurt, either. I bought every Conan book I could find, haunting Cohen’s Stationery store, where I also bought my sports magazines and the occasional comic.
Next time, we get to the point of my mini-therapy session as we take a peek at the books I distinctly remember from the Year of Few Comics. As you might suspect, each rings a bell only I can hear, and each has a story to tell.
Which you’ll hear next time!