Thanks.

Was it hockey for you?

I could barely stand on double-runners!

A Comic Lover’s Memories, Part 34 
The Year of Few Comics (Part Two)

Slam’s response to the previous entry jarred my memory and I did some checking that proved what he made me suspect… that I’d also read my first Doc Savage paperbacks during the Year of Few Comics.

I think I only read three Doc Savage books total – at least that’s all I can recall -- and two of them would have been available during this particular time. (The other, "Death in Silver," didn’t come out till 1968.)

 

I recall grabbing those two very quickly, in a local J.J. Newberry’s and loving them. Of course, Doc was every pre-pubescent boy’s dream-self, but I do remember liking Monk as well. If Doc was my idealized self, Monk was the real me, a mini-Mr. Hyde. Except that he was super-strong, Monk embodied everything about Kid Hal that made me seek refuge in books like this and Robert E. Howard’s. He was short, less than good-looking, and always being mocked by Ham. And like him, I could have a short fuse at times.

For whatever reason, both of the Doc books I saw featured him squaring off against giant reptiles. What wasn’t to like? And those James Bama covers, well, they were just pain cool. (Although Doc had a certain aged weathered look to him.) I also loved the 1930s atmosphere. Wonderful fun.

I don’t really remember why I didn’t stay with Doc. I do recall that I never saw them anywhere else, at least when I had a little pocket change, and that there never seemed to be different ones at Newberry’s. Which I’m sure wasn’t the case, but when you’re 11 or 12, life has a shapeless quality to it. I might have gone a few days or a few months between visits to Newberry’s for all I know.

I was also starting to read mysteries around this time, especially Sherlock Holmes. I think I first read "The Hound of the Baskervilles" in 1966 thanks to a book I bought through the TAB Book Club, which we received a circular for every month at school.

Found a picture of the edition I read....



I always bought more books than any other kid in my class, I’m sure, and for that I give full credit to my mother. For all her faults, she always let me buy whatever I wanted form the list. The books were all reduced in price, which helped, but still, she must have realized how much I loved to read, and encouraged me to order a batch of books every month.

Believe it or else, I still have a couple of books I first bought from the TAB Book Club and have found a couple on-line that I wanted to read again.

Here are a couple I've kept since the late 60s. I still dip into these once in a while.

 

Now for the comics I bought that year (with their on-sale dates)…

Aquaman 31 (November 3, 1966)



Hadn’t seen an Aquaman comic since the halcyon days of Aquaman 9, one of just two comics my mother ever bought for me and my brother (knowingly, at least). It was an odd issue because it combined the spy craze (Aquaman was up against a criminal organization called O.G.R.E. (Organization for General Revenge and Enslavement)

It looked like a Superman cover, what with Aquaman stripping off his civvies to reveal who he was. My guess is that I picked it up because it was any Aquaman comic was a rara avis and that I’d better grab it or never see one again. I loved the Cardy art… so clean and clear, and for someone like me, who was trying to learn to draw, his was an easier style to learn from, all circular lines and uncluttered compositions.

I wonder if this wasn’t hanging around on the racks in December, when I bought the two comics next on my list, probably because I was over at my grandmother’s after Christmas. She used to give me “errands” to run and allowed me to keep the change to spend on “funny books.”

I’d run to the deli at the bottom of her street, pick up some ham for sandwiches and then hit the four candy stores in two blocks nearby and hunker down in front of an old movie reading to my heart’s content. A halcyon time.

Batman 189 (December 6, 1966)



I bought this because of the cover, an all-time great. The art on the story itself (by Moldoff and Giella) was not up to the standards Infantino, Giella (and the unknown colorist) established. But that was nothing new on most of the “New Look” Batman issues. This was certainly not a cover influenced by the Batmania craze, that’s for sure. (The “Holy Cliffhanger” blurb aside, of course, but you hardly notice it, do you?)

I do remember, though, that the character of Jonathan Crane stuck with me. Clearly modeled on Ichabod Crane of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Crane made more sense as a character than Batman foes like the Riddler and the Penguin, whose alter egos seemed identical in every respect to their costumed selves. In most cases, we never saw them “out of character.”

Crane, however, had another life, as a teacher of all things, and was clearly an angry outsider who had never fit in and was now ready to burst. Because his m.o. was inducing fear by exploiting phobias, he was, even in the less violent and dangerous Silver Age, a foe Batman did not find easy to defeat.

The cover was a better forerunner of the kind of aura the Scarecrow would eventually have as an enemy of Batman’s and of the kind of Batman we’d see appear once O‘Neil and Adams started to tell his stories.

Tarzan 164 (December 15, 1966)



I knew about Tarzan of course, and this might have been my attempt at jumping into the adventures of yet another pulp-era hero, given that I was becoming a fan of the Conan and Doc Savage stories.I t was a beautiful cover painting, like almost all of the adventure genre comics at Gold Key were. The innards were also good, though Gold Key's rigid page compositions worked against the movement of Russ Manning's flowing, graceful drawings. 

Adventure 353 (December 27, 1966)



This one is an all-time favorite, a top-notch story. The blurb about a doomed legionnaire, the creepy design of Validus, and the somber background color (kind of a brownish-purple?) made this jump out at me.

The Dirty Dozen/Magnificent Seven motif worked beautifully. The doomsday scenario was believable, the dangerous villains without a hint of having even a nugget-sized heart of gold among them -- Validus excepted -- and the heroes a decidedly motley crew. The Legion would have to save the universe sans Brainiac-5 and Saturn Girl, as well as the rest of the Legion. Only Superboy (natch!), old reliable Cosmic Boy, new kid in town Ferro Lad, Sun Boy and the fabulously useless Princess Projectra were left to defend the Alamo against the ravenous Sun-Eater, a Galactus-level antagonist, something unheard of at DC Comics, in a story told on a cosmic scale.

Young Jim Shooter combined the best of Marvel with the best of DC in this finale (I had neither bought nor read the first half) and in a saga that today would have been a 12-issue mini-series destined to be collected in a trade, told a story of heroism, courage, treachery, and derring-do on an epic scale. In a time at DC that even a two-issue story was a rarity, this could have been expanded by two or three issues and would have been even greater.

Still, it was as good as it got in 1966. No muss, no fuss, no merchandise tie-ins, no rapes or mind-wipes, no grim grittiness or painfully self-conscious world-weariness.

These heroes and villains just got the job done. And so did Jim Shooter and Curt Swan.

Great comic.

The next batch I bought early in the summer. I’m betting I stayed over at my grandmother’s house again, maybe as a reward for graduating from eighth grade.

Batman 194 (June 6, 1967)



No memories of reading this, but I know I loved the cover. Just so different from the usual, plus I had really liked the previous Blockbuster story, which I still remember reading. It also had an excellent cover.


B and B 73 (June 22, 1967)



My first-ever B and B! I was so excited to actually hold an actual Brave and the Bold in my hands. Dramatic cover by Infantino and Cuidera! A couple of DC heroes I rarely got to see! At last, the comic I always wanted to read, but had never seen anywhere before!

Just my luck, it was the final non-Batman team-up. With a couple of exceptions, I was somehow able to find B and B from here on in, but it was the oddball team-ups like this one that had always made me want to read it in the first place.


Rawhide Kid 60 (June 29,1967)



Another first. And probably my first Western comic, period. I remember picking this up at a candy store that always had comics just lying around, quite a few of them long beyond their shelf life. Another oddball book that I thoroughly enjoyed, but then rarely ever saw another issue of! The next issue I remember buying was #67, 15 months later.

Sgt. Fury #46 (June 29, 1967)



I was a sucker for this kind of story in Sgt. Fury, especially a John Severin story. It made me think that Marvel could do an occasional DC-style war story in which actual people were the characters, as opposed to GI superheroes.

Ripley’s Believe it or Not 7 (August 24, 1967)



No idea why I bought it except that I’d never seen it before. I’ always liked the comic strip, and the paperback collections of it, so maybe that was it. And the cover painting is a little creepy with that earless, round-headed werewolf snarling at you.

Detective 368 (August 29, 1967)



My first Detective in nearly two years; I’d skipped most of the go-go check phase in Detective and Batman. I couldn’t stand the  TV show and the disrespectful way in which it had treated Batman (and by extension, me), which accounted for some of that. I do remember, though, that as I read this issue, with a stunningly drawn and colored Infantino-Anderson cover stripped of go-go checks for the third issue in a row, Batman solving a mystery, and a clever little Elongated Man back-up, I felt as if I’d returned home where things were more the way they used to be.

It was a nice feeling, too, especially as I was headed on the adventure of a lifetime, one that would change me forever, an adventure in which comics would play an important part.

Maybe we could have a poll to see how many were among the youngest/smallest in their class (me), sick in bed for a long stretch ever (me), and saw comic books before they could even read them (also me). I remember vividly how I used to read comics before I could make out those markings in the balloons (and I think my stories might have been better than what was actually written once I could read them).

I had friends who weren't allowed comic books, or sometimes not most of them but maybe Garfield or Tin Tin were okay somehow... but I was known as really liking comics and could draw cartoons and kids would sometimes just give me comics they had outgrown. I never got questioned about it, it seemed to be part of me and wasn't a negative. I also read more science fiction/fantasy than average and knew obscure records from my Dad's and brother's large accumulations. I only gave up buying U.S. comics circa 1986-87 semi-reluctantly, and then not 100%. I managed to be there for a few independent titles, the first wave of manga and the occasional vintage back issue.

A Comic Lover’s Memories (Part 35)
The New World

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to do much concentrated writing, despite all the sheltering in place we’ve been doing. Life has a way of deciding what you’re going to do, no matter what your plans are.

Anyway, I’m back. We last left Teen Hal on the brink of a new adventure, one as I told you in our last installment, that would change him forever.

I’ve actually written some about those fateful days a couple of years ago here (entitled "April 5, 1968") in an entry that I’ll borrow from to save you looking for it or to make it easier for any newcomers to catch up.

Like so many others, my parents and my father’s family had left city life behind after “the war,” as all my relatives called World War Two. (My mom's family stayed.) The life they had known for decades was changing. The city (in this case, Jersey City) was no longer the city they had grown up in. Jersey City, like so many other cities, was divided into wards, which were further divided into neighborhoods, but because of its overwhelmingly Catholic population, people identified themselves most often by an even smaller sub-division, the Catholic parish where they lived. And those parishes were further categorized by ethnic group; there were Polish, Lithuanian, German, and Italian parishes, but they were outnumbered by the dozen or so Irish parishes.

We moved from the city before I was four to a town that was in many ways an idyllic cliché: think Pleasantville, Beaver Cleaver’s Mayfield, and a thousand other small towns. It might as well have been a larger version of the scale-model towns through which Lionel trains ran in Sears catalogue ads and department store window displays. (We actually had a freight train that ran through a tunnel and into the lumberyard.) Thirteen thousand, seven-hundred and eighty-two resident lived in three square miles nestled between two “mountains,” (imaginatively named “First” and “Second”), with a beautiful county park, a Shop-Rite, a clothing store, a soda fountain where the hoods hung out, a few candy stores where we bought our comics and baseball cards, a movie theatre, brooks, woods, ball fields, and a library whose lights glowed orange until 9 every weeknight. I mean, it had everything. I loved my hometown. Still do. It was a magical place to grow up.

(It looks dingy on a rainy day in black and white, but it wasn't. This was the intersection near the park. That dark brick building on the left housed Park Stationery, one of the candy stores where I bought my comics. Lakeside Deli, aka "Lakeside," was where we bought sodas and snacks for the walk home up the hill. There was a white door between Sebiri's Liquors and Wright's Hardware (in the center, with a car parked in front) that opened on an alley that led to a shortcut across the brook.

Wright's was dark inside, had wooden floors, wooden barrels full of nails and screws, and was managed, when I was a kid, by the father of David Chase. (Not that I knew that back then.) It is to this hardware store that Chase refers when Feech La Manna (Robert Loggia), recently released from prison, tells Tony Soprano that he'd like a piece of the weekly high-stakes game "above the hardware store" in the fifth season of The Sopranos.

On the bottom right is the county park and the almost exact spot where a couple of FBI guys put a scare into one of the Russian girls.)



But in 1967 the magic had started to sputter out.

The two mountains were no protection against the world outside. Unlike Pleasantville’s, our main street, which everybody called “the Avenue,” led to the heart of Newark, a once-proud center of culture and commerce that was fighting a losing battle against crime, neglect and white flight. Newark was over fifty percent black, had more tuberculosis, more venereal disease and less wealth than any other municipality in the state, except maybe Jersey City. If there was something terrible to be had, it seemed, Newark had it.

But that’s where I would now be going to high school, with 2500 other North Jersey boys, because our parents thought that a Catholic education would help us to strengthen the wall we’d lived behind all our lives.

Now, my parents were strict; they loved the simplicity of the binary code by which the Church dictated they live. Things were other good or bad; people were either good or bad; behaviors were either good or bad. There simply were no gray areas.

Or so they declared to us.

But I didn’t see it that way. There were times I wanted to, very much. I wanted to surrender to the notion that my religion (one chosen for me, of course) would provide an answer for every question, a solution for every quandary and an explanation for every paradox. It would have made life so much easier for me.

As strict as my parents were, they were also generous to a fault, incredibly hard working, and tried to give my five siblings and me as good a life as they could. And it was good. We didn’t go to bed hungry, we had toys, we had a nice house. They'd even panelled the attic so that my two brothers and I could have our own bedroom.

Some of our clothes were hand-me-downs from cousins, but I liked that. My cousins had some cool clothes. We never went anywhere on vacation, never went to the Jersey shore, but I didn’t really care. I lived in a town that rewarded wandering, and with lots of younger kids to tend to, my parents, strict as they were, didn’t miss me too much when I was out and about. So I was used to having a bit of freedom.

But my parents, for all their generosity, for all their work ethic, for all their attempts to do the right thing for us, were plagued by their own demons. I didn’t realize that back then, of course. I didn’t have the wherewithal to be able to describe those demons back then.

What kid can analyze the only life he knows while he’s living it, especially when virtually all of your friends come from a similar set of circumstances and you have very little else to compare it to?

It wasn’t until many years later, when a younger sister, in counseling after she had fled an abusive marriage, that I was able to put that piece into the puzzle .

My sister had literally escaped -- with her twin sister’s help -- from the husband who had, immediately after their wedding, established a pattern of physical violence, virtual imprisonment, and complete control of her life. The night before she fled he had held a gun to her head, and threatened to kill her if she ever saw that twin sister again, among other threats.

A few weeks later she was describing to the counselor my parents’ reaction when she arrived back at their home. They were dumbfounded at first, and welcoming, but it didn’t take long before they went into they went all “CIA,” as sister’s second husband calls it.

“Don’t answer the phone,” was their first reaction. “People won’t ask why you’re here.”

“If you do, or if someone should see you, we’ll say that “Johnny” [not his name] is at a medical conference and you’re here visiting.”

One of my brothers told her that she’d “have to make it work,” the unspoken implication being that neither divorce nor annulment was an option.

My sister would have none of it, but my parents did all they could to ignore anything that had happened to my sister. They almost never spoke to her about it after that first day and were much more invested in her receiving an annulment from the Church than in talking about what she had endured during the first few weeks of her marriage. She was also pursuing divorce, but that was never spoken of.

The counselor told her not to look for what they couldn’t give her. “Your parents,” he told her, “have constructed a white picket fence around their world, and nothing they don’t want to see, or hear, or confront is allowed to come within that boundary.”



(Not my house, nor the one I grew up in.)

One might say he was taking them off the hook. I think he was simply being realistic. It would have been as fruitless for my sister to ask them for the kind of emotional support my sister needed as it would be to ask me to run a four-minute mile.

Denial was a key component of my parents’ defenses, and to a great extent they lived life as if they were under siege from anything that lay beyond the boundaries of that picket fence. They were incurious about so much, defensive when threatened -- they were threatened by almost everything, and thus, resentful of what others had that they didn’t, and what others got that they felt they deserved.

The 60s were not an easy time for them.

But as much as my parents tried to protect me from whatever it was that they were threatened by on any given day, because they were determined to send me to Catholic school, and because we were not well off, I went to the one in Newark, the cheapest option, eight miles and one universe beyond their picket fence.

How did all that affect my life? I’ll defer to Frost.



“I took the road less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

Next time: Crisis on Earth-Two (and you'll see what this has to do with comics!)

A Comic Lover’s Memories (Part 37)
An Adventure on Earth-Three (Prelude)

Having discovered the two comic shops near my high school, I was further delighted that they were both strict about getting the books out on the on-sale dates I saw in the ads. Another bonus compared to what I’d been used to. All this in addition to the fact that they had comics I’d never before had the chance to see on the stands, let alone buy.

You may recall that I stumbled across these two treasure troves in January of 1968, just when the new distribution deal allowed Marvel to expand its line and improve its visibility on the newsstands. I was in heaven; my Marvel exposure had been limited and now I was able to immerse myself at last in the universe I’d only visited occasionally all these years.

I don’t have to tell any of you what it was like to be able to read comics like Captain America 100, Dr. Strange 169, Agent of SHIELD 1, Iron Man 1, Hulk 105, and Sub-Mariner 1.

   

I’d been a DC kid because they were more available, but also because I had grown up in the world of those comics, and I genuinely liked them. The superheroes seemed to be nigh immortal to Teen Hal; after all they’d been around in this incarnation since the late 50s/early 60s, I was barely sentient when they arrived on the scene and they had apparently ruled the candy stores and newsstands for most of my life… nearly 10 years!

The DC superheroes were like major leaguers, they were the Pantheon. They carried themselves with a certain formality and dignity that seemed appropriate for their stature and respectability, the excesses of Batmania excepted.

The war comics were the gold standard: realistic, violent, melodramatic. Just like all the 1940s war movies I’d been watching since I was Kid Hal.

They even had goofy heroes like Metamorpho and the Doom Patrol, who’d have fit in over at Marvel, where they were always suggesting that DC was stodgy and old-fashioned.

So it was a bit of an adjustment getting on a steady diet of Marvels, with their unconventional heroes, beset by problems ranging from sickly aunties to heart conditions to looking like ten miles of bad orange road, but I liked them, too. It was just the kind of comic book universe where everybody acted like anguished, proud, misunderstood superheroes, even the war heroes and the cowboys.

Those first few months of Marvel baptism and exploration were eye-opening. Some Marvel titles I fell in love with right away.

There were the Avengers, who really weren’t the JLA as one might assume at first glance. At this point, they were closer to the Four Soldiers of Victory than anything else, a ragtag group when I came on board, down to just three JV members, Goliath, the Wasp and Hawkeye (Of course I loved him… any bowslinging hero immediately was a favorite of mine) before the enigmatic, dynamic Black Panther dropped in for a bit. I loved that they quarreled, that they let their tempers rage,  that they could look in the mirror and not flinch from the fact that they were essentially second-stringers. And there was that gorgeous John Buscema art. He gave these lesser lights grandeur; he made them look like Olympians. What justice he could have done to the Justice League!



Captain America, Marvel’s most iconic hero for sure. I fell for that first solo issue hook, line and shield. In fact, a reproduction of it hangs above my left shoulder as I type this. I love that cover still, and remember buying it, not in Newark, but in Cohen’s, the stationery store two doors up from that store I pointed out in the photo two posts ago.

All those new characters, that bold, simple logo, and a perfect expression by Kirby of the essence of Cap, the natural leader, racing into peril several steps ahead of his companions.

And Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, with Steranko at the height of his powers? Wow. Just wow! 


Holy F***!

Meanwhile, Mort Weisinger was giving us this:

 

The cutting edge of a butter knife.

I knew about Fury’s being a spy from one of the Sgt. Fury annuals, where his debut with SHIELD in Strange Tales 135 had been reprinted, but otherwise, I knew virtually nothing about what had happened since. Man, what I was missing!

This may have been the first time I felt as if I were reading a “grown-up” comic. Steranko’s art was so different from anything I’d ever seen on a pulpy piece of paper. I had nothing in my limited experience to compare it to. That summer I discovered Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes at, of all places, my hometown library. I read and reread it, taking it out time after time, and realized that a guy named Eisner seemed to have had some influence on Steranko, but now, all I knew was that this guy Steranko was turning my comics world on its ear.

And so did my one and only buddy who also loved comics. Billy lived across the street from me, and we had been fast friends for a couple of years, first bonding over war movies, playing army, playing with army men, baseball, football, listening to the Beatles, and for the last year or two, comics.

Billy really loved James Bond, too, and that was one of the reasons he fell so hard for Nick Fury. It was a love that knew no limits, and one that would send me on an adventure to Earth-Three and increase my comic collection by at least half.

But that will be a story for another day.

A Comic Lover’s Memories (Part 38)
Journey to Earth Three: SHIELDQUEST!
Chapter One: “To Wake the Hal-Gog!”

(For continuity fans, this installment takes place a month after an entry I posted two years ago, a memory of the day after Dr. King’s assassination, which is on page 17 of this thread.)

As I was saying, for the previous couple of years, I’d had a good buddy named Billy who lived across the street, a friendly, funny, gentle kind of kid who liked everything I liked: war movies, army men, comics, The Beatles, and sports. The one thing Billy loved that I could take or leave was James Bond.

To this day I’ve only seen one full Bond movie, and since it was one with Daniel Craig, I wouldn’t think that it counts as a ”real” Bond movie. It isn’t that I actively dislike or lobby against Bond movies, it’s just that they never grabbed me during the heyday of the super-spy back in the mid-60s. I liked “Mission: Impossible” quite a bit, and its 19th century counterpart, “The Wild Wild West,” of course, but I guess I wasn’t genetically pre-disposed to go all ga-ga over 007. I mention this because Billy’s love of all things Bond and Bond-like is the crux of my adventure on Earth-Three, aka SHIELDQUEST!

My comics habit was being well fed in early ’68, the result of three factors: the radical improvement in distribution; my access to more stores courtesy of my daily bus commute to school; and my emergency dollar. I think I’ve mentioned the emergency dollar before, but just in case, I’ll do what the comics do every so often and retell its secret origin…

“Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities --”

Sorry. Wrong origin.

Here it is…

Hal Lad, as you may recall, never had an allowance; that was frowned on, for various reasons, by Ma and Pa Hal. However, with my having to go to Newark, aka Earth-Two, every day via Public Service bus, it must have occurred to Ma Hal that Kid Hal might need a utility belt packed with items he might need in case of emergency.

Aside to younger members: Back in the Olden Age of Comics, nerdy little fans like Hal-olescent did not carry a cellphone, iPhone, android phone, or even megaphone with which to stay in constant contact with the nest, hive, womb or homeworld from which we’d emerged. Once kids like me were out of sight, there was no easy way to find us. We could contact the parental units if we were near what was known as a (slowly now) phone... booth. (Below)



And if we had a dime. (Below) 



But otherwise, we might as well have been Kuiper Belt objects.

Thus, whenever we embarked on a trip of any note, as we were racing out the door, our Moms would inevitably call after us, “Do you have a dime in case you need to call?” Or if we were going to the movies, they’d always say, “Don’t spend the entire dollar! Keep a dime if you need to call!” (The Saturday double feature cost 75 cents. If you were lucky, they wouldn’t have quarters and you could spend a quarter on candy at Maxie’s store just up from the theatre.) End of aside.

A day or so before I started my freshman year, I took a trial run on the bus so that I wouldn’t accidentally take the bus for East Jebip by accident.



           

The Flash's cosmic treadmill.                                            Kid Hal's cosmic treadmill. (Mine was actually the 29 bus, but it was a clone.)

Newark being Newark, you never knew what might happen, so my mother didn’t just ask me, she made sure that I had an emergency dime for a phone booth, which was thoughtful enough of her, but then she took me completely by surprise. Before she handed me the dime, she placed it into what looked to me like an official wallet! I’d never had one of those!

I was starting to feel age creep up on me.

Ma Hal told me to keep that dime in the wallet so that I wouldn’t accidentally spend it. But she still didn’t hand it over. First she told me that I could keep my commuter bus tickets (18 cents each) where you’d normally keep your folding money. She opened the wallet to show me where and then, like a magician, form nowhere, she produced a crisp dollar bill and slipped it in with the tickets!


(This equalled four annuals; eight regular comics plus four pieces of bazooka; two annuals and four comics + two pieces of Bazooka; one SPORT magazine and five comics + one candy bar; twenty packs of baseball, football and/or Mars Attacks cards, twenty candy bars, or any combination of the two.)

                                   

“With great power comes great responsibility,” Ma Hal intoned.

Well, no… she didn’t actually intone anything. And certainly not that line. What she did say was that I should keep that dollar there if ever there were an emergency for which I needed that kind of money.

I was hard-pressed to imagine any emergency that would cost me an entire dollar to survive, but I trusted the wisdom of the wife of Hal-El and thanked my mom appreciatively.

I guess the best part of this secret origin would be that I opened that wallet on the day I graduated and returned it to my mother with gratitude that I’d never needed it. Yeah, that would be cool, but it never happened.

What did happen was that my mom, fully expecting that the emergency dollar would burn holes into that wallet, would rarely make it through a month without having disappeared in exchange for Cokes, bubble gum, Twinkies, Milky Ways, and yes, comics, would every so often ask me if I needed another one, always with a half-smile on her face that said she knew she’d put way too much temptation into that wallet for me to withstand.

That wallet, by the way, lasted me throughout high school, the repository for bus tickets, the emergency dollar, my student ID card, and not much else. There wasn’t much else I could have put into it, as it was, as I later realized, less a wallet than a billfold, and one emblazoned “SWISSAIR,” after the company one of my uncles worked for. It was some giveaway, like the travel bags he’d bring over, which my mother used as the file cabinet for her bills. Plastic it may have been, but it did its job nobly as the Ark of the Emergency Dollar.



Ma Hal's filing cabinet...

Thus armed with the might of the emergency dollar, and given the power of flight in the form of the 29 bus to Newark, which while not exactly Flash’s cosmic treadmill, did a nice job of transporting me from Earth-One to Earth-Two, the realm of comic books never before seen, the feared Hal-Gog was able to wander freely and spend profligately.

And his first comic book quest soon would beckon... 

Next: “Now Expands the Universe!”

A Comic Lover’s Memories (Part 39)
Journey to Earth Three: SHIELDQUEST!
Chapter TwoThis is Chapter Two, not Chapter One. Nice counting, PH...: “Now Expands the Universe!”

Strengthened by the power of the Emergency Dollar and free to roam the trackless wastes of the dimension between Earth-One and Earth-Two, the Hal-Gog was ready to take on new worlds. And the opportunity came in May of 1968, thanks to his buddy across the street, Billy, aka the Kid who Loved James Bond.

His was a poignant story that particular month because he, like me, had been unable to find a copy of Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD #3. This was a title we both were crazy about, in large part because of the mind-blowing Steranko artwork and the cool stories, but as I mentioned earlier, Billy was heavily into spy stories, and he thought Fury was the best spy ever, better even than Bond himself. For him, that took SHIELD to a whole ’nother level.



Now we were both really annoyed that no matter where we’d looked, from the six or seven stores around our town or even in the two stores near my high school, which up to now had stocked every title I could possibly want (even Tomahawk, fer chrissakes!), we hadn’t seen a trace of SHIELD 3. We’d seen the cover in house ads, I’m sure, because it was all I could do to keep Billy from running back down to the Avenue to look one more time to find a comic both of us thought looked astoundingly wicked, as we used to say.

By this time we were well beyond the on-sale date (May 2, a Thursday) and we were starting to worry that we were headed back to the days of the hit-or-miss distribution that had cost us too many second parts of two-part stories. We’d begun to get spoiled and had started to take consistent distribution for granted. Now, Billy knew about my connections on Earth-Two and asked me every day if I had seen it yet. No sign of it, I told him for about the hundredth time.

I have no idea who first came up with a plan to locate a copy of SHIELD 3, but as I was the one with the ability to breach the gaps between worlds, it was only logical that I look for another such gap, the one to Earth-Three…

The next day I decided not to go all the way home on the bus, but to disembark in each of the three town centers between Earth-Two and Earth-One, where I would explore, roam, and rummage through every candy store and newsstand I could find until my quest for SHIELD 3 was satisfied.

Coins in my pocket, the Emergency Dollar neatly tucked away, and a couple of extra bus tickets as well, I was ready to find yet another Earth where I might find the first comic book grail I ever had the means to search for.

My first stop was just 10 minutes or so on a good day from my Newark bus stop, in the bustling town of Bloomfield. No Siri, no Alexa, no GPS, no phone, just the inherent instincts of a feral comic hunter on the prowl. I was geared up for adventure. My universe was expanding. I stepped out onto Earth-Three.



The first store I found was very near an S.S. Kresge’s (an Earth-Three counterpart to J.J. Newberry's, I inferred), just a few steps from where I got off the bus. It was both a newsstand and a candy store, the kind that often proclaimed that they sold stationery and “sundries,” (which I always thought was a misprinted “sundaes”) in raised letters on the façade or printed on the faded striped awning that inevitably flapped above the entrance.

I entered with that same mixture of hope and excitement that hit any comics fan upon entering a store for the first time. In those days, you never just went right up to the cash register and asked, “Do you have comics?” You never knew what kind of sneering response you might get. The guy at the counter might ask, “Comic books? Ain’t you a little old for comic books?” What could you say? There was always the “buying one for my sick little brother,” and that might work if you came back with a Bugs Bunny or a Donald Duck, but not if you returned with a Spider-Man or a Batman. And definitely not if you showed back up with a copy of Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD!

And even if the guy didn’t give you any grief, you never knew who might overhear you. If it was another kid your own age, it could mean verbal evisceration, mockery, derision. The Hal-Gog knew power, but even the Hal-Gog knew enough to us guile and grace when the enemy was too strong for a physical confrontation.

Thus, like other comic lovers eager to keep their secret identities as secret as possible, Teen Hal espied the magazine rack form the street, made a beeline for it, and began his search. One couldn’t often linger too long there. There was the ever-present problem of the non-comics types wandering by, and you wanted to be as much of a moving target as possible. Dart in, assess the comics on sale and vanish like the morning mist. You also didn’t want the owner to think you were loitering there to cop as many peeks as you could at the girlie mags, the ones you hadn’t even noticed just two years ago, but now loomed as large as billboards, leering luringly, languorously, lasciviously at you from shelves that used to be too high to see, but now were within your reach. Oh, the temptation!


Tween-Hal at the newsstand, back when he didn't have to hide the love that dares not speak its name...

But the Hal-Gog had his mission and stuck to it, a relentless, remorseless engine of pursuit.

A quick scan of the racks. Nothing! No sign of the SHIELD!

No true fan gives up without a second or third look, though, and now the hands of Hal had to join the hunt, flipping through all the comics to find a misplaced or hidden copy.

Nothing.

But wait! Is that Fury's outstretched hand reaching toward mine from his corner box? Is that the mixture of ebon, red and orange, for which I've attuned my Hal-Gog sense to notice?? So carefully I extend my hand. Slowly I grasp the corner and pull ever so gently. The disappointment will be easier to bear this way if it isn't Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD 3. My eyes close momentarily to prepare for a letdown. Gradually I open them and --

YES! YES! SHIELD #3, tucked behind something I can’t remember now, maybe an issue I already had picked up that month, maybe Cap 104 or Sgt. Fury 56, or even Thor 154. Whatever, it was there, waiting to be plucked from concealment, withdrawn by the one fan who had earned the right to pull this sword from its stone.

Look at it! It’s beautiful! Perhaps the most beautiful comic book I’d ever seen! And I was holding it. No paging through. Not here. Not yet. This beauty must be savored. Better to wait till the next bus.

Take a breath. The quest is almost over.

Now to grab another copy for Billy, and we’re home free!

One for me, and one… for… for… B-i-l…

Oh, no-o-o-o-o-o! There’s only one copy of Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD 3!



To be continued…

Next time: "The Hammer and the Helluva Cost"