Laugh Comics Digest 6 (Sept. 1976)

One of my favorite book blogs began life as a reflection on stolen books. With one exception, I've never intentionally stolen a book, though my bookshelves do continue to hold a few borrowed volumes that I haven't returned to their rightful owners, some of whom I don't really see or even talk to anymore. (Splitting hairs? Probably.)

Anyway, in reference to the exception mentioned above, I will admit to having premeditatively stolen one book, back in the spring of 1980: Laugh Comics Digest number 6. It belonged to my first-grade teacher, who kept the book, along with several young-adult mass market novels, on a rickety spinner rack that stood in the back of her classroom. I'd read through the book several times, and borrowed it (for that spinner rack served as a sort of informal lending library) more than once. At the end of the school year, I'd come to love the book so much that I decided to "borrow" it and never return it.¹ This was my first Archie digest. I obtained a few dozen more, the honest way, over the next seven years or so, but Laugh number 6 remained one of my favorites.

This book also introduced me to the so-called digest format, which (for those who don't know) has smaller dimensions than a regular comic book (5" x 7" versus 7" x 10") but many more pages (128, 160, or even 256, versus a comic's comparatively paltry 32). This was my preferred format for comics for many years, because I got more comics for a dollar (the going rate of an Archie digest in the early '80s) than I would for 60 cents (the cost of an Archie comic in those days). So while I bought a lot of digests as a kid, I didn't buy a whole lot of traditional comics.

What I didn't realize at the time was that the digests were comprised entirely of old, reprinted material, whereas the comics contained all-new material. But that didn't matter to me until, many years later, I would buy a new digest and find stories I already owned between its covers. On the other hand, reading the digest stories, some of which were decades old, instead of the all-new stories in the comics, provided me with a much richer appreciation of the many great artists who illustrated Archie's stories through the years, particularly Dan DeCarlo and, my personal favorite, Harry Lucey. (More on him in a future posting.)

---

Pointless Footnotes

¹ I didn't feel badly about stealing it at the time, but I did later. In fact, if I could return it to Mrs. England now, I would.

Incidentally, I later learned that "filching" (i.e., "to appropriate furtively or casually") was the term preferred by kids who shoplifted comics from drugstores, record shops, or any other mass market retailer. There was, apparently, a whole comics subculture dedicated to the art of filching, as if it were a sport and not just another term for theft.