Web of Spider-Man 25 (Apr. 1987)

Whenever I went to the grocery store with my mom, it was usually so I could browse the magazine and comic book racks while she did the shopping. In the early '80s, I was looking for the newest Archie digests. In the late '80s, I had begun reading other types of comics. One cold day in early 1987, I was browsing the racks and had picked out a book for myself, probably the latest G.I. Joe, X-Factor, or Daredevil, and sweetly asked my mom to buy it for me (these grocery store trips, you see, were how I supplemented my allowance-purchased comic books). She agreed, but asked me to pick out something for my brother too, because our mother is nothing if not fair.

The hitch in this plan was that my brother wasn't a big fan of comics. He read a few here and there, but wasn't nearly as interested as I was. So I couldn't simply pick out the latest issue of whatever he read because he didn't read any series regularly.

I chose Web of Spider-Man 25 for him because, well, Spider-Man. I can only guess why I chose this particular book and not, say, Amazing Spider-Man 287 or Spectacular Spider-Man 125 (which were on the rack at the same time): The ASM book states that it's "part four" of "Gang War" and the SSM book doesn't even have Spidey on the cover. Plus, Spidey's getting squeezed to death by a badass alien on the cover of WSM, and my brother and I were big into sci-fi back then. I suppose that's why Web of Spider-Man is the one I picked for him.

In any case, it turned out to be a good choice. Mike read it and liked it enough to begin reading Web of Spider-Man regularly, which in turn led to him reading Amazing Spider-Man regularly about a year later. This was great for me because it meant I could read both Spider-Man books without having to spend my money on them. Thanks, Mike!

Daredevil 3 (Aug. 1964)

In 1986 my allowance didn't amount to much. I recall earning maybe two or three dollars a week for yardwork and various chores around the house. So I had to choose my comic book purchases judiciously, especially since I also spent my money on books and records. Fortunately, Vintage Books and Comics priced their back issues reasonably--often, in fact, cheaper than the new comics (which were 75 cents at the time). So I was able to load up on older comics for 50 cents or even a quarter apiece.

But sometimes I would discover a big-ticket item in one of Vintage's many back-issue longboxes, and I'd kneel there for a while with the book in my hand, doing math in my head. The first such book I pondered was Daredevil 3. Published more than twenty years earlier, it was the oldest comic book I'd ever seen in person. It wasn't in great shape (most collectors would probably have put it in the "good" category) and it was priced at five dollars. Compare that to an LP, which cost about ten dollars at the time, or a mass market paperback, which cost about four or five dollars new. Even as a fan of comics, I felt that 22 pages of art and story didn't really compare to a three-hundred-page book, or a record that I'd listen to over and over again.

And yet, I could not force myself to put this beat-up old comic back in the longbox. Its age, its ancient-looking cover art (by Jack Kirby), its single-digit number--all this teamed up against my frugal nature and eventually triumphed. I absolutely had to have this artifact from Marvel's early days. So, with trembling hands, I put back all the other, much cheaper comics I'd planned to buy that day and took Daredevil 3 to Don at the cash register. I handed him five dollars, went home, and spent the rest of the afternoon gently turning the book's pages, as if I were inspecting one of Gutenberg's original bibles. It all seems a bit silly and overblown when I look back on it now, but my thirteen-year-old self was in awe of this book. Not just its contents but the physical book itself. It was a piece of comic book history, something that hordes of my fellow teenage fans had never seen before. These days, finding the story in this issue is easy--it's readily available in the various Marvel Masterworks or Essentials editions of the Daredevil series--but back then it was only as easy to find as the issue itself (which was decidedly not easy to find, in those pre-ebay days of yore).¹

In the coming months and years, I would eventually buy comic books that were worth more than Daredevil 3 (though, according to Mile High's website, anyway, my copy is now potentially worth between forty and seventy dollars), but Daredevil 3 remained the oldest comic book in my collection until very recently. And it's still one of my most treasured issues.

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Pointless Footnotes

¹ Besides, reading these stories in the black-and-white Essentials or even the gussied-up Masterworks formats loses a lot of the charm of the original four-color-on-newsprint printing of the story.

Archie 243 (Apr. 1975)

This comic book was a hand-me-down. Sometime in the late '70s or early '80s (I don't remember exactly when), during one of the vacations my family took to a lake in Wisconsin with my dad's brother's family, my cousin Scott gave this comic book to me. He's a few years older than me, so when I was only seven or eight years old, he seemed impossibly cool and grown-up. This was my first Archie comic book.¹

It was well-read when Scott gave it to me, and became even more well-read over the next several years. Miraculously, and unlike most of my comics from the late '70s and early '80s, its cover is still attached. But just barely.

Here's what I learned from this issue: Harry Lucey was (and still is) my favorite Archie artist. I didn't know his name back then, but his style was unmistakable, and he drew every story in this issue. Ren and Stimpy creator John K. provides a brief but thoughtful overview of the primary Archie artists on his blog, and I agree with pretty much everything he says. But what I keyed into specifically in this issue were Lucey's uses of exaggerated action, motion lines (and blobs, and stars, etc.), and creatively drawn sound effects.

In "Race against Time," Archie braves a blizzard to deliver some important papers for Mr. Lodge. He begins by using some old snowshoes, but eventually switches to using a trashcan lid as a snow sled, which results in him rocketing down the side of a hill. I love the snowball-sized snowflakes that fall throughout this story.


From "Race against Time"
In "Way to Go, Boy!" Mr. Weatherbee yells at Archie, Jughead, and Reggie, twice, for throwing things to each other in the school hallways. The panels in which Mr. Weatherbee finally loses his cool are works of art.


From "Way to Go, Boy!"
In "Clear Thinking," Archie apologizes to Reggie for insulting him, which leads to Archie and Jughead reinsulting him. The "steam from the ears" squiggles to indicate irritation were old news to me, but I'd never before seen bubbles used to the same effect. This was a Lucey staple.


From "Clear Thinking"
Last but not least, in "It's a Cool Fool," in which Archie tries to remain calm while Veronica is out on a date with another guy, he finally loses it in a way that makes Mr. Weatherbee's earlier freak-out look positively calm by comparison.


From "It's a Cool Fool"
All these little details were what made Harry Lucey's artwork come alive for me, resulting in a powerful childhood bond with the fictional gang from Riverdale. I love Dan DeCarlo's art too, but Lucey was always number one in my book.

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Pointless Footnotes

¹ Not to be confused with my first Archie digest. I don't know which I got first.