This book belonged to my brother. My memory of its acquisition is fuzzy, but I remember the two of us being at the mall with our dad, who bought this book for my brother at one of the kiosks, probably from some local guy who rented the space for the weekend to sell off part of his collection. This wasn't in 1974, because my brother wasn't born until 1976 and I would've been just a year old; it was probably sometime in the early '80s. Anyway, the Holiday Grab-Bag was important because it provided Mike and me with our first experience with many Marvel superheroes in situ. We had watched Spider-Man's live-action segments on The Electric Company (until that show was canceled), tuned in to Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends every Saturday morning, and read his comic strip adventures in the newspaper every day, but we had never read a Spider-Man story in an actual Marvel comic book. Here, his team-up with the Human Torch (from Marvel Team-Up 1) is entertaining, but was by no means the highlight of the book.
In terms of characters, Daredevil made the biggest impression on me. Wally Wood's lively rendition of the Sub-Mariner beating the living hell out of Daredevil for a dozen pages, and Daredevil refusing to give up the fight, is legendary (originally published in Daredevil 7). From the moment I read that story, Daredevil was, and continues to be, my favorite superhero. I remember pretending to be superheroes with my brother a few times after that (playing characters either pulled straight from this book or other, more ever-present, characters like Batman and Superman), and when I'd play as Daredevil I'd close my eyes, trying to figure out if I could fight crime just by using my sense of hearing. The Daredevil story in the Holiday Grab-Bag makes it clear, through Matt Murdock's interaction with his partner, Foggy Nelson, and his secretary, Karen Page, that he's blind, but I wasn't able to interpret, from Daredevil's fight with the Sub-Mariner, how exactly his powers worked. (Of course, if I had been reading the current issues of Daredevil at the time, Frank Miller's visual depictions of Daredevil's radar-sense would have made it much more clear to me.)
In terms of story, it's the one starring the Black Widow that made the biggest impression on me (from Amazing Adventures 5). From Gene Colon's frightening depiction of the crazy-eyed cult leader and his sinister plan to rob a blood bank (whatever that is--my eight-year-old self wondered) to Natasha Romanoff's tearful failure to save the troubled kid's life at the end of the story, it was extremely affecting.
It also contains one panel that my brother and I found hilarious. As the Black Widow fights a couple of thugs, one of them hits her in the face. Now, don't get me wrong, it's not the violence against women we found funny, but the thug's line in that panel: "S'funny, Widow-woman!" Here, we had stumbled upon one of the major limitations of comic book dialogue in the '70s and '80s (perhaps imposed, indirectly, by the Comics Code Authority), where the author would struggle to make his adult characters sound tough by using completely unobjectionable language. And sometimes (often, in fact) it sounded ridiculous. "S'funny, Widow-woman!" became a catchphrase of ours for years afterward, and it still makes me laugh when I think about it. Less interesting to me than Daredevil and the Black Widow were the two reprints at the end of the book (from Fantastic Four 25 and 26), which featured the Fantastic Four and the Avengers fighting the Hulk. The B-list Marvel characters were the ones that most appealed to me, and this appeal continued when I began reading Marvel comic books in earnest five years later. As I mentioned in my first post, superheroes just didn't do it for me in those days. I was an Archie fan--but the Holiday Grab-Bag provided me with a tantalizing first look at the characters I would later become far more familiar with.
My brother's copy of the Holiday Grab-Bag eventually disappeared. I distinctly remember the first page having been ripped out of the book and ending up in his trashcan (a testament to my brother's eventual, complete disinterest in comics). I did rescue it, tape it back together, and return it to its rightful place for him, but the book was gone a few years later. I recently bought my own second-hand copy on eBay, to relive my first experience with Marvel superheroes.
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