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.

Son of Heavy Metal (May 1984)

On the last day of fifth grade my mom took me to the College Mall, and while she browsed the shelves at B. Dalton I checked out the magazine rack at the front of the store. Usually, at that age, I was looking for the latest Archie Digest, but I'd also keep my eyes open for an issue of Dragon, the Dungeons & Dragons magazine. Instead, what I found that day was Son of Heavy Metal--and I was not ready for it.

This being a blog about my early love of comics, I don't plan on talking a whole lot about sex here (because, in the '80s, anyway, sex didn't have much of a presence in Marvel comics), but let's just say that Son of Heavy Metal contains a memorably perverse little ten-page story that planted itself in my brain, lounged around in the frontal lobe for a painfully long duration, and didn't migrate to the amygdalae until a couple of months later--and even then it remained, hovering, taunting me, for many years. So much so, in fact, that I spent a prodigious amount of time trying to relocate this issue a few years later, once I'd begun collecting comics and had access to old issues of Heavy Metal via the two comic book shops in my hometown.

Frustratingly enough, despite combing through dozens of issues of Heavy Metal throughout the late '80s and the '90s, I wasn't able to relocate this issue until just five years ago, when I randomly happened upon a posting of the story on some comic fan's blog. Hooray for the Internet.¹

Anyway, despite (or, more likely, because of) its shock-and-awe impact, this special issue of Heavy Metal did not turn me into a preadolescent alt-comics acolyte. Quite the contrary. In any case, those ten shocking pages pushed the rest of the magazine's contents (including its cover, hence the epic search) from my young mind but, all these years later, it's the stories illustrated by Druillet, Moebius, Caza, and Bilal that appeal to me now. Still, this notorious issue is more important to me for its deleterious effects (and its affirmation of the power of comics) than for its superior European content.

---

Pointless Footnotes

¹ Sidebar: What I found most shocking, twenty years later, was how little the story shocked me when re-read it. Though still perverse, the story didn't twist my thirty-something brain the way it did my ten-year-old brain. In fact, viewed with mature eyes, it's clear the story's execution is intentionally silly, but its premise--which is 90 percent of what shocked me so much as a kid--still gives me that stomach-sinking feeling when I really think about it....

Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide vol. 16 (1986)

Once I started collecting comics, I spent a lot of time in the stacks at the Monroe County Public Library. Back in the '80s the library didn't have any comics or graphic novels in its collection,¹ but it had plenty of books about comics (including how-to books on collecting, encyclopedias of artists and writers, art books that contained samples of old comics, artists' biographies, reference books, etc.), and I read them all.

One book that I kept returning to again and again was the 16th edition of Robert M. Overstreet's Comic Book Price Guide. It made a huge impact on me in two ways (neither of which were objectively positive, as I will explain below). For reasons that are about to become abundantly clear, I've always said I will not allow anyone to try to hypnotize me, because I am one of the most susceptible people on earth. Sure, I've become more independently minded as I've gotten older, but when I was a kid I tended to take everything at face value.

Exhibit A: Overstreet's Price Guide led me to believe that all comics are valuable. By "valuable," of course, I'm referring to a monetary value rather than a personal, emotional value. Most of the books I bought and read naturally obtained a personal value (as readily evidenced by the existence of this here blog), but now and then I did succumb to the belief that if I bought a particular book it would become worth big money later, and that belief was my only reason for buying it. By no means is Overstreet the only one to blame for (in his case, indirectly) planting this harebrained notion in hundreds of thousands of kids' (and even a few adults') heads in the last decades of the twentieth century,² but it was the primary reason why someone like me bought not one but two copies of Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man 1. (More on that unfortunate occasion in a future posting.)

Exhibit B: The article that dominated the front of the Price Guide's 16th edition, which happened to coincide with Marvel's twenty-fifth anniversary, focused on Jim Shooter's comic book career thus far, culminating in his (then) triumphant reign as editor-in-chief at Marvel. As much rah-rah propaganda (Shooter's forte) as it was truly informational, the article went to great lengths to delineate all the ways in which Marvel's comics were infinitely superior to DC's comics--made all the more believable by the fact that Shooter began his professional career at DC. So if he says Marvel's better, they must be better, right? Yes, I was a gullible little kid, and this article single-handedly established my view of the two dominant comic book publishers in the '80s: Marvel good, DC bad.

But of course I exaggerate, for the purposes of my two points above. In fact, this book did provide me with tons of valuable information as well. Since I couldn't check it out of the library (as the latest edition of the price guide at the time, it was considered a reference book) I spent hours sitting in a wooden carrel, hand-writing list after list of comics I wanted to track down and buy someday (what I wouldn't have given for access to an affordable Xerox machine back then!). By poring through this book I also began to absorb the history of comics, albeit in an abbreviated, list-based form. Even today, if I start looking through an old copy of Overstreet's Price Guide, I'll spend a surprising amount of time browsing the black and white covers that line the top of each page. It's like spending time in the ultimate comic book shop--as long as you don't want to buy anything.

---

Pointless Footnotes

¹ I'm happy to see, looking at the library's website now, that it not only lends comics but even promotes them on the front page.

² Wizard deserves to shoulder most of that burden.

G.I. Joe 46 (Apr. 1986)

Downtown Bloomington, Indiana, had two comic book shops back in 1986. The first, 25th Century Five & Dime, had a slightly more imposing, traditional "comic shop" vibe. It inhabited a basement space on East Kirkwood Avenue, so you had to walk down some concrete steps to get to it, and whenever I visited the shop I felt a bit as if I were entering a dungeon. The guys who ran the store tended to have beards and wear obscure T-shirts, the smell of patchouli oil permeated the low-ceilinged room, and they sold a lot of grown-up stuff I didn't understand and didn't want to study too closely under their watchful eyes. I never felt particularly welcome there (not that the guys were ever rude to me--a just happened to be a shy kid) so, needless to say, I didn't visit too often.¹

The second, Vintage Books and Comics, was (as its name implies) a shop that sold both comics and used books. Originally an offshoot of the used bookstore Caveat Emptor, Vintage inhabited a space on East 6th Street, just a block north of 25th Century. Vintage was co-owned and managed by Don Wilds (also a co-owner of Caveat Emptor), a well-spoken, well-dressed, congenial man who (as far as I could tell, anyway) had only a passing interest in contemporary comics but was more than happy to talk to you about them, or about science fiction books, movies, and TV shows at any time. Unlike 25th Century, Vintage was a well-lit space that felt in no way oppressive or overwhelming.² On the contrary, it was a safe, welcoming place for a kid like me to browse for a few hours without feeling like I had someone's eyes staring at the back of my head. Don's laid-back attitude allowed me the time to explore the thousands of issues that were available, which was essential to my early conception of what series I might want to start reading. Long before the Internet became a valuable tool for researching hobbies and connecting with fellow enthusiasts, Vintage provided me with my foundational education in the art of buying comics.

So on a snowy day in January 1986, just four months after my dad had bought me my first Marvel comic book, I convinced my parents to take me to Vintage Books and Comics for the first time. I can't remember how I'd heard about the shop; I didn't have any friends that I knew of who read comics (my friend John, the one superhero fanatic in my circle, whom I mentioned in my first posting, had gone to a different middle school and we'd since lost touch). I think I must have seen an advertisement in our local paper or something. Anyway, this issue of G.I. Joe is the first comic book I bought in a bona fide comic book shop.

Over the next five years, I spent countless hours at Vintage Books and Comics. In 1990 a fire gutted the building Vintage shared with several other businesses, effectively ending its reign as the most important retail space in my life. With this huge gap in my soul where a beloved institution used to reside, I started frequenting 25th Century more often, but never quite got into the groove over there (though, as a more confident seventeen-year-old, I wasn't as intimidated by the shop as I'd been before). Fortunately, Vintage got a second life when it reopened as Vintage Phoenix in the summer of 1991, just after I'd graduated high school. Since I attended college in town, I was able to continue frequenting Vintage Phoenix for another four years. It remains the epitome of a comic book shop in my eyes, and I have yet to find another one that rivals it.

---

Pointless Footnotes

¹ Of course, I'd give my right arm for a shop like 25th Century nowadays. What I found so intimidating as a middle-school kid I would relish as a guy in my 30s. Alas, 25th Century went out of business years ago, and I don't even live in Bloomington anymore.

² I'm pretty sure my parents appreciated that about Vintage, too, making my subsequent requests to visit the store feasible. I don't think my mom would have been as happy to drop me off at 25th Century for an hour or two.