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.