G.I. Joe Yearbook 2 (Mar. 1986)

You may have noticed I've not had much to say about the specific content of the books I've been discussing thus far. If so, congratulations! You have hit upon a very important point: namely, that my understanding of quality with regard to story and art was still, at the age of 13, somewhat underdeveloped. Larry Hama's G.I. Joe scripts were adequately compelling in the way that soap operas and other serials are compelling, and you could, for the most part, tell his characters apart from one another without having to resort to looking at their uniforms. Likewise, Rod Whigham's pencils (among many others') illustrated the characters and, perhaps more importantly, the military hardware and vehicles with workmanlike precision, but without anything that my young teenage mind would identify as artistic self-expression. In other words, if you asked me to distinguish Whigham's pencils from those of fellow Joe pencilers Mike Vosberg or Frank Springer--or even Herb Trimpe--I wouldn't have been able to do it.

Enter Michael Golden. In the G.I. Joe Yearbook 2, Golden penciled the book's one story, about the Joes' Soviet doppelgängers, the Oktober Guard, battling Cobra forces. The story itself involves Cobra laying a trap for the Oktober Guard to steal their new laser cannon, which they're field testing on some Afghan rebels, blah blah blah. It's no more interesting than any other story in G.I. Joe, but look at that those camels' faces! Setting aside the fact that they're being slaughtered by some seriously cold-blooded Soviets, those are some beautifully rendered expressions.

And check out Golden's rendition of Destro. Some Joe fanboys might point out that Destro is supposed to be wearing a rigid steel mask that doesn't change expressions, but with a panel like this, who cares? Golden has filled Destro's face with more life in this panel than Destro had in all the other panels in which he'd been drawn (by other Joe artists) combined.

Yet even though Golden's forte is clearly people and faces, you can see from this panel that he could instill the vehicles and weaponry (which were so important to this serial 32-page advertisement for war toys) with just as much life and action as the characters.

And finally this page, on the left, may be the best drawn page in G.I. Joe's history. Look at the Televipers flying off the HISS tank in the first panel, the Baroness's hair in the second, Daina's little 'x's for eyes after the Baroness clocks her in the third, Daina's revenge in the fourth, and Firefly's bug-eyes in the last panel. Brilliant visual storytelling.

This is the book that showed me what comic book artists could be capable of creating. After reading the G.I. Joe Yearbook 2 I had much higher expectations, and finally began to develop my artistic tastes.

G.I. Joe 23 (May 1984)

My parents are "lake people" in the sense that they grew up spending their summers on a lake, and so as I grew up I was a "lake person" too, except that I didn't like it very much. I've never liked swimming, boats aren't that exciting to me, and, because we would go to a lake 500 miles away from my hometown, I'd invariably have to leave my friends behind for weeks or sometimes even months at a time.

But that remote outpost, sitting nine hours north of all my friends, did have one important saving grace in my eyes: a comic book shop. It took half an hour to drive from our lake house to downtown Cheboygan, where Taurus Comics stood, but every time we went into town I'd beg my parents to drop me off at Taurus for a few hours while they did their own shopping. As comic shops go, it was perhaps slightly larger than Vintage Books and Comics, and about the same size as 25th Century Five & Dime, but of course its inventory of back issues was completely different, and that's what made Taurus Comics such an exciting store to visit.

In the summer of 1986 I made my first trip to Taurus Comics, having only recently begun reading the kinds of comics one would need to visit a comic book shop to buy. And I was deep into my hunt for older issues of G.I. Joe to fill out the series, of which, at that point, I still had only a handful of issues prior to issue 42. So when I saw that Taurus Comics had quite a few earlier issues of G.I. Joe in their back-issue bins I became very excited, and when I saw the hand-written price tags stuck to their polyethylene bags my eyes practically bugged out of my head. I picked up issue 23, walked nonchalantly over to the guy behind the counter, and asked, "Is this really the price?" He took the book from me, looked at the price (65 cents), and said, "Yep."

I suppose I'd expected older issues of G.I. Joe to be selling for, I don't know, $3, $4, $5. My perception of the series, since I now cared about it, was that it must be popular and, therefore, in demand--thus, expensive. This perception was partly supported by the mail order companies who ran ads in the current issues of Marvel's comics. I remember ordering many issues of G.I. Joe from a company called American Comics, and I seem to recall routinely spending more than a dollar on those issues. So to find an issue that was so much older than any of the others I'd found thus far (a whole two years old! Amazing!) that cost only a nickel more than its cover price, was incredible to me. You can bet I bought this issue, along with a handful of others that day. And, as I mentioned before, I made several more trips to Taurus Comics that summer, as well as in subsequent summers for the next five years or so, until I went off to college and no longer spent my summers on Mullett Lake.

Taurus Comics was renamed Comics North! in the early '90s when it was bought by the store's manager, Dave Elyea. While Googling Taurus Comics for this entry I just learned that Comics North!, like Vintage Books and Comics before it, burned down back in 2009. Unlike Vintage, Comics North! apparently never reopened.

Archie 300 (Jan. 1981)

This issue of Archie is somewhat unusual in that it contains a single, 22-page story (albeit broken up into four parts) rather than a bunch of unrelated six-page stories (the standard length of an Archie story). But the reason this issue is of special note to me is that it was the comic book that tried to prove to me that the comics I got ahold of weren't ever going to be worth much money.

You'll note the cover has a "Special Collector's Edition" balloon on it. The balloon is all jagged and exciting, seeming to indicate that this issue will be of some worth. So the next time my dad took me to Caveat Emptor (the used-bookstore, previously mentioned here) I brought this issue with me and, with some excitement, asked the guy behind the counter how much I could get for it. He was very nice to my 9-year-old self and let me down gently. It was, practically speaking, worthless.

A year or two later, in sixth grade, I'd receive this same lesson secondhand, from a friend who'd received a few '70s-era issues of Batman and The Phantom from an uncle and, since he had no interest in comics, had taken them over to 25th Century (one of Bloomington's comic book shops, also previously mentioned here) to see if he could get some money for them. Again, the answer was not really. In that case, my friend just handed them over to the guy behind the counter anyway, since he didn't want them.

I, of course, still really liked Archie, so I kept this issue. Even though, I have to say, the story itself is kind of terrible. It's one of those that breaks the fourth wall so as to celebrate Archie's 300th issue within the book. Basically, everyone's running around trying to get away from Archie, and Archie starts to take it personally, until the end when it's revealed that they've all be trying to plan a surprise party for him. Great artwork by Dan DeCarlo, though.

And what could I get for this issue now? According to Mile High Comics, probably about $3 (considering the condition it's in). That's a 600-percent increase from the cover price! And it only took 32 years....

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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.