John Dimm

Here's my story. I discovered Marvel in the summer of '64 when I was 10 and my family had just moved to California. One Saturday morning I sat on the floor at the Rexall drugstore and read all the September issues. Iron Man and Hawkeye, the Fantastic Four and Diablo, Spider-Man and Daredevil, X-Men and the Blob, Thor and Loki. Soon I was begging my mom for $2 every month to buy everything Marvel was selling. I loved the origin stories in Marvel Tales #1 and wanted to know more about how things came to be. I became a collector. At the time Marvel had a back-issue service to off-load unsold and returned books. I begged for more money and sent in coins taped to cardboard, asking them to pack the comics flat instead of folded in half. I Used bookstores were the other source of old comics and my mom would often drop me off at one when she went shopping. In 1966 we moved back to Seattle and I found a huge stack of early Marvels at the great Tyee Bookstore on University Ave. There were two copies of Hulk #1 for sale at $0.05. I sent one to my buddy in California and sold the other in 1977 for $60. I bragged about making a 1,200 percent profit on the 5 cent investment. When I started going to Junior High School I didn't want people to see me buying comics. It was a little-kid thing to do and I was trying to be a grown-up or at least an adolescent. For awhile I reduced my monthly buy to FF, ASM, and Thor, and then stopped even those in 1967. My collection breaks down into two phases: before Dec 1964 many of them were purchased at used bookstores. Quality varies and I'm planning to get them pressed. After that, the second group are the ones I bought fresh at the news stand, carefully picking out the copy with the best spine. Most of them are in beautiful shape. Now I am a septuagenarian and must pass things on to the next generation. I slabbed a few and sold them but slabs make me sad. How can you really enjoy a comic interred in a plastic coffin? I am hoping to sell the rest of my collection as raw books. I'm also a developer and wrote a nice react/nextjs app to show my collection of 400 silver age marvels as a wall of comic covers that you can slice and dice, with the scans and photos I have taken so far. It's at silverage.vercel.app. No adds, no e-commerce. If you see something interesting there let me know and I will take all the photos you want. (Moderator: feel free remove this paragraph if it violates the rules)

Bought this at a Rexall drugstore in 1966. Higher res photos available on my personal non-commercial website silverage.vercel.app (Moderator: is that okay?)