If we are supposed to collect what we owned as a youth...

[VintageComics]

I've got to agree with Zonker, Comicdey et al. I grew up reading and collecting comics in the mid 70's onward but always felt like I missed the good stuff from the 60's. I spent countless hours as a 12 years tallying up what it would cost to buy entire runs of every Marvel ever printed.

 

 

Because I had never read a GA book I was fascinated. Like you all agree the covers where bright, mostly simple and vivid! Very alluring.

 

 

I loved the fact that they froze an era in a picture. I always wondered what it would feel like to grow up seeing Superman for the first time, trading comics and candy at a local theater and playing with friends on a sprawling landscape where subdivisions did not exist because there was no such thing.

 

Fast forward 30 years and I am buying SA Marvels in higher grades that I had read in reprints but could never afford before. I'm the type of character though, that needs to get right to the start of everything I touch. I realized that SA Marvels (my first love) were only half the journey. So I started reading a bit here and there on these boards.

 

In Chicago last year I met a bunch of you good 'ole boys while you were passing around your 'Tec #27's, Batman #1's and Cap #1's and I realized that this was ground zero for me. It was at that booth...you know...the one with the tall skinny Texan pontificating from his stool. Holding one of Win's Edger Church books after the forum dinner sealed the deal for me. That weekend I bought the earliest book I had ever owned up until that point. It was a L'il Abner #66 from about 1948. I'm a sucker for a yellow cover. It was pretty much flawless with pedigree like white pages and I was struck by how old and yet how beautiful an old book could be. Even at 60 years of age.

 

After a little more reading and research I decided that early Schomburgs was where it was at for me, so that is now my focus. The beginnings of the Marvel universe through the early art work of a master that makes covers look like paintings. In pursuing early Schomburg work I have come to collect GGA, Classic superhero covers, appreciate other artists, publishers etc.

 

I still love reading everything from 1960 to present and will probably not ever want to part with my early Journey Into Mystery Thor collection. I read GA simply to experience and appreciate it from a nostalgic POV.

 

I figure GA is the starting point for a superhero collector. That's why I'm here. I collect GA as artifacts and specimens of a world that will never return. Kind of sad in a beautiful way.

 

R.

 

[tth2]

My 12-year old self was absolutely crushed when the books arrived and I opened them to find putrid art and putrid stories.

 

Yeah, they really aren't any better than the BA stories.

I liked the BA stories and art, and also liked the SA stories and art.

 

Which issues did you get? What did you do with them?

Can't even remember now. I couldn't trade them away fast enough. I think I lured some other sucker kid in with the same premise that tricked me in, that it was Cap and Jack Kirby from the 1940s, so it must be awesome. As soon as the deal was done and we had exchanged the books, I'm pretty sure I yelled "No take backs" and quickly ran away.

[Larryw7]

When I was a kid, I read the 100 page Super Spectaculars, plus reprint books like Feiffer's Great Comic Book Heroes and Superman/Batman 30s to the 70's. I drooled over the covers reprinted in those books, and also just loved the style of the GA stuff. So, even as a little kid, I dreamed of owning GA comics someday(along with the great stuff from the Silver and Bronze Age, which was "new" to me at the time).

[rjpb]

The reprints available at the time piqued my interest - but it was the Vol. 1 of Steranko's History of Comics that really conjured up the magic of a bygone era. I was around 11 when it came out and got it for a birthday present - and I remember looking at all the B/W cover reproductions and wondering what sort of stories lay behind them. He made it all sound better than it was.

 

I too recall being disappointed with most of the stuff I read when I finally got my hands on GA books - and quickly came to realize that Marvel and DC reprinted the better stuff out of their inventories.

It was a rude awakening to open up my first More Fun and find Percival Popp the Super Cop running around the Spectre's strip - don't expect that craaap to be archived any time soon. But it didn't stop my interest - I still read any GA book I buy- and usually find the stories to be simplistic and often awful - but they still hold a goofy charm - and every once in a while one is pleasantly surprised - though it's usually with the late forties through early fifties stuff. It's the covers that have seduced me, ever since reading the Steranko book. That and the nostalgia for an era I wasn't old enough to experience first hand.

[tth2]

It really begs the question WHY were comic book stories and interior art from this era generally so poor? If you go and read comic strips from the same era and earlier (Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Gasoline Alley, Li'l Abner, Terry and the Pirates, Prince Valiant, Tarzan, etc.), there's a lot of great stuff. Comic strips were still in their golden age.

 

If anything, you'd think that people in the 1930s and 1940s, even kids, would have had very high expectations of any illustrated entertainment that they had to pay for.

[adamstrange]

The folks that were in comics generally wanted to be doing something else like syndicated work for newspapers. Their initial pay rates for original art was the same as the per pay rate for reprint rights so no one was getting rich or giving up a decent job to do comics instead. The novelty of the superhero was enough to sustain a number of companies who published 64 pages in a comic that was sold more by quantity than quality.

 

Now explain to me why the situation hadn't improved by the 70s.

[The Black Hand ®]

One of the reasons I liked Top Notch is because the run was pretty decent story wise for MLJ. Still, a lot of it was very bad. It was a shock reading SA as a kid and then trying to read GA, or the first time I looked at an early Archie after seeing a lot of Lucey's fine work in the 50's and 60's. Still, id you look hard enough you can find some gems, still we certainly do tend to wear our rose colored glasses when we think of our GA books. Eisner and Fine....Fuji and Montana.

[pennynike1]

I remember getting into comic books because a neighbor had some modern amazing spiderman and uncanny x-men issues. Wizard magazine was all the rage back then, and the "hot" book at the time was New Mutants #87. I remember how pleased I was when I was able to save up the money to get the book.

 

Back then, the New Mutants #87 was obtainable, but I remember always being fascinated when I went to the stores to see a reprint being sold of Giant Size X-Men #1. That became the next must have book, which I eventually obtained in a NM-.

 

Although I eventually grew to love the SA Spiderman (it is still the best written comic material ever IMO), back in the 90's I couldn't help being drawn to the artwork depicted on the covers and insides of Image comics. It was more like looking at a photo gallery of amazing artistry, as opposed to reading the books for the stories.

 

Silver Age is great, but there is something about GA that takes me back to a time where I can picture an eight year old kid loitering at the local store reading all the amazing books of the day. I haven't been collecting GA for all that long, but I have to think that the amazing material made available in 2006 has something to do with a few collectors making the switch to GA. I know the late/great John McGlaughlin's collection certainly opened my eyes to the great material that came out in the mid to late 40's and early 50's.

[Ze-man]

 

I think there is an underlying subtext to this thread, which goes something like, Will Golden Age comics collecting greatly diminish as the first generation dies off? I think not. People point to pulp magazine collecting as being a small niche, but I'm not sure pulps ever scaled anywhere near the heights of comics collecting. Also, the pulp characters like Tarzan haven't remained in the public eye to the extent comics characters have. You don't have the legacy aspect with pulp characters the way you do between the current Batman storylines and the Golden Age Batman comics, or with a Silver Age Spider-Man interacting with the Golden Age Captain America. And finally, I'm thinking a large part of the magic of the pulps survives translation into reprint form (Conan, for instance) in a way that a large part of the appeal of Golden Age comics (at least for me) is lost in translation to the Archives or Masterworks formats.

 

I think Zonk summed up quite well the flip side to my question, since today's GA collectors are not re capturing their youth but rather collecting them for a variety of other reasons, will the next generation of collectors find them alluring for similar reasons? Because for the most part we all read comics as kids so the transition was a simple one to make. Lets hope todays kids find their way to where we ended up without having the base of collecting as a kid to build from.

 

 

[MrBedrock]

the one with the tall skinny Texan pontificating from his stool.

More likely spewing B.S.

And please keep my stool out of it.

[VintageComics]

the one with the tall skinny Texan pontificating from his stool.

More likely spewing B.S.

And please keep my stool out of it.

 

[selegue]

the one with the tall skinny Texan pontificating from his stool.

More likely spewing B.S.

And please keep my stool out of it.

 

I recall some photos of the Bedrock grading room...

 

Jack