As *spoon* as Arch comes back from vacation Hepcat will still be Hepcat. 8 8

[Hepcat]

One of the house ads that appeared in most of the comics I was buying in the summer of 1963 was this one:

Well, yes! It went without saying that I absolutely, positively had to know the origins of the heroic Kid Flash and Elongated Man plus the dastardly villainous Mr. Element and Super Gorilla Grodd. I couldn't find it though at either Ken's or Les' Variety stores since every store didn't necessarily get even one copy of every comic and of course the one copy could have been swiftly snapped up by another kid.

I also couldn't find the then current issue of Green Lantern:

I "scoured" a whopping total of three or four different variety stores in my neighbourhood plus another three or four outlets downtown trying to find these two comics without any luck. For whatever reason I didn't think to devote an afternoon to riding my bike around to the other eighteen or so variety stores and drug stores that stocked comics in the square mile or so of my school district. 

In late August though we went on a family trip by train to far off Toronto to visit relatives and to take in the Canadian National Exhibition which was a mega fair even by the standards of American state fairs:

To my dismay I didn't succeed in finding either the Flash Annual or the Green Lantern comic in Toronto although admittedly I only checked a couple of variety stores in the immediate High Park neighbourhood where our relatives lived. Oh well. C'est la vie. I have both comics in my present day collection anyway.

I did however pick up this nearly three month old gem that had been forgotten and was still on the spinner rack at one of the stores on Bloor Street:

The other thing I very clearly remember from that train trip to Toronto was admiring one of the 1963 CFL coins that had been free inside a ten cent bag of either Krun-Chee or Humpty Dumpty Potato Chips that I'd managed to score at either the CN train station or from the vendor that came down the aisles inside the train itself with a metal basket of various goodies (including cigarettes, chips, chocolate bars and Jocko chocolate drink in cans). Here are some pictures of these coins from my present day collection:

I already had about five of these CFL coins and I wanted to collect both the CFL coins and the DC comics badly but my funds were very limited and I couldn't do both. The comics won out.

Nonetheless being a huge Canadian football fan I started pecking away at completing this 160 coin CFL set back in the early eighties. It took me until 2000 or so to get all 160 coins because the coins were made available in two series and the high numbers ended up being short printed. Worse yet, forty of the short prints seemed to be distributed only regionally so that only the Toronto Argonaut, Hamilton Tiger-Cat, Ottawa Rough Rider and Winnipeg Blue Bomber twenty player team sets were generally available in Ontario. As a further complexity, the coins available within Humpty Dumpty chips had bilingual English and French text on the back while the ones in Krun-Chee chips had English only text.

But I like the 1963 CFL coins so much (partially because of my memories of collecting them as a kid) that about ten years ago I decided to break my set up into two, one with unilingual English backs and one with bilingual backs so that I could keep on collecting these little treasures! I'm getting close to completing a double set but I'm still some 53 coins short. Here are a few pics:

Bilingual

English backs

Finding bilingual high numbered coins of the Calgary Stampeders, Edmonton Eskimos and British Columbia Lions is like pulling teeth though.

Edited April 20 by Hepcat

[Hepcat]

Aquaman 12 hit my mail box early in September shortly after our return from Toronto. 

I was a bit miffed with it arriving folded in half down the middle though.  I also clearly remember acquiring these comics off newsstands by mid-September:

I remember buying the #9 at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind newsstand at the Covent Garden Market building in downtown London and trekking home with it. The excitement at my house otherwise that day was the selecting of a dress for my sister's prom.

This Flash cover absolutely knocked me out when I first saw it on the bottom of the magazine stand at Les' Variety. Both the composition by legendary artist Carmine Infantino and the colours are fabulous. I didn't realize it at the time but Heat Wave would be the final villain to be inducted in what soon became known as the Flash's Rogues Gallery:

I also remember seeing this comic for the first time on the magazine stand at Les' Variety shortly thereafter. It was another in the series of wildly colourful eye-catching Justice League covers. Only as an adult though did I notice that Mike Sekowsky habitually drew Wonder Woman with a huge and not at all athletic looking butt. 

Green Lantern, wow! Finally! And such a gorgeous cover by Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson. It remains one of my favourite comic covers of all time.

Wow! The two members of the Justice League of America who sadly did not have their own title featured teaming up on the cover of a comic. I was feverish with excitement! Mike M. from down the street had been pressing me to collect Dinky Toys with him but I knew my quarters and dimes would have to be reserved for more DC superhero comics.

I first saw Wonder Woman 142 downtown at the News Depot which together with Ken's Variety was one of my go-to places for Krun-Chee Potato Chips which frequently had great coin premiums free inside. But Wonder Tot?! What in hell was editor/writer Robert Kanigher thinking to introduce and then repeatedly feature such an execrable character? Kanigher must have been a soft-headed new father. 

Plus a few more I clearly remember buying:

Well that was it, game, set and match! By this time I was well and truly hooked on DC superhero comics. And now here I am today, still a huge comic fan!

Edited April 24 by Hepcat

[Robot Man]

I remember buying that Flash off the rack at the drug store. But by that time I was a Marvel Zombie.

[FoggyNelson]

This page was a good read HelpCat ‼️ 

thanks👍interesting too

[FoggyNelson]

On 3/10/2024 at 1:15 AM, Hepcat said:

The penny briquettes of Bazooka and Dubble Bubble were the everyday staples of every red-blooded kid including myself during my primary school years from 1958 through 1965:

 

Sadly I've not seen Bazooka Bubble Gum in the little briquettes for over thirty years in my neck of the woods. Tubs of Dubble Bubble can still be found in some variety stores in Toronto with hot pink wrappers:

While they're now a dime each, to be fair the briquettes are about 50% bigger than the ones I used to buy as a kid. They taste the same as the original Dubble Bubbles I remember. Moreover I've seen these gumballs in vending machines on occasion:

They have the original Dubble Bubble flavour and they're really good but unfortunately they're typically available only at rip-off prices of a quarter or even a dollar. 

More common though is this stuff which is very annoyingly wrongly labelled as "America's Original":

While it has a very pleasant tutti-frutti taste, the flavour doesn't last. And like I say it's not the "original"! 

But Dubble Bubble isn't produced by Fleer any more anyway. The Dubble Bubble name brand was purchased from Fleer by Concord Confections just north of Toronto in 1998.  Concord was then acquired by Tootsie Roll Industries in 2003.

What I really miss is Black Cat Licorice Bubble Gum:

It was somehow chewier than Bazooka or even Dubble Bubble and could be blown into the biggest bubbles. It wasn't widely sold but I remember happily chewing it for hours when I could find it.

Nonetheless I remain a bubble gum chewing cat to this very day. Bubble gum is in fact one of the few things on which Balticfox (that mangy mutt living out back by the tracks) and I see eye-to-eye.

I too loved me some double-bubble penny bricks , except they were 2 cent when I bought them 

[Hepcat]

I still clearly remember the day I bought the comic that introduced me to Adam Strange particularly well. It was the day in October 1963 of the annual charity bazaar in the basement of St. Martin's church which was adjacent to my school. Included among the attractions were some designed to coax the nickels and pennies from kids' pockets such as a "fish" pond. I clearly remember standing in the outside entrance alcove at the side of the church admiring the copy of Mystery in Space 88 that I'd just purchased at Les' Variety:

Up to that point Mystery in Space had not been among the titles I'd been buying because my focus at the time was on superheroes and I thought Adam Strange was one of those future spacemen like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Space Ranger and Tommy Tomorrow. It was the cover blurb promising a Hawkman thriller that actually prompted me to buy the issue. Hawkman was a mysterious hero who I only knew from house ads such as these up to that point:

But that issue of Mystery in Space acted to make me a big fan of Adam Strange as well. Unfortunately Adam Strange stories illustrated by the old master Carmine Infantino continued to only issue #91. When Julius Schwartz took over the Batman editorial bailiwick from Jack Schiff in 1964, Infantino was assigned the artwork on Detective Comics and he had to give up illustrating Adam Strange stories.

Edited April 27 by Hepcat

[Hepcat]

I also clearly remember being terribly excited when I found this issue of Green Lantern on the comic stand at Les' Variety in October:

But my comic collecting in 1963 came to another crashing halt when my sister convinced my mother to confiscate my comics and hide them from me. Don't ask me why. I've asked my sister several times over the decades what she was thinking but she doesn't have a good explanation either.

In any event I still have a very clear memory shortly thereafter of a dark dreary evening in October when I was being taken by my mother to see a new dentist on the other side of town. My parents wanted to support a young Latvian girl who had started up a practice on distant Oxford Street East. The bus that stopped a half block from our house should have enabled us to get there non-stop but for whatever reason - probably to shop at Kresge, Metropolitan or Woolworth - we had stopped at London's main downtown intersection. There on the magazine stand at the United Cigar Store on that corner was this Flash comic:

I stared at the cover featuring the mysterious Top with longing but there was no point in buying it. Now of course I have a copy.

Edited May 8 by Hepcat

[Hepcat]

While I resisted actually buying any more comics late in 1963 and early in 1964, I continued to peruse them on newsstands. These in particular left a lasting impression on my young psyche when I spotted them on the newsstand at the News Depot on Dundas Street in downtown London:

Wow and double wow! Aquaman, the king of the seas who can command fish, and the mysterious Hawkman, monarch of the skies who can converse with birds. What a perfect pairing! Incredibly exciting!

Ullllpppp! Shrunk and stripped of his superpowers? However will old Supes get out of this desperate predicament?

Oh man, what fantastic covers! Carmine Infantino was at his creative peak in 1963-64 on both Mystery in Space and The Flash covers.

The comics more so than any others that drew me back into actually buying again though were those of my favourite hero, Green Lantern. The first of these I may have discovered at the News Depot as well:

Eeeeek!!! Talk about being in dire straits!

I was compelled to attend supplementary Lithuanian language classes throughout my grade school years on Saturday afternoons at St. Peter's School on Richmond Street in downtown London. Across Richmond St. from St. Peter's was the Davis Variety which also boasted an old-fashioned honest-to-goodness lunch counter. It was the magazine stand at the back that interested me though and it was there that I first saw Green Lantern #28 & 29.

Wow! The return of the Shark whom Green Lantern had somehow barely managed to overcome in issue #24.

Gil Kane was at his creative peak in 1963-64 on both The Atom and Green Lantern covers. 

I couldn't resist buying Green Lantern 28. When I discovered the stack of comics my mother and sister had concealed from me inside the couch a few weeks later, I was back to collecting DC superhero comics big time!