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Charlton Comics Group Appreciation and Information Thread
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Started by com1cbook,

444 posts in this topic

jools&jim

jools&jim

Posted
Posted

 

Any love for late '70s Modern Charlton reprints?

 

Here's what they look like...

 

667773.jpg

 

…and here's why I bother to accumulate them...

 

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When I was in middle school, the local Woolworth's store in the small town we had just moved to after my dad had been transferred to a new job was closing up shop on Main Street and moving to bigger digs in a brand-new shopping mall a few miles away.

 

This was late 1978 or so: I was a new kid in town and didn't have many friends yet, and was also (slowly) starting to become aware of the adolescent world which lay ahead -- beyond comics and toys and parents and baseball and trading cards and sugary cereals and my favorite TV shows and everything else I held dear at the time...a terra incognito of girls and cars and music and all sorts of other scarier things whose siren call I was only then just beginning to hear.

 

But...I still liked comic books, and the Woolworth's was blowing-out these Modern reprints at half of their 35-cent cover price.

 

So one day after school, I rode my bike into town, determined to buy as many as I could afford and could carry home.

 

The comics were stacked 10-20 copies deep on large wooden tables right inside the front doors -- there were hundreds and hundreds of them, all minty-fresh. A cornucopia of garish delight!

 

I was strictly a Marvel fan at the time (with a weakness for DC's Superman titles), but some of the Ditko stories looked really cool (especially the Blue Beetle and Captain Atom -- characters I'd never heard of before!), and a few of the other titles even had art by John "Uncanny X-Men" Byrne…a real shocker!

 

I think I may have had three or four bucks on me at the time, and must have bought 15 or 20 different issues. I paid the cashier, stuffed them into the pleather pouch strapped to the handlebars on my bike, and rolled home.

 

When I got there, I dumped the comics onto the floor in my tiny corner bedroom, and started to flip through them in earnest.

 

What a haul!

 

The first thing that hit me was the smell -- these were some seriously pungent comic books! What was Charlton putting in their inks back then?

 

I managed to read two or three of them before dinner, homework, and other distractions, and probably read at least one more before bedtime that night.

 

Not bad…not bad at all! And getting them at half price didn't hurt! I was onto something here...

 

Fast-forward to the next day, after school again.

 

The bus dumped me at the same old spot, and I walked the same old block back to our same old rancher down the same old street with the same old kids talking about the same old cr@p that, long since forgotten now, was oh so important then.

 

Shoes off. Books on my desk. Cookies in my mouth, and a comic book in my hand.

 

My time. Comics time!

 

And now we come to the denouement--the big reveal, and a moment I'll never forget as long as I live.

 

I was poring through the reprint of Captain Atom #83 (Ditko) and really getting into it, when suddenly I hit a major snag.

 

A story page was missing! What the hell?

 

I double-checked.

 

Yep…definitely a page missing.

 

And then it dawned on me to check the other comics I'd bought in the same batch.

 

My heart sank…all of them had at least one page missing -- sometimes it was just an ad page; sometimes it was a story page, too. But they were all light some paper.

 

Sonuvab!tch! No wonder they were selling these for 17-cents!

 

Ah, well. Sadder but wiser and all that. I read what I could, and chalked it all up as a learning experience.

 

I have no idea what happened to the comics after that. I probably threw them out.

 

Fast forward again: years later, I learned from my older sister that it was my mom who had torn out the pages. She was very zealous about her faith back then, and certain ads and story pages were not to her liking, so out the door they went. Don't even get me started on her opinion of KISS!

 

But…time has a way of taming us all, and healing wounds both large and small. My mom mellowed out considerably over the years after that, and became a trusted friend, confidante, and tireless advocate to my sister and I in ways that we didn't deserve, and can't possibly repay. We lost her last year, and miss her and think about her (and my dad -- another flawed sweetheart who died in 2010) every single day.

 

It's funny how a bad memory can become a good one, depending upon your point of view.

 

So now, of course, I want ALL of the Modern reprints, and the smellier the better (seriously!). They remind me of so many things I've lost, and of a few much more valuable things I've managed to learn along the way.

 

Not bad for 17-cents, eh?

 

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