The first superhero comic I remember buying with my own money was this one:
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #109 from early 1974. I still have it. I’d read some other comics prior to this, but don’t remember a single thing about them and nothing in my collection jogs any memories. For all rights and purposes, this was the first comic I ever read. Oddly, this also coincided with the debut of SuperFriends - a show my brother and I watched faithfully every Saturday morning – and yet I have no recollection of the cartoon influencing my buying decision and in fact distinctly remember wishing SuperFriends was a little more like the Justice League. I wanted Flash and Green Lantern and the Atom not Wendy and Marvin or the Wondertwins. And villains – where were the villains? Somehow, though the timelines are parallel, watching SuperFriends and my introduction to comic books seem light years apart.
What attracts a nine-year-old to comic books? Let me qualify that: What attracts a nine-year-old to comic books in 1974? For me it was the perfect combination of larger than life characters, eye-catching images, accessibility, and an altruistic depiction of the possible. But accessibility may have been the real key.
From that first purchase in 1974 through my first few years of comic book reading I bought floppies at one of two places: a 7-11 across from my elementary school and a small local drug store next to the supermarket where my mom did her weekly shopping. The drug store was where I bought that first JLA, as well as my first Avengers, and these:
Which were the coolest things ever as far as I was concerned. Still have them too.
Comics were sold in spinner racks in those days. In 7-11’s they were as ubiquitous as slurpee cups and the best stores had two spinner racks. When you stumbled across one of those stores it was comic book nirvana, and you never forgot its location. At 20 cents a book they were incredibly affordable, even for those days. My allowance was 50 cents a week so keeping up on four or five monthly titles with money left over for baseball cards was easy to budget. Of course the books would quickly go up to 25 cents each, which was manageable but getting only four books for a dollar left me feeling incredibly short-changed.
In early 1976 DC prices jumped to 30 cents and towards the end of the year Marvel followed suit. In late 1977 prices rose to 35 cents at both companies. Although JLA began a run of “Giant Size” books priced at 50 and then quickly, 60, cents, then went back to 50 cents while gradually scaling the page count back to a normal sized book. A bit of a sneaky trick if you ask me. This was a standard ploy by DC: bump a book’s page count and price up for several consecutive months under the guise of a special “Giant Size” promotion and then when the book returned to regular size the price would be a nickel more. In mid-1979 the prices went to 40 cents each and a year later they hit 50 cents a piece. What happened to 45 cents? A young man’s first experience with the concept of inflation. In hindsight the price increases weren’t that horrible but, man, I used to live in fear of that next bump in prices. As soon as Marvel started adding “Still only…” to a price I knew it was time to recalculate how many books per dollar I was going to be able to buy. At 50 cents plus sales tax I couldn’t even buy two books for a dollar and somehow a line had been crossed. Comic books were officially “expensive”.
The rising price of comics may have reflected the rising costs to produce the product but it unfortunately didn’t coincide with a dramatic increase in the quality of the product. That may have been more my problem than that of the publishers. The same formulas that appealed to me as a 9-, 10-, or 11-year-old weren’t nearly as interesting to my 14- or 15-year-old self. Or maybe teenage cynicism finally overcame youthful optimism. Whatever the case, I stopped dreaming about the day when I’d get my power ring or what I’d do after I was splashed with chemicals during a lightning storm – I even stopped thinking about how cool it would be to even write a comic book.
A while back I got an email from a reader who, like myself, had recently returned to comics. He wanted to know why I had stopped reading comics in the first place and, as I think back on it, money and the quality of the material were two big factors. Comics fell into the background as sports, girls, cars and fast food began to occupy my teenage years and my limited teenage budget. I occasionally wonder if I would have continued to read comics if the quality and selection had been then as it is today, but I doubt it would have changed much, particularly if it meant the books would cost two and three buck each.
There may have also been one other factor that resulted in my losing interest: I had no one to share my hobby with. My brother would read Spider-man titles, but little else and I knew of no one who read the books with anything beyond a passing interest. Fresno only had one comic book shop in those days, nearly ten miles from my house – it was a rare treat when we could get Dad to make that trip – and it was the gold standard for grimy, hole-in-the-wall, unorganized comic book shops that have been the butt of jokes for years. A more progressive and professional shop would open when I was 14 or 15 but by then my momentum away from comics was too great. And, of course, there was no Internet. I wish I’d made some connections back in those days, found other folks to share the passion with, but it makes me that much more thankful for how different things are this time around.
Comments