My first comic book
I wAS four when Mom bought me my first comic book, when they were Still Only Thirty-Five Cents. Spider-Man? Doctor Octopus? Oh, yes, make it happen, please! So on that walk one summer day, up Spring Circle, she made it mine. Years later, I found out where the story originated, and then realized what must've been on sale up on Old Lindale Road. Marvel Tales, I discovered.
I didn't get anymore for quite some time. But wow. Big scary explosion at the end, suspense in the snow, helicopters, and some strange business between some pretty friends at a party Peter's missing. "My Uncle...My Enemy?" is sheer ridiculous fun. Aunt May inherits a nuclear reactor? She thinks Doc Ock really wants to be her loving companion? It made her seem such a doddering ol' dupe! But I was four, so it worked just fine.
I didn't know then, but one day I'd find out Gerry Conway was a big fan of the same cartoon I loved back then, too: SPIDER-MAN! Reruns of the ABC SAturday morning show aired from 1967-70 were a WGNX afternoon staple. It was the one cartoon I loved more than G-Force, on Battle Of The Planets. One day, Gerry himself would tell me, some professionals want to deny it, but there is an absurd element necessarily present in these adventure comics. That's why he loved Spider-Man's snarky humor, and created Firestorm to capture, in a new character, the spirit of what he enjoyed most in Spidey's classic days. After all...after two science fiction novels and an apprenticeship briefly writing whatever Marvel titles Roy Thomas couldn't catch, Mr. Conway, age nineteen, succeeded Stan Lee as the second long-term scribe on the flagship magazine, The Amazing Spider-Man.
I guess, with Gwen Stacy's peril not even a year in the rear view mirror, there was quite a bit of concern about May getting into a deadly crossfire, with Hammerhead and his gang hot for Ock's secrets. (I don't mean wedding night gossip- obviously, the bad Doctor had an angle in marrying this "geriatric dame." Yeah, this was when the idea of elderly women was fifty years behind what you see in movies today.) Aunt May and Ock harkened back to a very good story around issue #54, where Peter discovered Doctor Octopus hiding out by her leave in their kitchen- and then, go back to Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 for May's impression of Otto Octavius as a gentleman. Holy instant Stockholm Syndrome! What I didn't realize for a long time is how very lonely May would be, after years with Ben Parker. Loneliness does open people to situations they take with blinders on, because they want the loneliness to end.
Spider-Man fought Doctor Octopus, both gangs, and they, each other- a calamitous visual feast by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, if memory serves, (It doesn't- Franck Giacoia inked it, with Dave Hunt inking the backgrounds.) there was no fault whatsoever from the action angle. So very exciting, I took it around a bit too much, and doubt it survived intact into 1979. I don't think I had much of it left by the time we got more, a year later- one for my sister, Debra, and one for me. Luckily, both Spider-Man!
I loved my Aunt Linda, as favorite an adult as Mom and Dad at that point. I remember telling her around this time, I'd like to build a log cabin, where she could live with me and cook me pancakes.
You would fight to save your Aunt!
Spider-Man even flies a jet, somehow. It made him seem so very awesome!
So, for its purpose at the time? Right on the money, for its twenty cents. Too bad, the next month, they'd go up twenty-five percent!!!
Oh, did I say Twenty cents instead of thirty five? Here's inflation: Marvel Tales, throughout the decade, reprinted stories published in Amazing Spider-Man, four years earlier. In five years, the price of a comic on the newsstand or spinner rack or magazine rack, doubled. No wonder creators thought they might be out of a job the next year, nearly each year!
But that issue of Marvel Tales, my first, was originally Amazing Spider-Man #131. It was published the first week in January- apparently, the day before I was born, in 1974.
I don't know what that means, just that it filled me with awe when I figured that out, in those dig-around days before the Internet.
I didn't get anymore for quite some time. But wow. Big scary explosion at the end, suspense in the snow, helicopters, and some strange business between some pretty friends at a party Peter's missing. "My Uncle...My Enemy?" is sheer ridiculous fun. Aunt May inherits a nuclear reactor? She thinks Doc Ock really wants to be her loving companion? It made her seem such a doddering ol' dupe! But I was four, so it worked just fine.
I didn't know then, but one day I'd find out Gerry Conway was a big fan of the same cartoon I loved back then, too: SPIDER-MAN! Reruns of the ABC SAturday morning show aired from 1967-70 were a WGNX afternoon staple. It was the one cartoon I loved more than G-Force, on Battle Of The Planets. One day, Gerry himself would tell me, some professionals want to deny it, but there is an absurd element necessarily present in these adventure comics. That's why he loved Spider-Man's snarky humor, and created Firestorm to capture, in a new character, the spirit of what he enjoyed most in Spidey's classic days. After all...after two science fiction novels and an apprenticeship briefly writing whatever Marvel titles Roy Thomas couldn't catch, Mr. Conway, age nineteen, succeeded Stan Lee as the second long-term scribe on the flagship magazine, The Amazing Spider-Man.
I guess, with Gwen Stacy's peril not even a year in the rear view mirror, there was quite a bit of concern about May getting into a deadly crossfire, with Hammerhead and his gang hot for Ock's secrets. (I don't mean wedding night gossip- obviously, the bad Doctor had an angle in marrying this "geriatric dame." Yeah, this was when the idea of elderly women was fifty years behind what you see in movies today.) Aunt May and Ock harkened back to a very good story around issue #54, where Peter discovered Doctor Octopus hiding out by her leave in their kitchen- and then, go back to Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 for May's impression of Otto Octavius as a gentleman. Holy instant Stockholm Syndrome! What I didn't realize for a long time is how very lonely May would be, after years with Ben Parker. Loneliness does open people to situations they take with blinders on, because they want the loneliness to end.
Spider-Man fought Doctor Octopus, both gangs, and they, each other- a calamitous visual feast by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, if memory serves, (It doesn't- Franck Giacoia inked it, with Dave Hunt inking the backgrounds.) there was no fault whatsoever from the action angle. So very exciting, I took it around a bit too much, and doubt it survived intact into 1979. I don't think I had much of it left by the time we got more, a year later- one for my sister, Debra, and one for me. Luckily, both Spider-Man!
I loved my Aunt Linda, as favorite an adult as Mom and Dad at that point. I remember telling her around this time, I'd like to build a log cabin, where she could live with me and cook me pancakes.
You would fight to save your Aunt!
Spider-Man even flies a jet, somehow. It made him seem so very awesome!
So, for its purpose at the time? Right on the money, for its twenty cents. Too bad, the next month, they'd go up twenty-five percent!!!
Oh, did I say Twenty cents instead of thirty five? Here's inflation: Marvel Tales, throughout the decade, reprinted stories published in Amazing Spider-Man, four years earlier. In five years, the price of a comic on the newsstand or spinner rack or magazine rack, doubled. No wonder creators thought they might be out of a job the next year, nearly each year!
But that issue of Marvel Tales, my first, was originally Amazing Spider-Man #131. It was published the first week in January- apparently, the day before I was born, in 1974.
I don't know what that means, just that it filled me with awe when I figured that out, in those dig-around days before the Internet.
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