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What was your best comic book "find" or aqusition ever as a child?

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KevinP:
It would have to be my first comic book.  For being a good boy at the dentist, my mom stopped at a drugstore and told me I could pick out any comic I wanted.  TUROK #5 was on the rack, and how could I resist DINOSAURS?

larrytalbot:
My best comic book(s) find was a boxfull of golden age comics ... that I never got to read. 

It happened in the 4th or 5th grade at a school run by nuns.  A pal of mine had his eye on one of my favorite toys.  He knew I loved comics & made an offer I couldn't refuse: his comics collection for my toy. For some reason, rather than bringing the comics to my house, he brought them to the school for me.  I took the box to class & placed it under the desk at my feet & dreamed all period about those wonderful comics I'd rummage through when I took the box home.

Unbeknownst to me, a little brownnoser in the class had told teacher that I had the comics.  They were confiscated by the nun.  I never saw those comics again.  Tearful appeals to my parents failed - they didn't want to go against the nuns.  Now, this was the 1940s, & even before Wertham many educators - certainly the nuns - considered comic books a bad influence on kids.  But, to me & my friends comics were wonderful: they taught us to read, to appreciate art, to learn new things & to see new worlds (without the use of drugs.)

Losing that box of comics only sharpened my interest in & appreciation of comic books. And, thanks to this & other such sites, I'm able now to read many of those lost comics.

Many Thanks!

Yoc:
Wow, Great story Larry!
It must be painful to recall but yes, I'm sure you've read many times that many here on the site.
:)

misappear:
Right around Christmas Day of 1962, I was in a drug store with my brother buying something or other, and I spotted a magazine rack filled with comics.  I had never been to a store that had a magazine rack of comics before, so I was quite stunned by all of the four-color goodies in front of me.  The only comics I had at home were some coverless cast-offs from my brother, which I read over and over. 

I asked if I could get a comic, and I was allowed the purchase Superman #159, an imaginary tale about Lois Lane being a super-woman on Krypton.  I say allowed because I had my own money, but in our family, you couldn't buy anything unless it was approved by a parent.  My brother didn't seem to think this was a major thing, so he let me buy the comic.  When we returned home, my mother was not pleased that I would waste my money on such a frivolous thing.  After some persuading on my part, I managed to convince my mother that I should be allowed to buy comics because they were cheap, and it was something new to read, as we didn't have a library in my neighborhood.  (side note: The possibility of my parents actually buying me a book, any book, was zero.  I never heard of The Hardy Boys or Tom Corbett, or anything like that until I was an adult!)  I was told that if I used my own money (25 cents per week allowance) I could buy comics.  Wow! I was hooked.

Imagine the frustration of standing in front of a comic rack every week and trying to decide which two to buy.  Expecially in the early 60's when so much stuff was coming out! 


This porbably explains my obsessive desire to buy books to this day.  Crazy stuff

jfglade:
 In my case, the question covers a lot of area. I have a much older brother, so when he was in high school in the early fifties, I was learning to read and one of the tools my parents used were his comic books. The "Detective Chimp" series in "Rex the Wonder Dog" was something I found fascinating and was an early favorite. While I was in first grade, Ace the Bat-Hound was introduced which may not seem like a milestone now, but it was certainly a marker even for me at the age of six. I have vague recollections of the furor that led up to the comics code, and I remember being told that I wasn't allowed to look at horror comics or any of the "crime comics" which I think only amounted to "Crime does not Pay." I had to look at those when no one was looking at me, and didn manage to talk my brother into reading the text of the more puzzling and disturbing books to me. I remember a few stories from various EC books clearly and there are a few involving vampires with wings and shrunken heads (not in the same story) that I'm still trying to locate. I've also located a few stories in the collection here that I remembered, mainly from "Chamber of Chills," "The Thing," "This Magazine is Haunted," and "Adventures into the Unknown."


 A few marker events I do remember are: early "Manhunter from Mars" stories, Showcase #4, Space Cabbie stories, Dick Tracy comics from Harvey, Superboy Meeting Superman (a book someone brought me while I was in the hospital in second grade with what turned out to be the "Asiatic flu"), my first glimpse of the War Wheel in an issue of Blackhawk, the first issue of Fighting American with an origin story I found more disturbing than almost anything from horror comics, the first Batgirl story, issues of  Uncle Scrooge which made me want to get my hands on a Junior Woodchuck manual, the "Mole" story from an early issue of "Mad" before it went to magazine format, the strange locic of  Dick Briefer's "Frankenstine" which fascinated me, Ghost Rider which was simultanously a western and a horror comic. the first issue of Mad as a magazine, O.G. Wottaschnozzel stories in the back of Popeye Comics, Spooky the tough little ghost, Mary Jane and Sniffles in issues of Little Lulu, the first issue of Showcase featuring the Challengers of the Unknown,  and many others.
 
 "The Brave and the Bold" #28 was a big marker event, as was "The Flash of Two Worlds" story, and the reintrocuction of the Justice Society of America in a Flash story. In hindsight it was the first two part "Crisis" story in Justice Society of America which changed me from someone who read and traded comic books into a comic fan who collected comics.

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