General Category > Comic Related Discussion
Any one else trade comics when you were young?
jfglade:
Trading comic books was a fairly common practice among elementary school students, male and female, back in the fifties and I'm just curious to see if any of the other regulars remember going through the process. Comics generally had a price tag of a dime, but I can remember some terrific arguements about the relative value of any of the summer or Christmas annuals that sold for a quarter; most considered them worth two comics in exchange but some insisted they should be worth three (the same people seemed to forget that idea when they wanted to trade for an annual rather than use one for trade). The worst scenario was trading comics with girls, because sometimes you had to settle for issues of Wonder Woman or Little Lulu to avoid getting stuck with romance books; it was also hard to get girls to take genre comics like war, science-fiction, and cowboys. Brand new comic books were the most coveted, although the newness wore off quickly.
I was a rural kid, so it wasn't unusual to have visitors bring a cardboard box filled with newspapers, paperback books, magazines, and comics if they had kids themselves; the downside of that was if you were visiting a family that had kids of their own you could be expected to pony up a few comic books which was a good way to get rid of things like Wonder Woman and books that had more exciting covers than they did contents.
I stopped trading comics when 'The Brave and the Bold' #28 appeared in a local grocery store. After the Justice League debuted, I became a comic book collector rather than someone who just read comics.
Yoc:
Growing up in the 80s in Canada I mostly recall trading bubble gum cards Jon.
But when I'd visit my cousins up north I'd always bring my comics for the ride (Scrooge, DD, Archie) and trade books. They'd mostly have Archie Digests that I never saw so I was happy for the summer catching up. I never did grow to like Lil Jinx though.
Roygbiv666:
Never. I bought it, I kept it. Plus I didn't really know too many comic nerds in my small town.
OtherEric:
Not often. But it wasn't entirely unknown, either. For the life of me I can't remember what I traded FOR it. But I've still got a Looney Tunes #163 I traded for in the 80's; it was the first 10c cover comic I ever owned. What an utter sense of wonder having a 10c comic was! (Of course, now I've got hundreds if not close to a thousand books of that vintage. But the first one- the idea that I, born in 1971, could even ever FIND one- was something amazing back then. I'm getting chills just remembering the sense of wonder that brought.)
josemas:
I certainly remember trading comics as a kid in the 1960s. I would only trade for genres I wanted. Primarily superhero but some war, western, humor and sci-fi/fantasy/mystery too on occasion.
I don't ever remember trading comics with any girls as they mostly had romance and Archie comics which were low on my list-in fact I don't ever remember reading a romance comic as a kid.
I wasn't much into the teen genre but certainly read plenty that belonged to friends.
Another genre I rarely read was the various hot rod/racing comics that were around then. I didn't know anyone that regularly bought them and I never did.
For some reason the annuals/giant-sized comics were hard to find when I was a kid and were more prized and less rarely traded. I remember scoring a copy of Wham-O Giant Comic #1 which was huge and very coveted and when I finally let it go a few years later it was for a pile of comics that I really wanted. Several years after that when I had started collecting I picked up another copy, relatively inexpensively, which I still have.
I also remember reading many comics over at friends houses that may not have been up for trades but which they didn't mind sharing with a friend for reading. So even with a limited income, between the trading and the sharing, I managed to read quite a few comics as a kid.
When I got a paper route at age twelve I could afford to buy all the comics I wanted and soon started collecting and stopped trading. There were less and less friends to trade with about this time anyway as more and more friends "outgrew" comics just as I was getting into it heavily studying the artists and trying to learn about the history of the genre.
By the time I was a high-school senior I was enough of an "expert" on comics history that I did a musical slide show (video and computers were still some years away) for one of my classes (Christians Values Through the Media) that so impressed my teacher it helped cinch me an "A" in the class and was used by him as an example of what to aim for in a presentation for several years afterwards (my younger brothers and their friends updated me on it as they took the class in succeeding years- "Hey I saw that comic history thing you did for Father Menard today!").
Best
Joe
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