Digital Comic Museum
General Category => Comic Related Discussion => Topic started by: bminor on October 10, 2012, 10:10:46 AM
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I am excluding all the Golden Age comic companies.
My thinking is that most of us here at DCM started reading comics comics in the early 60's.
I myself did not start until about 1968, and was a Marvel guy mostly.
Is there a company that I am missing? :-/
Yours,
Bminor
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I started actively buying in 1979.
I grew up on Marvel but enjoyed the clearance bin Atlas/Seaboard Comics at the time.
3 for $1 when I couldn't get anymore Marvel titles on that trip was a good buy.
I'd still like to know how Phoenix and Vampire Planet were going to finish...
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I started in the '50's myself with DC, Atlas, Marvel, Dell, Fargo, etc.
It was a mixed bag, but mostly the DC brand.
My folks hated the EC's, but I liked them.
Geo
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Well, Marvel had most of the properties for comics for series I liked, so Marvel. ACG was long gone, DH, Image and IDW didn't exist and Whitman and Charlton were in their death throes.
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I started reading comics in 1973, when I was in grade 2. I even remember the comic that first caught my interest: Justice League of America number 100, guest-starring the Justice Society and the Seven Soldiers of Victory. It was the first of a three-part story, and it took years for me to get the middle part.
I was mostly a DC reader after that although, really, I was happy reading most team books: Avengers, Teen Titans, JLA, JSA, Legion, Infinity Inc., X-Men, etc. I wasn't really into solo heroes from any company.
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At the time I would identify myself as a DC fan. Looking back though, I do have quite a bit of Marvel. I had a sneaking admiration for their shared continuity (and house style). But Batman is still the Man.
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I am excluding all the Golden Age comic companies.
My thinking is that most of us here at DCM started reading comics comics in the early 60's.
I myself did not start until about 1968, and was a Marvel guy mostly.
Is there a company that I am missing? :-/
Yours,
Bminor
"Growing up" covers a lot of ground and I'm a bit older than average, so I did read some material from companies early on which aren't listed but I doubt any of them would garner many votes. I finally went with DC because the first comic I remember buying (on my fifth birthday) was an issue of "All Star Western" and DC was a very stable company with good distribution so I probably read more DC comics than any others from the time I was six (the year my older brother married and left home and I started selecting my own comic books instead of reading what he was bringing home; that also happened to be the same year the Comics Code came into use) until I was I was sixteen and Marvel's distribution improved. There were times between those two ages when I read books from many other companies but only Dell books seriously rivaled DC for a few years when I was seven to nine. I began collecting golden age books when I was seventeen but they were never by primary comics reading material because of the cost.
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I started as a DC fan. Being an oddball collector I fell in love with all the "other guys" superhero comics with Dell superheroes, Crusaders, Chartlon Action, Fatman, ACG heroes and Myron Fass' Captain Marvel . I became more of a Marvel fan after their demise but like bcholmes I was fond of most teams.
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First Comics... Growing up in the 70s, I read Batman, Green Lantern, Daredevil, later X-Men and the Avengers... But overall, First Publishing was my favourite-I-Love-every-title company. They had Badger, Grim Jack, Nexus, Dreadstar, Whisper, Jon Sable, Hawkmoon, etc. Loved every one of their titles, even Warp :D
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You neglected harvey comics.
Various harvey titles (mainly casper & richie rich ones) and archie comics were neck & neck when I was growing up, but I think harvey just barely edged out archie.
The only time I got any marvel comics was when I got one of those random bagged 4 for $1 ones. While I've always been a big fan of spiderman, I despised marvel comics especially & "serious" comics in general because of the publishers' money-grubbing tactics of forcing you to buy 40 issues each, of 12 different titles each, of 20 different & unrelated heroes/groups, just to get one story. I swear, all the issues of spiderman that I saw back in the 80s had far more "see incredible hulk #xxx" and "continued in x-men #xxx" than actual current content.
Now, if you're talking about stories/characters rather than actual comic publications, then it'd probably be DC, with marvel as a close second. I was a big fan of the 60s batman show, the superfriends show, and the filmation batman cartoon, as well as the 50s superman show, a vaguely remembered 80s superman cartoon, and the wonderwoman show. I was also a big fan of spiderman (there was the classic 60s cartoon, the 70s live action show, the 80s solo cartoon, the spiderman & friends cartoon from the same timeframe) and the incredible hulk (the live action show & the 80s cartoon).
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I knew I was forgetting a big company.
Harvey has now been added!
B.
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I voted DC since I started reading comics well before Marvel hit their stride. I was a big fan of Flash and Adam Strange.
I'm wondering about the ordering of the companies in the list. I suspect it's just the order in which you happened to thin of them, but a great deal of thought (and fight) goes into the ordering of names on a ballot. Apparently being listed first is a benefit. For example, the rule in CT is something like the party of the serving governor gets to be listed on top, but this year there was something of a fight about it. Dan Malloy (D) is the governor of CT; however, when he won election he was also endorsed by another minor party (I forget which). Although he had more votes than the Republican candidate, he had fewer votes as a Democrat. The original ballot was designed with Democrats on top and the Republican party sued. The Supreme Court of CT decided the Republicans should get top spot.
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I voted DC since I started reading comics well before Marvel hit their stride. I was a big fan of Flash and Adam Strange.
A couple of my favorites too, from their start in the '50's. For Adam Strange I still have the 'Showcase Presents' books of 'Adventures on Other Worlds'.
(http://imageshack.us/a/img717/6776/sho17.jpg) (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/717/sho17.jpg/)
(http://imageshack.us/a/img585/2379/sho18.jpg) (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/585/sho18.jpg/)
(http://imageshack.us/a/img805/6240/sho19.jpg) (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/805/sho19.jpg/)
Geo
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Geo, I never saw the Showcase Adam Stranges at the time. For some reason the place I got comics never seemed to put out either Showcase or Brave & Bold, so I didn't get the first appearances of any of those DC's. Atom's first appearance was the first Showcase I ever bought -- and I think saw. It might be just as well in the case of Adam, since I much preferred Infantino's Strange to Sekowsky's.
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Back then, in the pre-Johnson days, comics were plentiful, cheap, and good. No matter what town you lived it, you could find a place that had them, and they were buyable. Also, there were a LOT of step-on titles for kids...funny stuff, adaptations of TV cartoons and movies and the like. You got into those and you graduated to superheroes. Now, we don't have them, and that's why kids don't read many comics these days, among other reasons.
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In this context, "Johnson" is ... a store/chain/distributor/US President?
Back then, in the pre-Johnson days, comics were plentiful, cheap, and good. No matter what town you lived it, you could find a place that had them, and they were buyable. Also, there were a LOT of step-on titles for kids...funny stuff, adaptations of TV cartoons and movies and the like. You got into those and you graduated to superheroes. Now, we don't have them, and that's why kids don't read many comics these days, among other reasons.
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President Roy.
Geo
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For me, it was either Marvel or D.C. comics; I still have all of my DC and STAR WARS comics from Marvel from that period. My very first "comic" was a Spider-Man colouring book, and my childhood playmate George Baldock had a Captain America colouring book in which the hero faces a team of robots led by the main villain. I also had Disney and Looney Toons comics including Donald Duck and the Road Runner as well as quite a few ARCHIE comics, all of which I still possess. I gave away most of my Disney and Looney Toons cartoons to the Broadview Book Bonanza in 1993, so I no longer have any of those but two I retained, COMICS & STORIES and BAMBI. ;D ;D
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The Superman titles in DC comics were my choices, having limited funds as a kid. This was carried over from the Superman TV show. Just coming up with 25 cents per week was difficult. My first purchase came on December 27, 1962 with Superman 159. Kind of odd when I think about it, but Superman appeared in costume in only 1 panel of the story.
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Started reading around '72 or 73. I was pretty much a Marvel kid--loving both their superhero books and Tomb of Dracula. I did also read most of DC's war comics (I've always loved Russ Heath's art) and Gold Key's Turok Son of Stone.
It was the first Christopher Reeves Superman movie that got me thinking DC's superheroes were cool. Since then, my preferences have been more balanced.
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Narfstar's description of himself as an oddball collector rings true for me as well. However, and as there are some non-N. American members, and as I'm a bit older and American comics weren't distributed here till '59 - '60, my main companies were L.Miller with Marvelman etc. and Foldes Press/WDL with Ace Hart, although I loved Beano and Dandy when I saw them, usually at the barber shop. But, in the '60's, I much preferred DC and, later, the companies on narfstar's list, when I could find them. Normally I wouldn't know anything about a comic unless and until I saw it in the newsagent. Marvel's continuity was pretty useless when you were unsure that the same titles would turn up every month. Newsagents seemed to get a random bundle, although I remember that Batman and Detective always seemed to be there.
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I voted Marvel but that just covers me from 1974-1977, at age 12-15, which were my main comic buying years. From 1970-1972 I primarily bought funny comics and the mainstay was Walt Disneys Comics & Stories which was reprinting early 50s Barks stories. I never missed an issue and also bought other Gold Key Disney comics as well as Harvey comics and Fawcett's Dennis the Menace. I moved on to super heroes at age 11 in 1973 and bought both DC and Marvel comics but was buying far more Marvel comics by 1974. In 1975, I traded a copy of Marvel Team up 1 for a complete run of Charltons E-Man(issues 1-7) and loved it. I started buying Charlton's other titles as well. Back isssues were usually in the 5 cent bins of our local comic dealers which made them an absolute bargain--especially when I found a good piece of art by Ditko or Tom Sutton among other artists who had much more stylistic freedom at Charlton. I had heard stories of collecting in the 60s when there were no comic dealers and collectors just prowled around second hand book and magazine shops and bought the early Marvels for pennies and I was delighted that there were still some comics that could be collected that way.
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I voted for DC, which was the dominant company distributed to my town's local drugstore during my elementary school days in the '50s. ACG was my second favorite, although I had to ride my bike across town to a little family grocery to buy them. I also saw Dell and Harvey comics, but DC was pretty much the main player available. My brother and I mocked the ridiculous Mort Weisinger Superman universe (with Bizarro Superman, Superboy, Jimmy Olson, Lois Lane, and so on), but it was the only game in town.
During my junior high and high school years, Marvel got back into the superhero business and with my family moving to another state, suddenly Marvel was being distributed to the local shops. I mainly switched from DC to Marvel during the '60s. (Gold Key also won me over in this period.) However, by the time I left for college in '68, I was mostly done with newsstand comics and shifted my attention to underground comix and the underground press. It took GAC and DCM to pull me back into appreciating the Golden Age comics that I'd mostly missed because they were all before my time.
Happy Halloween to everyone here and thanks to Michael T. Gilbert for a great Halloween DCM animated logo GIF.
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This is a tough one, and I won't vote because 1) companies are elusive and 2) "growing up" came in several phases.
As a kid outside Los Angeles in the late 50s and early 60s, the corner supermarket stocked DC, Timely-Marvel, Gold Key, Charlton, and Classics Illustrated, and none really grabbed me. All except CI seemed lame. I loved MAD from its earliest days, and I loved certain newspaper strips and panels. But my real "growing-up" phase came about a decade later, and what really hit me were the undergrounds, both in papers and comix. I few years later I was selling those on street corners.
So for my "major growing-up publisher" I'll nominate: Apex Novelties (ZAP!).
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My main comic book company of choice growing up was Marvel. This was during the 80s and they were doing some exciting things with the X-Men (Fall of the Mutants, Dark Phoenix) and was the heyday of Chris Claremount. When Claremount and Frank Miller teamed up to do the Wolverine mini-series I read it a hundred times. I read other companies stuff those days to be sure: Dark Knight Returns, The Crow, etc. But Marvel got the majority by far.
Somewhere along the line during the late 90s to early 2ks (most of the 90s I was too busy in the military to follow any series or company faithfully) I made the switch to DC. The Cartoon series done by Bruce Timm of Superman and later the Justice League got me to the library checking out the graphic novel section of their stories. Stories like the Identity Crisis, Kingdom Come, Heaven's Ladder, and Red Son brought me back to comics but on the other company's side pretty much for good.
Now i'm mostly DC but do grab some of the other stuff out there by IDW, Image, or Dark Horse.
Thank you
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I was pretty oblivious to the publisher back in those days, but looking back my favorites were Silver Age Green Lantern, Doom Patrol, and Metal Men, clearly skewing toward DC.