The Lost Comic Books: an illustrated history

It's the summer 1973 and I am 7 years old. The sky is overcast and the air is cool. The pine needles are beaded with globes of rain. It's just me and my father at the cottage. I don't know where my mother and sisters are. Wherever they have gone they have taken the car because later my father and I walk to Carmichael's general store in Bristol. I'm reading a comic book on that grey afternoon. Sitting on the shelf above an antique dresser are old sleeping bags, rolled up and tied like hay bales smelling of napthalene mothballs. The comic book I am reading is called The Brave and the Bold. The story is eerie. There is a man from India who has visions, another man who transforms into a demon and another man who has risen from the dead after 100 years and there is the Batman. I am 7 years old and I am awe struck by this scenario. The images are so intense that they will stay with me through the years if only as lingering shadows in the corners of my mind.





That was the first comic book story I remember. I had comic books before this but I can't remember complete stories, but nonetheless whose panels form an arcane mosaic in my memory. At some point I started to save these 20 cent pulp and ink pamphlets and as the years passed the piles accumulated like so much sediment on shelves. This was years before the fanatic comic book collecting culture of today. A comic book then lived and breathed outside of a coffin of plastic poly bag and cardboard backing. In these times comic books served as coasters for glasses of kool-aid, were brought to the beach, were rolled up and stuck in a back pocket. Pages were cut out and pinned on the wall, images were traced in blue ballpoint pen. Crosswords were filled out and covers torn off.

My favourite comic books at the age of seven told the stories of Superman and Batman in Action Comics, Detective Comics and World's Finest published by National Periodical Publications Inc. 909 Third Avenue, New York, New York, otherwise known as DC comics. By the time I was 10 the comic books that I once enjoyed seemed juvenile and unsophisticated to me. Somewhere around 1976 my preferences shifted towards Spider-man and his monthly angst. The Marvel comics banner on a cover became a standard of quality adventure to my young eyes. The DCs moved to the closet but it would be a few years before I decided to part with them altogether. I barely remember when this happened. I think that my mother probably had a garage sale and that was that. The accumulated strata of 4 years of childhood adventures blew away like dust in an afternoon.

I saved just five issues from that newsprint trove. Two 100 page Super-Spectaculars that my father had given me for Christmas. Batman and the Flash, A Green Lantern DC Special also a Christmas gift and two of the earliest and eeriest issues my mother had bought for me at the Woolworths in the Westgate Mall in Ottawa. Those being an issue of the Justice League of America in which the ancient wizard Felix Faust opens up a gateway to the netherworld one Halloween evening in Rutland Vermont. The other an issue of Wanted that reprinted a 1940s story of the original Green Lantern battling the reanimated corpse of Solomon Grundy. Given these scenarios is it any wonder that years later I would be drawn towards the stories of HP Lovecraft that so clearly spoke through these old comic books.



Years passed, I grew older and comic books moved to the periphery of my life. There were times as an adult where I would come across one of those old DC comics at a flea market or in a bookstore and whether I was reading Shakespeare or Joyce, Foucault or Derrida the power that these musty old newsprint pulps had over me remained. I would pick them up when I came across them but I never actively sought them out. One year in Montreal Nikki and I went to a comic book convention. I was 29 and despite my love for my old comic books I had never been a part of that fan culture nor wanted to be. The comic books were satisfying in themselves. By this time though the thought of seeing some old long lost friends was appealing and I was drawn to the convention floor where table after table of junk was being bartered. I did however come across an old comic book that I had when I was 6 years old. It was an issue of Shazam. One of the 100 page Super-Spectacular series. Images of our home in Nepean in 1973 rushed over me. I could see my father coming home from work and handing me this treasure. It's very thickness promising thrill after thrill.



Somewhere along the way that charge of reclaiming my childhood set in and I wanted all of that lost DC collection back. I promised myself that if I ever had the income to do so I would. That time arrived this year.

LOOK!
Looking at these comic books again sometimes for the first time in over thirty years it is astounding how certain images still have this emotional impact when I look at them. I thought i would include some (click on images for full-size view)