As long as I can remember I’ve been interested in comic books. I was attracted to the eye catching covers with monsters and dinosaurs even before I could read the stories. I’m relying now on a fuzzy 55 year old memory but as a kid in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, I think the first comic book I ever saw was Journey Into Mystery#56 from 1960. There is a Jack Kirby story in that book “I Planted The Seeds Of Doom” that shows an astronaut on an alien planet fleeing from a big monster on the splash page. My 6 year old brain was amazed at the exciting imagery on that page and I’m sure that experience helped form the template that I’ve been programmed to follow all these years. 

My family moved to Savannah, Georgia in 1961 and I continued dabbling in comic books form time to time. New issues could be bought at the 7-11 store owned by Mr. Woo and Fordham’s Supermarket both at the nearby Montgomery Crossroads that intersected my street of Edgewater Road. But, it was really difficult to find back issues. Why? There were no comic book speciality stores in those days. I wasn’t aware of any used bookstores in downtown Savannah that carried old comic books. There certainly weren’t any comic book conventions for fans to gather at in a sleepy little backwater town like Savannah. There were rumors of such events but they only supposedly happened in impossibly far away exotic places like New York City. There were no ads in the new comic books by mail order dealers like Robert Bell and Howard Rogofsky until about 1965. 

So if you wanted to find back issues in those nearly hopeless circumstances, what could you do? I quickly developed the habit of asking any new friends I made in the neighborhood or at school if they had any any comic books. Most people I met didn’t collect comic books but sometimes I got lucky and was able to pick up a few back issues here and there. I’ve listed below some of the very few old friends from the antediluvian days of the 1960s who were able to help me in my endless quest to find old comic books. Would you believe I’ve still got some of their books?

                                                              Roy Davis 

Of my friends at White Bluff Elementary school Roy Davis was one of the few who said he had some comics. Roy didn’t live in my semi-rural neighborhood. He lived about a mile away across the woods in a more upscale suburban neighborhood named Paradise Park. So one day circa 1964 my trusty red Schwinn bicycle carried me through those dark woods to Roy’s house. He had a small stack of well used comics. The only one I remember now and was glad to get then was a white cover book with some colorful costumed heroes fighting a big fat guy named the Blob. I’m sure X-Men #3 was was the first X-Men comic book I ever laid eyes on. I was always a cash and carry man, not a trader, so I probably paid Roy a nickel for the book. Later Roy visited my house and I showed him a DC science fiction book I had bought new because I liked the striking cover. Nowadays the comic price guides call them Infinity Covers. It was Strange Adventures #170 from 1964 and Roy agreed with me that the cover was very impressive.

                                                                             Billy Barrett

 In the mid 1960s Billy Barrett was one of my best friends and lived close by in my neighborhood. About 1964 or 1965 I learned he had a fairly large collection of DC super hero comics. Naturally, I wanted to get them. He said he would trade them all for an interesting toy he could play with and wanted to know what I had to trade. I had lots of cool toys in those days but didn’t want to part with any of them. The solution was to take one of my younger brother David’s toys instead. It was a large green plastic Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaur named King Zor that David had received a few Christmases back. I had received that same year a big blue robot named Robot Commando but there was no way I was going to part with that. I let David read the comic books I got from Billy so I figured that was fair.

When I got to Billy’s house and thumbed through the DC comics I was pleased with with the 60 or so comics he had. They dated back to the early 1960s and I had never seen any of them before. I enjoyed reading the Superman stories with the bottle city of Kandor, the retarded albino Bizarro Supermans and the different colors of kryptonite that affected Superman in a different way depending on the color. I remember wondering that since Krypton was just one planet thousands of light years from Earth when it exploded, how did so much of it find its way across the gulfs of outer space to land on Earth? 

Even though I enjoyed the stories and wasn’t a confirmed Marvel collector until later in 1965 and still open to persuasion, for whatever reasons these comics didn’t drive me to start collecting new DC comics. The only DC title I ever seriously collected was The Metal Men and I don’t remember how I got hooked on them. I don’t recall Billy having any of those. None of these DC comics I got from Billy survived the 1960s. I don’t remember what I did with them. Maybe Mom, like many mothers in those days, threw them out when she figured I was tired of them.

Today, I still have a few vague fragmentary memories from some of these stories. So, in recent years when DC started doing reprints in their hardcover Archive lines of World’s Finest and The Man Of Tomorrow which had the Action and Superman titles, I started buying them to see if I could locate and rekindle some old memories. No luck. DC cancelled those Archive books before I came across any stories I remembered. I was especially curious about 2 stories I can remember. In one story, Superman and Batman had a contest to prove who was the better detective. Superman was so obsessed with winning that he started neglecting more important duties that were way beyond what Batman could do. So, to serve the greater good, Batman deliberately allowed Superman to win without letting Superman know Batman had taken a dive. In another story Superman and Batman were rounding up some bank robbers. A bullet bounced off Superman’s chest and seriously wounded Batman. Batman developed an inferiority complex which led him to give up being Batman, so Superman had to figure a way to restore Batman’s confidence. I don’t remember how Supes did it. If anybody knows which 2 issues these stories appeared in, please let me know.

                                                                        Danny Lincoln

Danny Lincoln along with Billy Barrett was my best friend in the early 1960s. He lived right across the street in the biggest house in the neighborhood and his family was well off enough to be one of the first families in the neighborhood to afford a color television set. He also had a large pit in his backyard covered by a trampoline which attracted kids from all over the neighborhood. His dad owned a swimming pool in Savannah and a motor boat and Danny took me swimming and boating with him a few times. Yes, Danny was a great guy even if he didn’t collect comic books. However, one day in late 1965 he did turn up with a copy of The Avengers #21 or #22, I think it was. I wasn’t a confirmed Avengers collector yet (although I did have a well read copy of #14) so I wasn’t in a panic to get it. Still, it was a Marvel comic so I asked Danny if we could work something out. We probably would have but cruel fate intervened. Danny’s class at White Bluff had a time capsule project where each student brought in an artifact of mid 20th Century culture from their home to be buried in the capsule on the White Bluff school grounds for a century. The event was even covered on the local TV news. You guessed it. Danny figured the interests of science outweighed his loyalty to me so he donated his Avengers comic book. The capsule isn’t scheduled to be opened until A.D. 2066 so I eventually had to settle for another copy of that book.

                                                                   The Bartlett Boys

After plundering the available pool of friends at White Bluff Elementary School for 6 years for their comic books, I moved on to Bartlett Junior High School 1967 – 1969 on Edgewater Road to continue the search. My best friends at Bartlett, none of whom lived in my neighborhood, were Bill Carter and Jeff Lindsay (both alumni from White Bluff) and Jim McKenzie, Billy Eitel and David Miller. Jeff Lindsay and Jim McKenzie had no interest in comics. Jeff did have a stash of 1960s Playboy magazines hidden in the woods near his house that he had salvaged out of the trash dumpsters behind K-Mart, so he was useful to have around anyway despite his not being a comic collector. 

David Miller, like Roy Davis and Bill Carter lived in Paradise Park and so was within easy bicycle range. David had a nice Fantastic Four collection but he was devoted to it (he liked Crystal the Inhuman a lot) and had no interest in selling. When I pressed the point he told me I already had enough comic books. He eventually boxed up his comics and put them in storage and that’s the last I saw of them. I re-established contact with David 33 years later through an internet high school reunion website and asked him about his Fantastic Four comics. He said he had sold them years ago. I guess he sold them to someone he figured didn’t have enough comics already. 

Under questioning, Bill Carter admitted he thought he had an Incredible Hulk comic. It sounded like #1 from 1962 to me by his description. I badgered him into searching for it in his attic. He reported back and said he couldn’t find it and he wasn’t going to try again since it was to hot in his attic to spend much time up there. Bill was still a great guy anyway. We took judo classes together at the YMCA and spent lots of time comparing notes on our favorite science fiction writers. He preferred Arthur C. Clarke and I was a Ray Bradbury man.

With David Davenport I had some luck. I remember that like me, David liked reading Edgar Rice Burroughs novels. He especially liked Tarzan and I remember him having some of those 1960s Ballantine Books Tarzan paperbacks. Naturally the subject of comic books came up and David assured me that he used to have a large collection of old Marvel comics but had since disposed of it. I remember him bragging about his former copy of Fantastic Four Annual#1 that was so nice it looked like “it had been pressed between glass.” I did make a trip to his house and found 1 mangled issue of Strange Tales with the Thing and the Torch. I don’t remember which one and I got rid of it somewhere along the line since it was to beat up to keep in my collection. Later however, David came through me for me. Apparently he still had some contacts with comic collectors he had known when he still had his collection. He showed up at school with 2 comics, The Amazing Spider-Man #1 in solid Very Good condition and Strange Tales #88 in rougher shape. I paid David his asking price of $6.00 for both of them without making a fuss. I knew a good deal when I saw it. In 1968 Spider-Man #1 was about $12.00 on any mail order dealer’s price list. When I read the Strange Tales #88 book I remembered having read it years before at my grandmothers house in Birmingham, Alabama. That stoked some pleasant memories and I still consider Strange Tales #88 to be one of my favorite pre-Marvel monster books. I still have both those books today.

I finally hit some real paydirt when I met Billy Eitel. I had seen Billy around school but didn’t know him. But he got wind of me being a comic book collector and one day approached me in the Bartlett library and asked me if I collected comics. He was pleased to hear about some of the Marvel comics I was able to rattle off and we quickly became friends. I never went to his house but he visited me at least once. I remember he was thrilled to see my copy of Fantastic Four #19 which he had never seen before. I don’t think we exchanged any books as we both wanted to keep what we had. 

After graduating from Bartlett after the 9th grade Billy and I both started at H.V. Jenkins High School. One day in 1970 while sitting in class Billy said he wanted to sell his comics collection to me. He only wanted $40.00 for everything. I remember thinking to myself, “I’m robbing this guy blind.”

 I may have added some of Billy’s books to my collection, I don’t remember. I did want to sell most of Billy’s books since most of them were duplicates of mine in no better condition and in those days I didn’t see any reason to have more than 1 copy of a book. I gave all the Marvel Western comics like Rawhide Kid and Kid Colt Outlaw to my cousins who were visiting from Birmingham. I think I sold The Incredible Hulk #6 and a few other rare books to dealers I saw in the leading comic book advertising fanzine of that time, The Rocket’s Blast Comic-Collector aka RB&CC. A little later I ran an ad in RB&CC #85 in 1971 to sell the rest of the collection. I was greedy and priced the books to high so none of them sold. So, I just put them away in storage. 

Then sometime later I was walking through Savannah’s only big mall which had opened in 1969, Oglethorpe Mall on Abercorn Expressway. There was a collectibles show going on with out of town dealers set up inside the mall. One of them had comic books for sale and I think had a sign up asking to buy old comic books. On impulse I decided this was a good way to unload the rest of Billy’s collection. I went home and got most of the books and came back to the mall and sold them for 10 cents each I think. I was questioning the low price and the dealer explained to me there was a lot of overhead in his business. He had to pay for the space he had at the mall and burn gasoline to lug his merchandise around the country. He did have 2 relatively high grade pre-Marvel monster books to my surprise which I bought. The only one I remember is Tales Of Suspense #16. The price was $15.00 per book. I think he gave me a small discount to offset the low price he was paying for my comics. 

So, all I had left now of Billy’s collection was his Amazing Spider-Man run which I at least had the sense to hold back and not sell for a dime each like the others. Sometime about 1972 after I had started at Armstrong State College I paid the college library to put the Spider-Man comics into 2 bound leather volumes. I think it costs $20.00 per volume. I still have those volumes today. They have served me as well as reading copies and to remind me of those innocent, happy days when you could still buy 1960s Marvel comics for about a dime each.