And here's Joe…
Hope your ankle is on the mend. Don't do anything to aggravate it like race against the Flash or buy a vineyard and stomp your own grapes.
A number of birthday related questions: How early did you discover the Marvel Comics Group? How soon till you were buying all their releases (if you did)? When did you stop following the titles?
Also, as you're six years older than me, did you have to sweat out the draft? As a kid, I wished I was five years older, so I could have read the Fantastic Four from the start rather than #55. Then, eventually, it occurred to me that, had that been the case, I might've been reading Sgt. Fury from a Vietnamese foxhole rather than on my bunkbed.
Actually, I just stopped wearing this huge, clunky boot that I'd been wearing whenever I walked after the surgery. With it on, I could have squished a grape orchard into Manischewitz Concord with a couple of stomps.
I'm a bit fuzzy on when I began buying Marvel Comics and I think some of the early issues were not distributed — or distributed well here in Los Angeles. I'm fairly sure I bought a few pre-superhero Marvels — comics full of silly monsters — before Fantastic Four #1 came out. And I'm pretty sure my first issue of F.F. was #11 and I found it at Bart's Books, which was a second-hand bookshop out in Santa Monica. That was not a wonderful issue but I still got hooked right away and quickly filled in the back issues. And at about the same time, I bought Amazing Spider-Man #1 off the newsstand.
I bought everything until such time as Marvel put me on the "comp" list and at some point in the eighties, the number of titles that arrived in the box each month was going up and my interest in their product was going down. I finally called someone and asked them to stop the shipments and I put a few years' worth of mostly-unread books in storage. Then a few years later, I gave them to a dealer and told him to sell them cheap and keep the money or donate it to charity or something. I just couldn't keep up and I needed the storage space. I can't give you a year on this.
I wrote about my experience with the draft back in this post. In hindsight, I don't know why I wasn't more worried about that than I was. I sure didn't want to go and my father really, really, really didn't want me to go. I think the happiest moment of his life was when I was assigned such a high draft number. Thanks, Joe.
