Joe Landau wrote to ask me — well, I'll cut-and-paste his e-mail so you can read it for yourself…
Forgive the age reference here but I often read stories by fans of your generation about how their parents disapproved of them reading comic books and threw them all away. Did you ever have any experience of this sort? Your articles about your parents make them out to be very nice people but did they ever, out of concern for your welfare, throw away your comics and forbid you to buy more?
Au contraire. They not only never disapproved, they bought me all the comic books I wanted — an action which I think had an awful lot to do with my eventual career, not just as a writer for comic books but a writer of other things. Almost no restrictions were put on what I could watch or read or see. Once in a while, they would tell me that I was too young for a certain book or comedy record but that was rare.
I'm a little skeptical of some (not all) of the claims I've heard over the years about parents throwing out or tearing up their kids' comic books. In the sixties, there began a flood of news stories about how a copy of Superman #1 had sold for a then-staggering $300 or a Batman #1 for even more. Imagine someone paying that much money for a book that sold originally for ten cents! It does not seem to shock many these days when one of those comics goes for six figures or more.
But with those initial news reports came all these stories that went, "I had all the first issues — Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, all of them — but my mother threw them away!" I heard that so often on TV and from people I met that I couldn't believe it had happened to many of them…maybe even to any of them. I'm sure some parents threw some comics away but not all those rare issues that now sell for the price of a mid-sized mansion.
As a kid though, I was never really disciplined. I never gave my folks much reason to and neither of them was the yelling type. I started to read at a very early age, way younger than was expected. My Kindergarten teacher noted this and forwarded my name to some special division of the Los Angeles City School Board and I wound up skipping grades and my parents were told their kid was exceptionally gifted, at least in that area.
(One of the problems I had was that I was not gifted at all in other areas. So I wound up in classes where I was the youngest, smallest kid — ahead of my classmates in English language skills, behind them in things like arithmetic and history. And this was more traumatic than you might imagine, I was way, way behind them in learning the games we played at Recess.)
I think my early reading abilities had more to do with book books, as opposed to comic books, but comics deserved some of the credit. My parents figured they were doing something right and let me read whatever I wanted. As I got more into collecting back issues of comics, my father would even drive me to second-hand bookstores to search for ones I needed. So no, Joe. I never had the situation you're describing. In fact, a few times I benefited from a friend whose parents made him get rid of his comic book collection. I bought my friends' collections.
