Chris Cavanaugh poses this question to me…
I enjoy your Instagram posts about comic books you owned, read, and loved. There is quite a variety. Did you buy almost everything you saw on the stands? Which genres and titles were your favorites? Were there any you passed on?
My memory is that I started with comics featuring characters I knew from television. We're talking 1957 or so here…so mostly Dell. At that point, there were comic book racks in a lot of markets and drugstores so my parents would say, "Go pick out a couple" and I'd pick out a couple and they'd buy them for me along with whatever else they were there to buy. But my parents also loved old book shops and in those, while they shopped for used books, I'd hit the piles of old comics that sold for a nickel each, six for a quarter.
Naturally, I bought them in multiples of six. An awful lot of the diversification in my purchasing came in the second-hand shops because I'd pick out, say, 35 comics I wanted and then I'd have to take one more to get to that multiple of six. So that was how I tried a lot of new things…because from my point-o'-view, that 36th comic was free. I'm pretty sure the first time I bought a Charlton comic, it was as a "free" comic in a used book shop. I do not remember seeing Charlton comics on racks of new comics until around 1966.
With me, it went roughly like this: I started with Dell comics that featured characters I knew from television. That led easily to some Dell comics that were similar in content even though they featured characters I didn't know from television.
I also started buying Harvey comics that had characters I knew from television and that led to Harvey comics featuring characters I didn't know from television. And somewhere in there, I bought two DC Comics — The Fox and the Crow and Sugar & Spike before I ever went near Superman. I still think The Fox and the Crow and Sugar & Spike are two of the Ten Best Comics to ever come out of that company.
Soon after, I started buying Superman comics because I knew Superman from TV. One local station sometimes ran the Paramount cartoons and another had the live-action series starring George Reeves. Julius Schwartz once asked me to write the Superman comic for a while and I realized that the way the character was being handled then was quite different from the way I would have wanted to do it so I declined.
I'm not knocking how they were doing it. Their approach might well have been more commercial but it wasn't the way I saw the character. (The way I saw the character, he would have been more like the Paramount cartoons when he was Superman and more like George Reeves when he was Clark Kent.)
Anyway, the first comic book I bought that had Superman in it was a coverless copy of Action Comics #250. I'm not sure why I had a coverless one but I did and it was many years later than I acquired a copy with a cover on it. That cover can be seen above and next to it is Jimmy Olsen #45, which was the second comic I bought that had Superman in it.
Not long after that, I bought an issue of World's Finest Comics because it had Superman in it…and it also had Batman, which led to me collecting all the comics with Batman in them, and then Justice League of America because it sometimes had Superman and Batman in it. Each comic was a gateway drug to another.
Beyond that point, I just kinda started buying everything…all the other super-hero comics, then war comics and westerns and romance. I just decided I liked every kind of comic book and I was more interested in the form — how they were written and drawn, how a story was told in them — than I ever was in the characters or stories themselves. I can't chart a timeline of when different comics went on my "to buy" list because I was getting a lot of them second-hand, not when they arrived at newsstands. I'd say "…and reading all those comic books made me the man I am today" but that's a horrible thing to say about comic books.
