Great fun for 12 cents

When The Amazing Spider-Man comic first appeared in 1963, I was the big red circle in the centre of its target audience. I turned 15 that year.

The grip that comics had on me in my teens has never completely let go. It’s been a kick seeing how those characters that were launched way back in the 60s have been reintroduced this century in movies and television.

Windsor’s largest comic book store, when I was a kid, was in the front of an old frame house on Wyandotte Street just west of Windsor Arena. It had bins of used issues and racks of new releases. Most issues were a dime or 12 cents, some large special issues were as much as 35 cents.

I bought the original and next 20 issues of Spider-Man; the first and a few others of Daredevil; the first dozen X-men; the original year or two of Fantastic Four; Thor and a bunch of others including Dr. Strange, which first appeared in the back half of an issue of Thor.

I surprise myself at how much content I still recall.

The first Avengers series had a guy who hasn’t made it to the movies. Called Giant Man or Ant Man, this guy could get very large or very small as the occasion required. He had a girlfriend called The Wasp. Neither were a great hit.

The Incredible Hulk, on the other hand, was on a trial basis with The Avengers. Some Avengers thought he couldn’t be trusted because of that temper. Hulk wasn’t excited about hanging out with them either, after various battles with super heroes in other books. All this was great fun for a 15-year-old.

I kept my comics in boxes in my bedroom closet, as well as a few that were not from Marvel: The Phantom, Blackhawks, and the occasional DC.

Marvel comics eclipsed the others because they introduced superheroes that had to deal with personal dilemmas -- like Hulk who just wanted to be normal. This was unlike DC's characters, such as Superman, who was revered and honoured in Metropolis, or Batman who was a rich guy and resource for the police. Flash was a cop. Wonder Woman was a privileged princess. Green Lantern was a fearless test pilot (I had the first issue of that too.) None of those DC characters led tragic lives or second-guessed themselves.

But in Marvel, Spider-Man was an orphan teen living with his poor aunt and uncle. And when he accidently got his powers, he didn’t want to fight crime. Instead, he tried to use his new abilities to make money. He ignored a bad guy and the bad guy turned around and killed his uncle. Realizing he could have prevented his uncle’s death, Spider-Man was a tormented kid. I loved that.

Other Marvel headliners had their troubles too. Thor was stranded on Earth because he had been kicked out of Asgard. Iron Man could die anytime; only the power device in his chest kept his heart beating – long before the invention of actual pacemakers. All the Marvel comics had these back stories. It was my introduction to literature. That notion struck me when we were taking King Lear in high school. I thought the tragedy of King Lear was the same as the tragedy of The Silver Surfer: they both gave up a secure and privileged life for a promise of adventure, then realized their mistake when it was too late. I doubt that this notion impressed my English teacher.

In English class, we were supposed to read Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Heart of Darkness, and Shakespeare. None of it held my attention for a minute.

As my teens ended, novels and short stories replaced superhero comics. Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein; Sirens of Titan and other Vonnegut novels; I Robot; Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas; Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Mailer. Plus there was poetry: Leonard Cohen, Richard Brautigan. And let us never forget In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works.

Nonetheless, once a super-hero fan, always a bit of a super-hero fan, I guess. Recently, I watched episodes of the new Marvel’s Daredevil series on Netflix.

Oh, what happened to my boxes of now valuable comic books? On a day after I was married, I came by my parents’ home I asked my Mom about my boxes of comics and things. She didn’t recall where they might be. I looked around but never found them. I didn’t live there anymore so I suppose they got tossed out. After all, why would a married man want to keep old comic books?