@ CJ...I, too, had multiple erector Sets...one day my dad brought home a crate filled with partially rusted, assorted girders, plates of various sizes and plenty of bolts and nuts...that simple box of parts gave us more happiness than most kids my age had...mom & pop wouldn't allow comic books in the house...I loved going to the dentist...he had plenny of comics I could read while waiting...
Posted by CJ at 11:32 am (PDT) on Sun October 2, 2016
@LoyalTubist - Gee Thanks for reminding me how old I am LOL I was 11/12 when you were learning to read. Oddly enough, I was never into comics. Spent most of my time with my Erector Sets and the Girders & Panels.
Still love comic books. I don't remember dime comic books, the lowest price I remember is 12 cents. (I didn't start learning to read until about 1961 or 1962.)
My best friend's older brother always bought 10 cent horror comics in the pre-Code days. My friend was not allowed to touch them but of course when the house was empty we did.
Nightmares, believe me!
Posted by Duff at 10:01 pm (PST) on Sun November 25, 2012
Yup, parents have a habit of throwing away what might be valuable collections, often when the kids go off to college. If not valuable monetarily, these things (books, comics, art projects, toys, model trains, dolls, clothes, or whatever) often had incalculable sentimental value. While we haven't saved everything, my wife and I have tried to be sensitive about this with our daughter's things.
Posted by SK-B at 6:39 pm (PST) on Sun November 25, 2012
I had a friend whose father's job had something to do with comic books. He got a variety of comic books for free, and when he was finished with them, he would sell them to me for 2 cents.
I devoured comic books. At school, I was labeled as a poor reader, and put into remedial reading. I liked that because it got me out of the regular classroom for an hour at a time, and into a small group where I basked in the individual attention. My mother was sure that I needed to stop reading comics, because somehow they were distracting me from reading.
Another "distraction" was science books, which -- along with comics -- I was devouring under my pillow with a flashlight at night. I was just not interested in the garbage that school tried to force on the students. In effect I had created my own program of independent study, and as a result my intellectual development progressed ahead of my peers, on a non-authoritarian track.
I had a large stack of 10 cent comics -- Superman, Batman, Little Lulu, etc. -- and one day they were all gone: In the interest of protecting me from harmful influences, my mother had thrown them all out!
Lest we forget, Fawcett's WHIZ Comics, the first to feature Billy Batson and Captain Marvel. The Captain and his feats were direct rip-offs of Superman and Batman, but he was drawn with much more of a sense of humor than the others.
Back in the 19-teens or so, a pulp magazine publisher by the name of "Captain" William Fawcett, of Greenwich, Connecticut, came up with the concept of a boy's weekly magazine called "Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang". 20-some years later, 'Captain', 'Billy', and 'WHIZ' all became staples of the comic book featuring 'the big red cheese', which is how the Captain's arch -enemy, the evil Doctor Sivana, referred to the Captain himself.
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I post mant to read at: www.ClassicComicsOnline.weebly.com
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Nightmares, believe me!
I devoured comic books. At school, I was labeled as a poor reader, and put into remedial reading. I liked that because it got me out of the regular classroom for an hour at a time, and into a small group where I basked in the individual attention. My mother was sure that I needed to stop reading comics, because somehow they were distracting me from reading.
Another "distraction" was science books, which -- along with comics -- I was devouring under my pillow with a flashlight at night. I was just not interested in the garbage that school tried to force on the students. In effect I had created my own program of independent study, and as a result my intellectual development progressed ahead of my peers, on a non-authoritarian track.
I had a large stack of 10 cent comics -- Superman, Batman, Little Lulu, etc. -- and one day they were all gone: In the interest of protecting me from harmful influences, my mother had thrown them all out!
Back in the 19-teens or so, a pulp magazine publisher by the name of "Captain" William Fawcett, of Greenwich, Connecticut, came up with the concept of a boy's weekly magazine called "Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang". 20-some years later, 'Captain', 'Billy', and 'WHIZ' all became staples of the comic book featuring 'the big red cheese', which is how the Captain's arch -enemy, the evil Doctor Sivana, referred to the Captain himself.
Registered users can log in to post comments or submit items for the galleries.