Tuesday, May 21, 2013

My wife is working in the basement and has uncovered a treasure trove.  For years, my comic book collection has only been seen by ferreting grandchildren.  Occasionally I might find a cover here or a page there that I would gingerly pick up giving it the respect it is due and return it to the hidden box, but I haven’t read one of them in decades.  It wasn’t always like that.  Some might say that reading comic books is a waste of time, and I have certainly wasted plenty of time reading them, but it is reading and even if there are pictures, reading is a skill that is not developed in a shocking slice of our society.  I’m not sure where my first comics came from, but when I was 8 or 10, Doug and Steve Tallakson would let me read some of theirs occasionally.  They had the some of the stuffy Classics Illustrated volumes which I read when I couldn’t get something more exciting, but they also had Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories and my favorite, Uncle Scrooge, as well as a smattering of the DC titles like Superman, Superboy, Supergirl, Action Comics, The Flash, The Green Lantern, etc.  You could tell the oldest and most precious of their magazines because the price on the cover was 10 cents. Their Mom would make them clean out their closet every year or so and they would sell me their cast off titles at exorbitant prices.  I began to accumulate my own collection and by the time I was 12 or 13, I was taking my lawn mowing money to the Skaggs Drug Store and buying hot titles like Archie.  Comics were 12 cents by then and I would carefully calculate how many I could buy with the exact change I had, taking in to account the 4% sales tax Arizona had at the time.  I bought a subscription to Batman and Bob Hope and looked forward to their arrival every month, but I hit the real bonanza when I found a used book store that sold older comics with most of the covers gone making them useless to a collector for 5 or 10 cents a piece.  I wasn’t a collector.  I was a reader.  You might have even said I was a user.  As an adult, I would occasionally come across collection volumes in book stores and I bought huge treasuries of Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Mickey Mouse, all of which are much the worse for wear having raised my 6 children and now working through the 20 grandchildren as they visit.  I acquired a few copies of Archie Comics Digest and my daughter Sarah loved them and began to spend her hard-earned cash on them.  Their price tag was in the multiple dollars like it is now, and I was Oh So tempted to keep her from buying them, but it was her cash.  Luckily, while we were stationed in  Germany, someone asked me if I wanted some comic books for my kids and, never one to turn down an offer like that, accepted gladly.  She brought a big box of the Digests and it took Sarah months to wade through them. Later, after Robert and Bethany married, Bethany contributed another box of Archies and Sarah was in heaven.  Archie has lost his charm for me now.  Even Uncle Scrooge and his money bin don’t lead me away like he used to.  Neither Superman or Batman or even, my action figure favorite, Spiderman thrill me like they once did.  I have gone through a Doonesbury phase and I really enjoyed Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County and The Far Side and the Peanuts collections have been special, but  I find I have graduated finally to text.  I guess I just don’t need the pictures any more.