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Topic: Anyone who still remembers their feelings towards certain comics? Post ReplyPost New Topic
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Olav Bakken
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Joined: 15 June 2014
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Posted: 28 May 2020 at 8:00pm | IP Logged | 1 post reply

Most have probably experienced the disappointment when they are finally able to see a movie that meant a lot for them as kids, or maybe read a book, only to find out that the magic they felt as a child is completely gone.

My comic book collection from my childhood is probably over 90% intact, and I keep them on some shelves in a dark room. On rare occasions I see through some of the issues, and actually remember the feelings they triggered in me (if I had been exposed to them on a daily basis, all those memory emotions would probably fade away permanently). Sometimes also where they were bought and where I read them.

Those are the moments that makes you realize the reason why you loved the comics so much as a kid and what you would have missed if you had never discovered them.

I don't think any planetary romance or space opera, or similar science fiction has ever been published in my country, except from some Star Wars novels after I became an adult. But what I didn't get from books, I got from comics. And some low budget sci-fi, which were far less impressive then the comic book stories.

Author Edmond Hamilton had a similar experience as kid:

"Some people, myself included, are born with a feeling about these things. In my case I couldn’t even read. This was on a farm in Ohio back in 1908 when I was four years old. I got hold of some magazine that contained an article by H. G. Wells called “The Things That Live on Mars.” It was, as I see it now, a follow-up to his very successful The War of the Worlds. And it had these pictures of tall, slender trees; strange looking Martians moving about. I looked at that magazine until it wore out. I wasn’t yet able to read it, to read the article, but those pictures! I sat and wondered if Mars was a long way off and if it was a very strange place. This feeling I say; I think people have a bent toward this."
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Kevin Brown
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Posted: 29 May 2020 at 1:27pm | IP Logged | 2 post reply

I still have the first 2 comics I ever owned.  My grandmother got them for me when I was 2.  One was Bugs Bunny and the other was Porky Pig.  I've probably read and re-read them hundreds of times.

I sold off my entire collection a few years ago, but I kept those.  I'll never get rid of them, no matter how dog eared they get.    The last time I read them I started tearing up and realizing how much I miss my grandmother.  (She passed when I was 12, a week before my 13th birthday.)  And even now I get misty eyed in just thinking about it....  But it was my grandmother who stoked my enjoyment of comics and reading.  She also made me a huge football fan, but that's another story!
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Phil Frances
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Posted: 29 May 2020 at 1:40pm | IP Logged | 3 post reply

Looks like the magazine Edmond Hamilton was looking through was the March 1908 issue of Cosmopolitan - 


- mentioned as the link has a few of the illustrations he refers to.
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Peter Martin
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Posted: 29 May 2020 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | 4 post reply

I used to get JB's entire run of FF in a big stack, flip it over -- so that FF #232 was on top, back-cover upward and then I'd take each issue off the top and read them, lying on my bed. I'd go through two or three issues a day and it would take me a good few weeks to work my way through the whole thing (always sad to get to 293 and then have the disappointment of 294 and 295). I can remember the feel of the bedroom, when I would go there after at dinner to read by my bedside lamp, the covers that were on my bed, the smell of the room. I used to look at the dates in the indicia and get all nostalgic about 1982 or whatever, which was fewer than 10 years before at that point...
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Rebecca Jansen
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Posted: 29 May 2020 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | 5 post reply

I still remember the feeling I had seeing the covers of Crisis On Infinite Earths and Legion Of Super-heroes with Supergirl dead on them... "Ouch, there goes a piece of my childhood!" However, the version then with the cheerleader outfit and headband wasn't the Jim Mooney and Kurt Schaffenbeger one I thought was really neat when I was little. If there was ever a death of Scamp special collector's edition I don't want to know! :^)

I still have the three Star Wars and one Battlestar Galactica comics from 1979 that got me hooked on buying Marvels regularly. I remember a lot of details about the time as much as what they themselves were or are. Later I got some of the Supergirls, Plops, Shazams and Scamps I'd had earlier but lost along the way, and while it was fun to see them again I didn't experience quite the same feeling of importance... maybe because they were not 'my' copies?

Edited by Rebecca Jansen on 29 May 2020 at 6:41pm
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Olav Bakken
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Posted: 29 May 2020 at 8:12pm | IP Logged | 6 post reply

Kevin Brown:

I am not able to remember which were my first comics (they partially overlapped with what we got from my mother and aunts), even if some stands out for one reason or another.

My grandmother too used to read comics for me till I was old enough to read them myself (and possibly a little longer), and is probably one of the reasons why I connected so to them.

Phil Frances:

Back in those days those with these preferences were probably starved on content like that. Including small children. I can imagine how he stared at those images till the magazine fell apart.

Peter Martin:

And even if you have read it several times, you get sucked back in. I never had any specific approach, but was just looking through one of the stacks before deciding what to read on the bed. Sometimes when tidying up the comics on the floor, I could open one at a random page, and the next I knew, I had completed the last page and the trance was broken.

Everybody here have most likely felt the disappointment when an artist that defines a comic title for you is replaced with another one with a very different style.

Rebecca Jansen:

Another run that was never published over here. So when I read "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?", where Superman gets a visit from Legion of Superheroes and Supergirl, he whispers to them that she is dead in his time. Which made me very surprised. And then Krypto and several others died shortly after, making me hope it was not really canon.

Yes, the fact that a specific copy is yours and have been in your ownership as long as you can remember could also contribute to the feelings. A stain or something else that would disqualify it from being mint condition or even very fine, can have its own meaning for the owner of the issue.
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Craig Earl
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Posted: 30 May 2020 at 10:09am | IP Logged | 7 post reply

I can still remember the first comic I read; a reprint of ASM 98. It was given to my brother who was ill with suspected polio and then passed down to me (the comic, not the illness!). That started everything for me. 

I can still remember other issues, where I bought them and where I read them. Here in the UK, there was a monthly B&W Spider-Man pocket book that caught my attention. It had Lee & Ditko reprints of those very first issues, and I can lying on my bed reading and loving those stories (I have always needed to read comics complete silence, with no one else around).

Later, I recall the thud of a mail order package that contained the Alpha Flight issues 1, 2, 4, 7, 8 & 10 - filling the gaps that made up for the unreliable distribution of US Marvel comics at the time. 
I made a cup of tea and read them all with a smile on my face.

Ah, childhood!  
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Brian Miller
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Posted: 30 May 2020 at 11:25am | IP Logged | 8 post reply

I still get that rush of excitement when I pull out my first comic, AS-M
229. Spider-Man fights Juggernaut.

And the same when I pull out AS-M 252. The first black costume.
Absolutely blew my mind when I saw it on the spinner rack.
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