Indecision.

The old subconscious works on us in our dreams, for sure.

I don't normally dream about the past, but I did last night.

I dreamed that I was back in high school again, in the midst of a football game. There I was on the field. Someone tipped the ball as the opposing quarterback threw a pass. The misdirected ball fell right into my hands. I hauled it in close to my body and began to run.

And then I suddenly realized that I didn't know which end of the field belonged to my team.

And so it goes...

I have to say...the old Gilmer High alma mater purple and white uniforms look cool, these days.

Things

I generally don't get excited about the things I have bought and the things that I own. I've known folk who get really choked up when they lose or sell something like an automobile that they've had for a while. This rarely  happens with me.

I have a hiking staff that I cut from the 120-acre property that my mom and dad once owned in the mountains of north Georgia. I've had that staff since I was 16 years old. Somehow, I've kept it close over the decades (almost four decades and counting). I have a statue of a bear carved from a piece of cedar that I bought in a shop when I was eight years old on a visit to the mountains of my native state. Again, somehow I've kept it close at hand for 47 years.

But I don't get upset about things like vehicles. However, today we sold our canoe. We've had it for a while. Ten years or more. I can't recall exactly when we bought it, but we've used it to paddle rivers and streams all over the southeastern USA. Everywhere from Tennessee to Virginia to North Carolina to South Carolina to Florida. We had a great time using that canoe.

Well, today we sold it to a very sweet couple from Asheville. I think they're going to have as much fun with it as Carole and Andy and I did. After they purchased the canoe, and before they headed back home to Asheville, we drove them over to Mountain Island Lake (five-minute drive) so that they could take the canoe on a test run. Watching them paddle away, I did get a bit of a pang seeing our canoe go angling away from us forever.

The sweet couple who bought our canoe.

Their little boy, Zane.

Goodbye, canoe! I think you're with a great family!

Sweet Nostalgia!

Sometimes I get a kick out of looking at some of the toys of childhood and recalling those sweet days. In the past couple of years I decided to begin accumulating a set of the original run of the Ditko-created issues of The Amazing Spider-Man. As my friends know, I feel that Steve Ditko pretty much created the character whole cloth and that adding another person’s name as “co-creator” is nothing short of a lie. I came to this conclusion based on a number of facts, and it irks me to see people like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby referred to as assistants to someone else.

Alas.

Recently, at a comic convention, I picked up The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 by Steve Ditko. I hadn’t read this comic book in quite some time, and I’d largely forgotten what a complete package of kid’s delight that it is. The book was ingeniously designed to be something that would dazzle any boy who bought it. The story brings the uninitiated reader up to speed on the then-new title character. It contains most of the major villains that had appeared in the first fifteen issues of the regular title, and has a fun—although simple—storyline.

What kid could resist this book? (Not this kid!)

The book is packed with great splash pages, pinup pages, cover recreations, and informational bits explaining the whys and hows of the Amazing Spider-Man. Of all of the comics of my childhood, this one transported me back to those early memories better than anything else I’ve acquired from those days.

Nobody could do this kind of page like Steve Ditko!

I know that this book has been reprinted a number of times, and that it can be had in book format and printed on high quality paper. But one of the pleasures of owning these books (for me) is partly due to the sensation of feeling that old pulp paper and smelling what I realize is the slow and unstoppable dissolution of that pulp. There’s nothing like the smell of an old comic!

Take me home!

Gone Forever

I was born in 1957. I grew up reading comics. The first comic book that I can actually recall reading was the Jesse Marsh adaptation of JOHN CARTER, WARLORD OF MARS that appeared from Dell Comics. If memory serves me, I think my mom’s mother bought it for me during the only time she ever visited our home. But it could have been someone else who bought it—I would have been about four years old at that time. At any rate, it’s the first comic I ever saw, and I liked the thoats of Barsoom because they reminded me of dinosaurs, which were my passion (even at four years old).

The next comic books I ever received were several copies of FANTASTIC FOUR that my dad picked up for me at a used bookstore when I was around five or six years old. These were issue numbers 3, 4, and 12. I really enjoyed these, especially the character known as Ben Grimm/The Thing.

By the time I was seven years old, my family had moved from Brunswick to Atlanta where my parents had opened a used bookstore. It was there that my dad quickly began to accumulate well over 100,000 comic books. And so my childhood was filled with being able to read just about any comic you can name that appeared between the mid-1950s until the time he opened the shop—1965.

What amazes me now is that there were so many kinds of comic books. I had at my pleasure science comics (CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED WORLD AROUND US), adventure comics, superhero comics, funny animal comics, romance comics, war comics, science fiction comics, fantasy comics, movie comics, TV comics, humor comics, crime comics, monster comics, animal comics, detective comics, western comics, history comics...just about anything you could imagine was being done in comics form. When I go to comic conventions these days, I find that there are pretty much no comic books published between 1957 and 1975 that I haven’t read at least once. In that way, I led a really cool childhood.

Today, when I walk into a comic book shop, I find the variety of comics to be extremely limited. The industry is completely dominated by superhero comics. I don’t have anything against that little genre, as such, but it’s a shame that it’s just about the only game in town. Even something as once dominant as funny animal and children’s comics are pretty much gone forever. Gone are Wendy, Casper, Hot Stuff, Pogo, Bugs Bunny, Tweety & Sylvester, Little Archie, Sad Sack, Dennis the Menace, Melvin the Monster, Little Lulu, and their type.

Slowly, over the years, the many other publishers of comic books relinquished their market shares to Marvel Comics and DC Comics. Dell faded. Gold Key left. Charlton failed. Harvey Comics vanished. Archie Comics has shriveled from the racks to retreat to digests, it seems. Classics Illustrated became extinct. Even Disney characters can now be found only in trade paperback format.

I keep wondering if, perhaps, comic books could make a comeback in something like their old form. But the older I get, the more I have to realize that this will likely never happen. For one thing, it’s so damned expensive to produce a comic book these days. Even the most awful of formats is a slim version of its old self—termed the “floppy” by the folk who sell them. At more than $3 an issue, how can kids afford to buy them? A dime or twelve cents or even fifteen cents was something just about any kid could scrape together every week. But several bucks for a comic book? No wonder there’s so little variety on the comic racks these days.

I’m not begrudging the folk who make their livings at creating comics. Far from it. They deserve to earn a decent paycheck. But it’s sad to think of everything the past couple of generations of kids have lost by not having the selection of comic books that I experienced when I was growing up.

Unfortunately, I don't see them ever coming back.

Well Spent Youth

(What I was riding, circa 1967.)

The brightest part of my youth was spent on a residential street in Decatur, Georgia called Mead Road. The entire street ran from Oakview Road on the south and Howard Avenue on the north end. Each end of the street was a terminus for Mead Road, for it did not continue on the opposite side of the streets with which it intersected. The entire street was only a few blocks long, and composed completely of single-family homes (one duplex of which I was aware), a doctor's office (Dr. Levin, my own doctor), and the elementary school which I attended and which was directly next door to where I lived.

I loved that place. I lived there for just a few years--from the time I entered the third grade until I graduated from the sixth grade. I had friends all up and down the street and some from the streets on one side or the other. We spent our days playing in the school fields, in the many patches of woods scattered throughout the area, and exploring up and down vast streams and creeks filled with fish and reptiles and amphibians, many of which we caught and released. I was lucky to have lived in an area that was filled with so many types of salamanders, which we kids were always thrilled to catch and examine and then put back into the creeks from which we'd kidnapped them.

We lived in a rambling house of wood and Stone Mountain granite. The foundation was granite and the fireplace was granite. It was a pretty darned cool place to live. We had a big living room which was more often than not piled to the ceiling with boxes of comic books from my dad's used bookshops. I don't think there was a comic book published between 1956 and 1968 that I hadn't at least looked at, and most of which I'd read. For a kid between the ages of eight and eleven, it was a pretty goddamned cool place.

Don't get me wrong--it wasn't all fun and giggles. But for the most part I had a really good time being a little boy. My parents bought me most of the toys I asked for, but I never was a greedy kid. I had model rockets and dinosaurs and books-a-jillion. There just wasn't a whole hell of a lot that I wanted and didn't have. But here, condensed into just a few items, are the things which seemed to me to have been the most important bits of silliness to the child I was then:

I had access to every comic book imaginable. None fascinated me more than Steve Ditko's creation, The Amazing Spider-Man.

I had quite a number of the Aurora Model Kits. Probably about twenty of them. The Superman model was a classic.

You can say what you want about Forry Ackerman and Jim Warren, but the fact remains that they influenced many of the children of the 60s who went on to become creators in comics, prose, TV, and film. Forry's vision was, and still is, seminal.

Yes, TV was a huge influence on me. One of my favorite shows was, of course, The Munsters.

I had several of the Weird Ohs model kits, also. Influenced by Big Daddy Roth, these were all the rage in my neighborhood (and neighborhoods nationwide) when I was in the third and fourth grades.

When I was eight years old my mom handed me this book. I sat down to read it and was scared shitless, amazed, stunned, fascinated, dazzled. I put aside Hugh Lofting and devoted myself to weird fiction for many years.

I Feel Young Again!

When I walked away from the collectibles business twelve years ago, I thought I never wanted to have anything to do with old comics again. However, as I entered my fifties, I decided that I missed the smell of aging pulp. In particular, I missed looking at the Steve Ditko Spider-Man comics that had so fascinated me as a kid.

So, a short time back, I started seeking out medium-grade copies of The Amazing Spider-Man. I didn't want high grade books. What I was searching for were copies in good to very good condition (or better if the price was right) that I could read without having to worry about hurting their "investment" value. Because they really aren't an investment--at least not in monetary terms. They're for me on a strictly personal and selfish basis. I just want the originals to read and touch...to bring back a few pleasant childhood memories as I enter old age.

I'm well along the way of putting a set together. There will be, I figure, 42 books to complete the set. I'll need Amazing Fantasy #15, Amazing Spider-Man #s1-38, Amazing Spider-Man Annual #s1 and 2, and Strange Tales Annual #2 which featured Spider-Man but was penciled by Kirby and inked by Ditko. I could live without the Strange Tales Annual, but I may seek it out.

Now that I can afford to buy these books, I guess I'll have a complete set. Not in high grade, of course, but there they will be. I reckon I'm a kid again. If ever I stopped being one.