Hi there! It's Don. If you slog through these blogs, you'll come upon one we posted very early on about how John and I "created" comic books when we were in high school, and how we met and talked to the great artist Jack Kirby when he lived in Orange County, California. Now, to be honest, John was the one guy in our little clique in high school who had the least experience with comic books - he admitted to purchasing a couple of Metal Men comics when he was 8 or 9.
The rest of us were fanatics. This was in the late 60s and early 70s, when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and John Buscema and Gene Colan and Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich and Neal Adams and John Romita and even Artie Simek were creating four-color classics every month under the Marvel banner. Most all the costumed characters that drove the Avengers movies and the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the 2000s were created during this period.
As a kid, I loved the old boxy Batman drawn by all the ghost artists who signed Bob Kane's name to their comics. But when my friend Mark Hebert gave me one of his Tales of Suspense comics to read in eighth grade, featuring the exploits of Captain America (drawn by Kirby) and Iron Man (drawn by Colan) - from then on, I Made Mine Marvel. I dove headfirst into collecting comics - new ones were released to the convenience and drug stores every Thursday, and I developed a route, traveling from one store to the next, searching for the perfect copies I could read, then slip into plastic bags to preserve their perfectness.
Why did we go nuts over Marvels? Well, that might be best answered by someone more qualified than me. A while ago, we talked with Gary Sassaman, who was in charge of publications for the San Diego Comic-Con and, for a while, the guests that appeared there. You can listen to that fantastic discussion here:
The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Number 69 - Gary Sassaman
(Make sure to listen for Gary's story about the action hero who tried to arrive at Comic-Con via helicopter!)
Gary, like me, was into Marvel comics, but, unlike me, he was there from the beginning - starting with Fantastic Four #1 - and, having read comics for a long time and rubbed elbows with some of the creators, he's posting all that expertise in a You Tube series called Tales From My Spinner Rack! If you're interested in learning a bit more about why comics caught our fancy way back when, check out the series beginning with, obviously, Episode 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDAQlbWOmeY
And, while you're watching, make sure to subscribe! Gary's looking to get 1000 people to subscribe in the next few weeks, and I think we should all help him out!
Oh, and don't miss Gary's own blog posts at https://www.innocent-bystander.com
Thanks, Gary, for talking with us, and thanks for an outstanding You Tube series about the fun of collecting comics!
As Stan Lee used to say, "Excelsior!"
