When I started Marvel Time Warp two years ago, I didn’t really have any expectations. I was pretty sure it’d be fun to read a bunch of old comic books I’d missed out on when I was a kid. And I thought it might be fun to write about those old comics. Turns out reading old Marvel comics and writing about old Marvel comics are both, indeed, fun things to do.
Years ago I had gotten rid of my large-ish comic book collection, that consisted mostly of books from the late 1970s and early-to-mid 1980s. I’d originally planned to just read digital/online versions of comics for Marvel Time Warp. But then I bought a few original copies of comic books on my Time Warp reading list, and I realized that it’s more fun to read old comic books the old-fashioned way. So I started collecting comic books again.
Most of my collecting has been in the service of Marvel Time Warp — comics that Marvel published in 1978. But in the process of searching for 1978 Marvel books, I have picked up a few other old books that appealed to me for one reason or another.
Since this is the three hundredth (!) Marvel Time Warp post, I thought I’d celebrate by doing something a little different and writing about some of those non-1978 books I’ve picked up.
Treasuries and Digests
My favorite place to look for comics is Bob’s Comics. Bob’s is in an out-of-the-way strip mall twenty minutes north of Birmingham, Alabama. Bob generally has a good selection of Bronze Age (my favorite comics era, obviously) books at good prices. And, most importantly for me, Bob keeps his books well-organized. It makes me kind of crazy when I go into a comic book store and everything isn’t sorted.
Bob was running a mid-summer sale last month. I picked up a few Marvel Time Warp issues I was looking for. Then, as I was checking out, I asked Bob if he happened to have any Marvel treasuries lying around.
I have written about Marvel treasuries a few times (including this post about a Star Wars treasury). They were oversized books that generally featured reprints of older stories. They seem to be popular with collectors these days, so I don’t encounter them in stores that often.
Anyway, Bob checked a box of books that he’d just brought into the store, and sure enough there was a treasury in there. And it happened to be one of the four treasury books Marvel published in 1978! Specifically, it was Marvel Treasury no. 19, featuring Conan. It wasn’t in great shape, but since he was running a sale, Bob sold it to me for three bucks. Three bucks! That’s not much more than the 1978 two-dollar cover price.
There’s another shop I’m fond of, Infinity Flux. It’s in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which is out-of-the-way for me. But I have made it by there a couple of times, and, like Bob’s, it’s a well-organized shop with a nice selection of Bronze Age books. Infinity Flux is bigger than Bob’s, and they use some of that space for toys and collectibles.
The last time I was at Infinity Flux, I picked up a Howard the Duck treasury. Howard is one of my favorite Marvel characters of the late-1970s, so I was excited to find a Howard treasury in really nice shape.
(I also got a new copy of my first comic book at Infinity Flux.)
I don’t think that Marvel published any digest books back in the 1970s. But I used to love to pick up DC digests when I’d go to the grocery store with my mom. Digests are kind of like the tiny version of treasuries. (Regular comics are approx. 7” x 10”, treasuries are 10” x 13”, and digests are approx. 5” x 7”. So basically a digest is half the size of a regular comic which is half the size of a treasury.) Aside from being more portable than regular comics, digests were cheaper than treasuries. This Legion of Super-Heroes digest I picked up at a Birmingham-area comics pop-up shop was 95 cents when it came out in 1980.
Even though Marvel didn’t do digests in the ’70s, they did do a few pocket-size paperback reprint books. I found this Conan paperback at Sasquatch Toys and Comics, a newer Birmingham shop. It’s a bit smaller than a digest at 4” x 7”. Also, where a digest just takes whole pages from the original comic and shrinks them down, this Conan paperback rearranges the panels from the original, so each paperback page has fewer/larger panels. And the paperback was published through Ace instead of directly by Marvel.
While they’re not exactly digests, I just read that DC is doing a new series of “compact” comic books, and I’m looking forward to checking those out.
The Action Comes Alive as You Read!
Speaking of Sasquatch, on my first visit there I found a Hulk book-and-record set from Power Records.
I used to love these sets when I was a kid. Keep in mind that in those days I didn’t have a VCR or even basic cable. So a comic book that came with a record that featured an audio version of the story with actors and sound effects and music (it was basically like a radio drama that followed the story in the comic book) was a big deal to me.
At the local pop-up shop I mentioned earlier, I found Spider-Man and Dracula book-and-record sets.
I somehow managed to keep up with both the book and record for two more of these sets (a different Spider-Man set and a Captain America set) that I had when I was a kid. Well, not exactly keep up. Basically I had kept the comic books, and recently I found the corresponding records in a stack of seven-inch singles I got from my parents’ house.
When I went to the web looking for information about these sets, I was kind of surprised that there wasn’t a lot of stuff out there. There is a Power Records fan blog that doesn’t seem to be actively maintained — many of the blog’s linked images are missing. But it still contains some good information.
And there’s also a Medium article about the Power book-and-record sets that digs into their influence on several hip-hop artists.
My First X-Men Books
When I started reading comics back in the late 1970s, I was a Spider-Man guy. But my absolute favorite comic book from my childhood is Uncanny X-Men, which I read as a tween/teen. I still remember how I happened to get my first X-Men book, Uncanny X-Men no. 171. I was a young computer nerd (which was less common in 1983 than it is these days). I lived in rural Alabama, basically the middle of nowhere. But my parents were (and still are) awesome and encouraging, so they signed me up for a weekend computer class in Birmingham, Alabama, and drove me up there on Saturdays.
On the way home from one of those classes, we stopped at a convenience store. I asked my parents if I could get a comic book — a common request, to which the answer was almost always “yes.” And even though I’d never really read any X-Men books before, something about the cover (with the X-Men attacking Rogue) grabbed my attention. When I actually read the book, I was immediately obsessed, and I kept up with Uncanny X-Men for the next few years.
I can’t remember my last X-Men book from my teen years, but I’m pretty sure I at least stuck with the book through Uncanny issue no. 214 in late 1986. I’m thinking I stopped actively collecting comic books around this time, because I started playing in a rock band and (probably more importantly) was old enough to drive myself around and do teenager stuff.
Even though X-Men no. 171 isn’t on my Marvel Time Warp reading list, I had been keeping an eye out for an affordable copy since it’s a sentimental favorite. The thing about Bronze (and Silver) Age X-Men books, though, is that they are popular with collectors and, therefore, generally pricey.
But! A seller at that local pop-up shop had several 1980s Uncanny X-Men books that weren’t too expensive. So I picked up a few, including no. 171 (for only three bucks!). I also picked up Uncanny no. 157 at the pop-up, which I had as a kid but I don’t think I ever read. That one was gifted to me when I ended up in the hospital for a couple days due to a particularly nasty stomach bug. It’s weird which things I remember from 40 years ago. Then again, that X-Men no. 157 cover is pretty memorable.
300 posts in, Marvel Time Warp continues to be fun (and educational — I have learned so much about Bronze Age comic books since I started this project) for me. And it has gotten me interested again in collecting comics, which is its own kind of fun. Though I am trying to keep the collecting to just a few short boxes of books — I live in a modest apartment, so I’m not looking to put together a huge collection of comics I don’t have room for.
I hope you find Marvel Time Warp fun and occasionally educational, too! Thanks for reading!
Next time — I’ll get back into Marvel’s August 1978 books!
Congrats on 300! Here’s a link to the excellent Power Records Podcast!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-power-records-podcast/id1078808840