Grab bags and quarter bins: your tales of discovering comics as a clueless youth

I remember flipping through that and going 'lol nnnnnnnnope'

shatter was a comic, my man - digital justice was a graphic novel

Duuuuuuude, I was going to write something about Previews but basically the thing you wrote so NBD. I discovered Previews and Wizard about the same time, but the former was definitely a deeper dive into the astounding array of stuff that was out there. And, yeah, I went over those things with a fine-toothed comb.

I'm realizing the more I think about this stuff that what I'd previously thought of as this long, meandering journey from a kid who didn't really care about comics to a hardcore, dedicated fan really took place over maybe like two years, from like '90 to '92 or so.

Wasn't Iron Man 2020 a digital joint, too? Was that later?

'Digital', lol.

yet more proof that old lunch and i are basically the same person

previews was a bible for a few years. i think i got into it right when Defiant started and i bought heavy into PLASM there's some garbage not worth reheating
https://badgenious.blogspot.com/2008/08/panelology-casualty-of-90s-warriors-of.html

One sad thing that was true in 80s indie comics as today is that you have a high degree of certainty a series will end before the story is done.

all I know about Iron Man 2020 was that he showed up in the Barry Windsor Smith Machine Man ltd series (which had p incredible artwork)

My 80s collection was packed with quarter box indies. I bet I had a good portion of every First and Eclipse/Pacific comic published.

my early interest in superhero comics was spurred by a kid in my class whose dad was weirdly opposed to him getting comics for some reason but he had a real obsession with spider man and was willing to buy any marvel issues with spiderman in them from me for a dollar apiece if he didn't own them. That's A LOT of possible comics and I was out at the local comic / record shop on the regular cause my dad did business with them so I was able to buy twenty spider books for five bucks, flip that for twenty and then buy fifteen bucks worth of quarter books with the profit. Dad spent hours going through the crates so i spent hours going through long boxes... got to the point where i could recognize boxes that I'd already gone through. back then there were several hundred quarter boxes to riffle through!

old Lunch, you are thinking of Iron Man: CRASH not 2020
https://taint-the-meat.com/2016/03/27/iron-man-crash/

<img src="http://tainthemeat.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/iron-man-crash-page-49.jpg";>
^ as done by the SHATTER guy

er:
http://tainthemeat.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/iron-man-crash-page-49.jpg

t0rrenting has been scratching a lot of old quarter box itches... recently got the complete Pacific/First collection. Not gonna read it all but by gum i finally OWN IT

Much love to bizarro and our trans-Atlantic brain tether.

Haaaaa, omg, forks...the issue of Previews with the sneak peak of Warriors of Plasm bound in was my first. What a dumb piece of crap that was.

all I know about Iron Man 2020 was that he showed up in the Barry Windsor Smith Machine Man ltd series (which had p incredible artwork)

yeah that was my first exposure to bws (as part of the backup to a weekly marvel uk spider-man reprint series iirc) and i've loved his work ever since - the lithe grace he gives to machine man is astonishing

I think my only exposure to him was like one-off X-Men issues and other random stuff, I had no idea about Conan/his 70s work until way later

me too old lunch! i think we were at the same comicbook store

Fish Police and TMNT were basically contemporaries - I think the comics debuted within a year of each other. I don't know why I know this.

this thread is a glittering monument to 'i don't know why i know this'

eh we all know exactly why

Wish I still had my first issues of both those comics. Alas, I had to pay for college somehow.

what was the TMNT ripoff with beavers...? drawn by Truman iirc?

Space Beavers. Possibly predated TMNT.

yeah I could be misremembering the chronology there

Dalgoda is indeed pretty great, and the second series featured one of Alan Moore's best works as the back-up.

DNAgents had a higher level of competency than most of hese, and functioned well enough as an off-brand New Teen Titans -- but spun off the much better Crossfire, which morphed from a supervillain antihero into an almost-straight Hollywood PI series. With long prose essays about amusing stories from Evanier's life as a jobbing TV writer as a bonus feature.

wait, no, Time Beavers was Tim Truman, Space Beaver was Darick Robertson.

leave us not forget dave sims beavers
https://momentofcerebus.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-origin-of-beavers.html

ah yeah Time Beavers is what I was thinking of thx

all I know about Iron Man 2020 was that he showed up in the Barry Windsor Smith Machine Man ltd series (which had p incredible artwork)

there was a great spiderman annual where iron man 2020 went back to the mid-80s to get a scan of a future terrorist's retina to prevent some apocalyptic event, only to be foiled by an assholish spidey. I found all four issues of that Machine Man series while clearing out the loft, I must reread it - loved his work (esp the X-men stories he did).

ah, for the days when 2020 seemed like the impossibly far future

BWS inked - obliterated - Herb Trimpe's pencils on the first three parts of that Machine Man mini-series (the fourth and last issue is all BWS).

Back in the 70s, loved the few pages of the Captain America treasury that Bazza inked over Kirby - so odd (in a good way!) seeing Jack being given a completely different finishing style from the Sinnott/Kirby brushy norm.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9goaVu7qTSE/Uq8H6IYrqFI/AAAAAAAAEDs/6PAQiT7nhCQ/s1600/1+(1).jpg

Finding a Treasury edition for sale in a newsagent was always a special score.

I seem to recall that the Machine Man was some of BWS first comic work in quite a few years and he started working with Trimpe to get back in the swing.

whoah yeah Kirby+Bazza is a great, odd combo!

That sorta-mask thing (paint?) on Jon Sable is so annoying. Hate it when they added just a little something to make it look superheroey. I'm sure there others in the 80s like that. Will Eisner was pressured into giving The Spirit an eye mask.

It's interesting to see First, Pacific, Eclipse etc titles and backups get collected editions. I thought a lot of this would never resurface.

My first comic shop visit was also unbelievably exciting, I wanted to live in there like the Phantom Of The Opera and read everything when the store was closed, back then almost everything looked great to me. Getting Previews was often the most exciting part of the month.
Stopped reading Previews around 7 years ago, it just made me too furious to see what a huge percentage of it is expensive opportunism. Hacky tie-ins and spin-offs, variant covers, $160 models with no craft, Star Trek pizza cutters and Watchmen bearbricks and toasters (not making those up).

It's nice to see more quality creator owned comics in the mainstream but there's still so much weak material and collectables that it gets me down. It's unlikely I'll ever be that excited to go to a comic shop again unless there's some unprecedented wave of brilliance in the future. Would like to go to a big French or Japanese store someday though.

Ordering Charlton ghost comics and reading them by the fire is one of my happiest comics memories.
The British magazine From The Tomb was a big deal for me, it was a few years before all that cover art was so easy to find on the internet and it had so much great images that you'd rarely see anywhere else.
This Charlton, Atlas era Marvel, Skywald and Harvey stuff was so tantalizing.

They got a lot of flack but the Pure Imagination reprints were great, getting there before bigger publishers.

I bought most of the Savage Dragon run from cheapie bins. Sometimes titles like Twisted Tales and miscellaneous Ditko comics from the 80s and 90s (usually not his best).

It's unlikely I'll ever be that excited to go to a comic shop again unless there's some unprecedented wave of brilliance in the future.

I went to Floating World this week. If it's never exciting to go there, then it'd be time to give up on the medium forever.

(Only had half an hour before having to leave the city, so it felt like one of those dreams where you find an entire shop or cache of comics, and you get glimpses of things you've never seen before, but something keeps getting in the way of going through them, so you can never know what wonders were in there)

The Passaic Book Center in Passaic, New Jersey was my mecca for a good few years (81-84). A seemingly cavernous old space stacked with comics and back issue sci-fi mags and paperbacks. Golden Age comics pinned to the walls and hanging from cords above the floor. In the window were displayed Heavy Metal graphic novels like Walt Simonson's "Alien" adaptation as well as a couple stacks of comics bundled together with twine under a sign saying "100 mix n' match comics for $20". A friend and I once split the cost of one of these stacks and it was such a joy sitting on the front steps of my house going through and dividing up the goods. I vividly recall the rush of excitement going in each month to get the latest Miller's "Daredevil" or Byrne FF, for example. Smell of old newsprint and older wood. Nothing like it.

I discover most of the newer comics I like through Meathaus, but they're mostly just illustrations and not sequences, so arguably not comics at all (I have no problem with this, there's a lot of older comic artists I wish had just done this, for all the crappy pinup books nobody really taken advantage of this approach until relatively recently).

I like comics for images first and foremost and there's always going to be more good artists in the wider fine art and illustration world because it's bigger and generally less constrained. I wish more artists would adopt sequential methods.

I like to think anything is possible but it's difficult to imagine a great quantity of things impressing your adult mind as it did your child-teenage-early 20s brains.

Then there's the excitement of initial discovery vs the reality of experiencing the things in full. So many discoveries would have been less exciting if I had been able to read quicker (same is true now with all the speculative fiction I'm buying that will inevitably disappoint).
The last time I was really excited by obscure comics was the Manga Zombie profiles of creators, I'd still love the full book and to see translations of some of these.

I quite like Uno Moralez, Tin Can Forest, Kurokawa John and Loic Locatelli, as far as newish comic people go.

i had a place in my old hometown where the prices were good and the selection was excellent but the owner let her two cats have the run of the place and there was often catshit in the back of the box.

Yeaaaaaah. Buying comics with unidentifiable stains in weirdly-sticky mylar bags is the dark side of the rites of passage related itt.

My gf's parents were refurbishing their basement a while back and her dad gave me a sampling of a big cache of comics he'd found, wondering if they were worth anything. It was my sad duty to report back, nah, not really in terms of actual monetary value (mildly warped and mildewed late-'70s/early-'80s Marvel & DC), but I'm sure they'd be an absolute goldmine to some kid somewhere.

(Oh, completely random detail I just remembered: the comics in question originally belonged to a young Michael T. Weiss of The Pretender fame, as he was apparently a childhood friend of their family. Life is weird.)

the right way to get rid of a longbox is to give it to an impressionable teenager.

that's gonna get put in "ilx posted out of character" isn't it

I loved those seemingly random Kirby text emphases. I could tell it was Kirby before I read Ward's description.

"We're not out of this yet, Cap!"

I love Kirby's dialogue. This article was interesting about the Kirby text emphases style, and how it differed from Stan Lee's:

Lee's "natural" dialogue emphasized nouns - it could have been anything, any component of the sentence, but Lee whipped his nouns until they bled. Lee loved words that were solid, visible, concrete, tangible - words you could pose for a picture. Look at the classic FF #50 (1966), the climax of the Galactus trilogy. As Reed Richards checkmates Marvel's most powerful entity and saves the trembling Earth, as Kirby's art crackles off the page with cosmic action, Lee's dialogue (admittedly some of his best) dwells on the stolid nouns and pronouns:

REED: "NO, Galactus, it is YOU who will perish... for we have found the WEAPON at last!"
GALACTUS: "The ULTIMATE NULLIFIER! ! In the hands of... a HUMAN! ...Your feeble mind cannot begin to comprehend its POWER! You hold the means to destroy a GALAXY... to lay waste to a UNIVERSE!!"
REED: "And should the UNIVERSE crumble... can GALACTUS survive??"
GALACTUS (to Watcher): "YOU did this!! Only YOU had the power... only YOU had the will! You have given a MATCH to a child who lives in a TINDERBOX!"

We know that Lee's dialogue often grated on Kirby. Words frequently didn't match what was in Kirby's mind when the scenes popped from his head onto the page. Maybe one of the reasons was a basic psychological mismatch between the two men's thinking and writing styles: When Kirby began writing his own dialogue, first at DC and then after his unhappy return to Marvel, he largely emphasized verbs. Even in Kirby's quietest scenes of the 1970s, his choice of emphasis in dialogue stresses words that run, jump, crash, explode, do things - like his images, they can't sit still. Take this reflective exchange from Mister Miracle #6 (1972). The art is simply head shots, but look at the way Kirby gooses the verbs until they notch up the tension level of the sentences:

SCOTT: "Earth ISN'T small! Perhaps we can LOSE ourselves in hamlets, cities - continents - !! Perhaps, in time - the forces of Apokolips will GIVE UP the hunt!!"
BARDA: "It's a DELUSION, Scott! But I'll BUY it! Only, WATCH Flashman! Megalomaniacs LOVE to make noise! ! He COULD be our Achilles' heel!"

https://twomorrows.com/kirby/articles/19dialogue.html

Kirby's style of dialogue seems like something very specific to the medium of comics, in a way that Lee's wasn't (I know Lee has aspirations towards being a novelist or getting into the film industry). I think I read some of Kirby's self-scripted 70s work for the first time in the mid-2000s around the time that 'decompressed storytelling' and that Brian Michael Bendis style 'naturalistic' dialogue was in vogue, and the Kirby stuff just seemed like the complete opposite, both in terms of the visuals and the words, the dialogue seemed dense and distilled in the same way that the images were.

I generally ignore the story and the dialogue when I'm reading Kirby/Kirby (as opposed to Lee/Kirby) but... are there good Kirby-penned "stories" I'm missing out on? I don't think Kirby's disinterest in narrative tarnishes his work in any way -- it's not what I want from him. But I guess I might be missing something as a result?

*When I say "disinterest in narrative", I mean lettered narrative (dialogue, plot) as opposed to storytelling with images, or ideas

In rough chronological order:

*My mom's old stash of Gold Key and Harvey comics when we spent the week at grandma's house. Little Dot. Baby Huey. Sad Sack. Casper. A handful of generic army adventure comics that were probably my uncle's.
*Stacks of comics influenced by my toy habits: G.I. Joe, Transformers, Sectaurs, Starriors
*Slightly older family friend (a teenager when I was still in elementary school) would occasionally gift me comics: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #2, X-Men #209, X-Men Annual #13. Let me read an issue of The Tick once. I obsessed pretty hard over these individual comics, re-reading them, but never buying other issues to learn more of the story. As an adult in my 30s, I finally bought a trade paperback that included X-Men #209. Reading the whole thing was a bit of a let-down. I mean, the run was fine, but it didn't recapture the magic of reading this lone issue of a comic full of references and storylines that I didn't understand. Following that, I made a point for about a year to just grab random comics off the shelf at my LCS, to try to relive the mystery, but I couldn't really make that trick work twice.
*My dad's younger brother had a stack of kung fu magazines in his old room at my other grandparents' house. One of the titles had Iron Fist serialized in the back. I was obsessed with this story, and on the way back home bought a handful of used Power Man and Iron Fist comics from a spinner rack in O'Hare.

After that, I wasn't into comics for a long time.

are there good Kirby-penned "stories" I'm missing out on?

All of the 60s Marvel Comics have Kirby-penned stories - Stan Lee worked 'Marvel Method' for his entire career. Apart from a hotly disputed outline for FF 1, conveniently found in a drawer years after the fact, there is no physical evidence anywhere of Lee typing out a plot and giving it to an artist. And by all accounts, even from company loyalists like John Romita Sir, his verbal plotting sessions with artists amounted to little more than 'let's bring back Doctor Doom this month'.

Of course, Lee did have some influence over Kirby's writing - he would sometimes reject pages, write dialogue that contradicted Kirby's story notes and dialogue suggestions, and push for greater continuity between titles (something Kirby wasn't really interested in).

But if we're talking 70s DC/Marvel Comics plotted, dialogued and drawn by Kirby then I think you have to accept that his storytelling style changed - a bit like Lennon and McCartney's songwriting changed in the 70s once they were free of each other, and free of the expectations as to what a Beatles song could or couldn't be. And reading things like Kamandi now, I'm struck by how 'straightforward' Kirby's dialogue actually is - it's just not Stan Lee snappy patter dialogue (and not going to lie, I LOVED that style when I was a kid).

I loved Power Man as a kid. I got the second issue of Luke Cage, Hero for Hire in one of those comics three-packs where you could usually tell only what the top one was. There were often good surprises tucked away in those. As a seven year old, I had no idea what "blaxploitation" was; I just thought his costume was cool af, and the fact that bullets bounced off of him but left bruises felt somehow more "real."

My first ever exposure to X-Men was randomly buying Uncanny #273 off the spinner rack. It was the issue immediately following X-Tinction Agenda and featured all of the characters from all of the X-teams hanging out in the mansion and it had like eight different pencilers (double checks...no it had exactly eight different pencilers) and I had zero idea of what was happening or who anyone was but I was super intrigued. So I bought the next issue to try and learn more, and I was treated to a completely unrelated and equally baffling story about Magneto and Rogue and Nick Fury hanging out in the Savage Land. And then I couldn't find the next couple of issues but when I finally tracked down 277, the X-Men were suddenly in space and I just figured that this ADD shit was what comics were all about and leaned into it.

I genuinely love everything about Kirby's Fourth World at its peak, most definitely including the dialogue. Dude was accessing a different dimension.

Agreed. Even the Black Racer had some kind of weird appeal.

I think my favourite find in a comic bin was Farmer Fiend's Horror Harvest by Glenn Chadbourne. Rarely ever get those "what the fuck is this?!" moments in a comic shop but that was one of them. I've been out of the loop for years so maybe more surprises are coming.