Comics

I wish I had kept all those comic books from my growing-up years!  

My earliest were issues of the pre- and during WWII era superheroes: Superman, Green Lantern, Hawkman, The Human Torch, The Flash, The Sandman, and all the rest of the bunch that made up the 'Justice Society of America' (I don't recall that Batman was ever inducted into the Society). All of those comic books of mine perished during the war, though many of the characters survived into the Fifties, and some are with us today and even more famous than they ever were.  

Other pre-war comic book heroes were the fish-faced Submariner, the space cowboys Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, Red Ryder, Smilin'Jack, The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, and a host of others.  During the forties, while the U.S. was at war, Captain America and Bucky came along to fight the good fight, as did the Blackhawks, a band of blue-uniformed airmen in special twin-engined planes with terrific firepower, and Terry and the Pirates, and Daredevil, and Airboy, who flew a special plane that flapped its wings.

All for ten cents an issue.

Each issue contained 64 pages, the last of which usually featured an ad for Charles Atlas' 'Dynamic Tension', a body-building method that turned ninety-eight-pound weaklings into he-men after having sand kicked in their faces by a beach bully.

I really liked Flash Gordon, especially when Alex Raymond started drawing the strip after the war.  The strip had a cast of unforgettable characters — the beautiful Dale, the bearded scientist and Flash Gordon's sidekick Dr. Zarkov, and of course the evil Emperor Ming of the planet Mongo, who had slinky Oriental temptresses in his palace always ready to seduce Flash away from the beautiful Dale.  (Some insidious racism here, but comics in those days were not drawn to be politically correct.)

Alex Raymond also drew the fabulous strip Rip Kirby, a special agent who was suave and smoked a pipe, and who battled evil communist spies and other evildoers.

After the war there appeared the whole Captain Marvel family of superheroes (kid-next-door Billy Batson was transformed into red-suited Captain Marvel by the simple expedient of uttering the magic word "Shazam!").  There was also Mary Marvel for the girls, and even an Uncle Marvel (if memory serves), and the evil Doctor Sivana, a skeletal bald guy with thick glasses who was continually hatching evil schemes in his lab.  

Also around that time came other superheroes with special skills.  Plastic Man could flatten himself as thin as a sheet of paper to slip through the bottoms of doors, or shape his flexible torso into telephone booths or trash cans, though colored red like his outfit, with black and white stripes around the midsection. All that transmogrification just to catch an unwary criminal.  Similarly, Spider Man could attach his web to buildings and swing himself across an urban landscape like a red-and-blue suited chimp to land on a bad guy.  And the gorgeous Wonder Woman could deflect bullets with her magic wristbands, or lasso a plane with a magic rope.  The plane she flew in was transparent, presumably made of some special kind of glass or plastic.

Another classy comic book character that I came to admire was The Spirit, drawn by the talented Will Eisner.  The Spirit was a masked crime-fighter in a rumpled blue suit, white shirt and red tie, who lived in an underground hideaway under a cemetery.  He had a lot of femme fatales to deal with, but it was the Police Commissioner Dolan's daughter Ellen who remained his true love.

I resumed my interest in comic books in the late-Forties, and had quite a collection by then.  The science fiction ones from the EC group, like Weird Science and Weird Fantasy, were followed by the horror ones from the same shop, like Tales from the Crypt. Added to them were the Crime Does Not Pay and Crime and Punishment comic books, which were gory enough for their time, though nothing as bad as some of the graphic novels of today.  And then to improve my mind, I also collected the Classic Comix, such as A Tale of Two Cities, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Corsican Brothers.

I wonder how much my old comic book collection would fetch today if I could put it out on auction on eBay.