|
Post by pinkfloydsound17 on Jan 17, 2022 10:47:24 GMT -5
I would say I was a reader/collector from the moment I stepped into a comic shop around 8-9 years old. I starting getting into grading and condition and really caring for the books when I was 12 or so and have ever since.
|
|
|
Post by tarkintino on Jan 17, 2022 11:19:43 GMT -5
It would appear there's no set "golden" age for comic collectors; there's too many very individualized external influences on why or how one read/collected/were most interested in comics to say there's a fixed period for that golden age.
|
|
|
Post by berkley on Jan 17, 2022 22:14:34 GMT -5
It would appear there's no set "golden" age for comic collectors; there's too many very individualized external influences on why or how one read/collected/were most interested in comics to say there's a fixed period for that golden age. I would say that everything from early childhood up to around the age of 12 has a special attraction or interest for most individuals - but that doesn't mean that all their favourite stuff comes from that time.
|
|
Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,051
|
Post by Confessor on Jan 18, 2022 5:21:39 GMT -5
It would appear there's no set "golden" age for comic collectors; there's too many very individualized external influences on why or how one read/collected/were most interested in comics to say there's a fixed period for that golden age. I would say that everything from early childhood up to around the age of 12 has a special attraction or interest for most individuals - but that doesn't mean that all their favourite stuff comes from that time. Yeah, I don't think the "Golden Age of everything is 12" thing is meant to be taken absolutely literally. It's just a shorthand expression about the affection that most people feel for pop culture content that they first encountered during their childhood.
|
|
|
Post by commond on Jan 18, 2022 7:18:05 GMT -5
Discovering comics at that age is hard to top. I remember trying out different titles, piecing together facts and info about the characters, searching out back issues with limited funds, making misguided purchases. The things that made it exciting were the scarcity of the books, a lack of general knowledge about comics, and limited disposable income. As soon as I started visiting my local comic book store regularly, and started following the trade publications, it was never quite the same. There were other milestones, like getting into mature titles, but I can still remember the way 1989 books looked on the shelves and spinner ranks. If I were able to go back in time, I'm sure I'd think it wasn't all it was cracked up to be (New Zealand was a village in 1989), but it's all disappeared now -- the stationary shops, the bookstores, secondhand book stores, the lot of it. Nowadays, we have everything at the tip of our fingers. We have access to things that were beyond my wildest imagination growing up. I probably take a lot of that for granted, but man was it exciting growing up having to take a bus somewhere just to see if there were any new back issues in the secondhand bookstores I frequented, or in my case, taking a ferry to visit the comic book stores. Not sure I'd want to be 12 again outside of that. though.
|
|
|
Post by Rob Allen on Jan 20, 2022 13:10:26 GMT -5
My golden age was a little later, 14 or 15. I'd been reading comics since I wad 7 or 8, but around '72 or '73, I discovered Led Daniels' book, leading to EC and it went from there. I became obsessed w EC, undergrounds, fanzines, Warrens--pretty much everything besides color superhero comics. Attended my first NYC con in July '74. I was at that con! I went to most of the big NY cons from '73 to '78 - the Seuling July 4th cons, the Creation cons, the Marvel cons. As it happens I wasn't following comics when I was 12: I had been a fan earlier and came back to them a year or two afterwards, but when I was 12 I was in the middle of a 3 or 4 year hiatus - it's hard to pin down the exact numbers. I think there are a few other regulars here - Rob Allen? - who went through a similar stage as young readers. Yes, I had a hiatus of almost 2 years. Ironically, it started when I was 12. I started reading comics at age 6; by age 9 I'd focused on Marvel exclusively. At that point I would have said that I wasn't a comics fan, I was a Marvel fan. I turned 12 in December 1968, in the middle of seventh grade. Looking back now, I'm pretty sure that I was spiraling down into a depression that would last several years. I kept buying my Marvels until that summer. Then I think my attention went to following my beloved New York Mets on their way to their first World Series. After ignoring comics for a year or more, I started re-reading my whole collection. That's when I realized that I could recognize artists' styles. I turned 14 in December 1970, and two months later my brother bought a few comics. That got me started again. I stayed a Marvel zombie thru 1971. In '72, at age 15, I finally bought a few DCs - at first, only the Kirby and ERB books. But I was totally enthralled by the Marvel comics of 1971-73. That was my golden age. I was coming out of my depression but there were a few times when the best reason I could think of to continue living was to see the new Marvels that would come out next week. In 1973 I was buying all of the Marvel and DC hero books, and started picking up Charltons because I recognized Ditko's art. I went to my first con in the summer of '73 and learned about all sorts of new things. For the next few years, my #1 focus at cons was to fill in that 2-year gap. That's also when I started buying Warren, Skywald and National Lampoon, and going to head shops to buy undergrounds even though I didn't smoke any pot until '75. I read a lot of good comics then, but when I look thru those years at Mike's Newsstand, it's the Marvels from '71 to '73 that I remember with the most intensity.
|
|
|
Post by Marv-El on Jan 20, 2022 15:43:20 GMT -5
I recall reading comics at an early age, probably around 6 or so but it was sporadic, an issue here, an issue there, probably a result of seeing them where ever my mom would be shopping that particular day and offering to buy one for me.
It wasn't until I was 10-11 (which was '82-'83) that I really started buying/reading/following comics. I had started receiving an allowance from my parents, a local convenience store started carrying a couple spinner racks worth of comics and I had discovered a used book store that also carried comics in nearby shopping mall that Mom loved to go shop. It was nigh heaven, bookcases full of used books of every genre one could imagine, racks of current comics (both Big Two and burgeoning indie market) along with a couple tables worth of back issues for dirt cheap prices.
At the beginning, it was all Marvel, scanning over the checklist in every monthly issue to see what was coming out and making the effort to follow monthly titles. DC was still sporadic though, maybe a Batman comic here, a Superman comic there. It wasn't until around '84 I think before I gave the same emphasis on following titles to DC that I had been giving to Marvel. The Judas Contract, the Trial of the Flash and of course, COiE helped immensely in that regard.
|
|