Joe Petchik wrote me to inquire…
I've seen you joke that you started reading comic books right out of the womb and that when the doctor spanked you, you dropped a copy of Mickey Mouse. But really, do you remember your first comic book? And when you began working in comics, did you work with any of the people who'd worked on that comic?
No to remembering my first but it was probably a Dell and it probably featured some cartoon character I already knew from TV. Might have been a Disney, might have been a Warner Brothers. I remember as a kid buying (or having my parents buy me) every comic book I saw with Hanna-Barbera characters or Jay Ward characters but I'm sure I was reading comics before 1957 when Ruff & Reddy (the first H-B show) debuted. The first Jay Ward show was Rocky and His Friends in 1959.
At one point, my folks gave me the money to send away for a year's subscription to the Dell Comic of my choosing, which cost an entire buck for twelve issues. I sent off the coupon for Looney Tunes and for some reason, they proceeded to send me the next dozen issues of Tom & Jerry. The error, which I guess is what it was, didn't bother me that much because I collected that comic, too. What did bother me was that subscription copies came folded.
When I began writing for Western Publishing on their Gold Key Comics in 1971 and later in the seventies when I ran the Hanna-Barbera comic book department, I worked with lots of people who'd produced Dell Comics in the fifties. That list would include Pete Alvarado, Karran "Kay" Wright, Dan Spiegle, Tom McKimson, Phil DeLara, Tony Strobl, Don R. Christensen, Del Connell, John Carey and Chase Craig.
I also became good friends for a time (and collaborated) with Alex Toth, and I know I read some of the Zorro comics he did under the Dell logo in the late fifties. (If you are baffled, as so many are, about the relationship between Dell Comics and Gold Key Comics, perhaps my greatest contribution to comic book fandom is to have explained it here.)
However, I can identify the first super-hero comic book I read. It was Action Comics #250, cover-dated March of 1959 although the copy I first read did not have a cover on it. It appeared on newsstands in January of '59 but I didn't buy or read the comic then. A year or so later, there was a charity-type bazaar at Westwood Elementary School, the place where you could then find me most weekdays. There were games and a big bake sale and in one room, an array of stuff for sale that looked not unlike a swap meet. There, I found for sale, bundles of comic books missing all or a third of their covers.
Comic book fans of my age or older will know what this was. They sold comic books in those days on newsstands which took them on a returnable basis. A newsstand got, say, twenty copies of the new World's Finest Comics and put them out for sale. At any point, though usually when the next issue of World's Finest came in, the newsstand could send back the unsold copies — including any that got damaged by kids pawing through the racks — for full credit. They only paid for what they sold.
The returns went back to the regional distributor. In a few cities, those distributors would yank out the damaged books and ship the still-sellable ones overseas to certain distributors there to sell. In all cities, books that would remain officially unsold would be made unsellable by having crews — and this was done mainly by hand — tear the covers off the comics. In some cases, they'd just tear off the top third of the cover containing the title logo and issue number. The covers or partial covers would go to the national distributor to prove the books were not sold; ergo, the distributor didn't have to pay for them either.
The remainder of each comic was supposed to be pulped but in truth, a lot of them were sold unscrupulously through various outlets either coverless or with the partial covers. Some newsstands and second-hand bookstores had them. People sold them at swap meets. In San Diego, there was a used book shop where at any given time, you could go in and select from thousands of recent coverless comics for a nickel each or 25 for a dollar. And in various shops that were not unlike today's Dollar Tree or 99-Cents-Only shops, you could buy bundles of these comics — sealed in plastic bags or tied-up with twine — for similar cut rates.
The problem with those bundles of course is that you could usually only see the top comic in each bundle and you didn't know what else you were purchasing. If you bought ten bundles, you might get them home and find out that they all had the exact same books with a different one in first position. Or you might get a bundle with a lot of comics that you already had or didn't want to read no matter how cheap they were.
That day at the Westwood Elementary School Bazaar, I bought one bundle because it had a Woody Woodpecker comic or a Daffy Duck or something like that showing. And that's how I got my first super-hero comic book — that Action Comics #250.
I knew Superman from the George Reeves TV show and also from the old Paramount cartoons on local TV. I liked Superman and I can't really tell you why I hadn't bought his comic books before then. But I read that comic, liked it and soon was buying super-hero comics to the point of crowding out the "funny" comics that had previously made up my collection.
I even went to the extreme of hauling my boxes of Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck to a local second-hand bookstore where you could trade them in on a two-for-one deal. For every 100 Disney comics, I could take home 50 Batman or Superman books. I even found a copy of Action Comics #250 with a cover. Many years later, I would start buying replacement copies of the books I'd traded-in.
In the meantime, I bought super-hero comics from the used book stores and new ones off the comic book rack. I'm fairly sure the first one I bought new was Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #45 with a cover date of June 1960. It came out in April of that year.
So that Action #250 was my first. As for working with the folks who worked on it: Curt Swan drew the cover. I got to spend time with Curt and get to know him but several times when he was about to draw something I'd written, he got yanked away for another assignment so that never happened. The Superman story in that issue was written by Bill Finger (I met him briefly) and drawn by Wayne Boring (Never worked with him but we exchanged mail).
In the back of the comic was a story of Congorilla, written by Robert Bernstein and drawn by Howard Sherman, neither of whom I ever knew. There was also a Tommy Tomorrow story written by Otto Binder and drawn by Jim Mooney. I never met Otto but I'm proud that I got to know Jim Mooney and work with him on a few things. He was a terrific guy, a terrific artist and very, very prolific. Every so often when we were talking or having dinner together, I would say to myself, "This is the guy who drew that Tommy Tomorrow story you read when you were eight years old." It's still a little hard for me to accept that that was humanly possible.
