A Golden Age

It’s been said (by COMICS BUYER’S GUIDE editor Maggie Thompson, or maybe it was comic book writer Roy Thomas) that the golden age of comics is five. Meaning that no matter how comics historians might define the Golden Age of comic books (and the Silver and Bronze Ages), what really matters to the individual comic book reader is the time that they started reading comics. I was probably interested in comic books when I was five years old (this was the mid-1970s, and it seemed like comic books were everywhere then, but I particularly remember seeing them in grocery stores and convenience stores), but I didn’t actually read my first comic book till I was seven.

Revisiting the Marvel comic books of 1978

It’s been said (by Comics Buyer’s Guide editor Maggie Thompson, or maybe it was comic book writer Roy Thomas) that the golden age of comics is five. Meaning that no matter how comics historians might define the Golden Age of comic books (and the Silver and Bronze Ages), what really matters to the individual comic book reader is the time that they started reading comics. I was probably interested in comic books when I was five years old (this was the mid-1970s, and it seemed like comic books were everywhere then, but I particularly remember seeing them in grocery stores and convenience stores), but I didn’t actually read my first comic book till I was seven.

I wasn’t a great reader at that point. It took me hours to read that first comic book because I was still at the stage in my reading life where I had to sound out every word. (And I probably had to ask my poor parents to help me out with several words per page.) But having spent so much time with my first comic book, I remember it vividly 40-plus years later — it was the 180th issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, a story titled “Who Was That Goblin I Saw You With?” The DC superheroes (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and pals) were on TV every Saturday morning back then on the Super Friends. Super Friends was appointment television viewing for me, but I first saw Spider-Man on The Electric Company, a PBS educational show I watched every weekday afternoon. Spidey was on The Electric Company to encourage kids to read (this version of the character didn’t speak out loud — his words were all presented in on-screen comic dialogue balloons), but Marvel, the publisher of Spidey comic books, surely didn’t mind that seeing Spidey on TV probably encouraged a few kids to buy Spider-Man comic books.

That was certainly the case with me. One morning I asked my dad if he’d pick me up some comic books on his way home from work. He asked me which comic books, and I said “Spider-Man!” And that afternoon Dad brought me home Amazing Spider-Man no. 180. I think he also brought me home a Batman book and, possibly, a third comic. But this was a very long time ago — I don’t even remember if I bothered to read the other book (or books) he brought home that day. (Owning more books than they read is a thing that all book people do, right?)

I still love Spider-Man (and I am not alone — he’s a big movie star now), and I still love Spidey comic books, especially Spidey comic books from the late 1970s. Because that’s my golden age of comic books. I’ve been thinking lately about how, if I’d been enterprising enough to find a job that would hire a seven-year-old in the late 1970s, I could have read all of the Spidey books of the era plus most everything else that Marvel published at the time. These comic books were, after all, generally only 35 cents a piece (about $1.60 a piece in 2022 money). An hour or two of minimum wage work would earn you enough to buy a week’s worth of Marvel books.

They say you can’t go home again. But thanks to the internet (something we definitely did not have in 1978) and services like Marvel Unlimited and Comixology, you can read a whole lot of old comic books. So I decided it might be fun to go back to the month my first comic book hit newsstands (which according to the Fandom.com Marvel wiki is February 1978) and read all (or at least most) of the Marvel comic books of the era in the order of publication. And then I decided if I was going to read all of those comics, it might be fun to write a little about the experience.

Based on a quick survey of a few months in 1978, Marvel was publishing (in the United States) around 40 titles a month in those days. My first thought was to write a comic-book-a-day column (with due respect to Brian W. Collins’ iconic Horror-Movie-a-Day blog) about my Marvel Time Warp, covering a month of 1978 books in a month of columns. But I’d need to read (and write about) approximately 1.3 comic books per day to keep up a month-for-month pace, and I’m probably not going to be able to manage that. Because, if nothing else, I have a bunch of other nerdy hobbies that I like to spend time on.

And I’m also not sure how much I will have to say about some of these comic books. I expect for the first month or two I will have a good bit to say because a lot of these books and characters (at least the 1978 versions of these characters) are new to me. But after that, who knows? Which is fine! So far I’m having a lot of fun (and learning a lot of new things about the comic books of my youth), and I’ll keep on with the reading (and with the writing about the reading) as long as it is fun.

And if you’re reading my writing about my 1978 comic book reading, hopefully you’re getting some entertainment out of this little adventure, too!

In the tradition of many comic book stories of the 1970s, I’ll close out this premiere column with a tease to (hopefully) get you to come back for my second column…

Next time — To know her is to fear her… Spider-Woman!

Originally published on the Marvel Time Warp Substack on May 23, 2022