Scenes from the Life of an Amateur Comic Book Collector (15)--Nearly the Last Exit in Brooklyn

The comic collecting bug is biting me pretty bad. This weekend, I went to a desolate neighborhood in Brooklyn for a warehouse sale advertised by a flyer I found at the last comic show. It was a beautiful sunny day and I ventured down to 36th and Fourth Ave. under the BQE. I wish I could say it was worth it, but all they had was lots of Bronze Age stuff (mid-70s-80s), hardly any Silver. There was an Inferior Five I would have bought, but they wanted $10. It wasn't even bagged or boarded. I did find a box of $2 comics and bought four Four Star Spectaculars. This was a reprint series from 1976 which included four stories from the 1950s. This way I found lots of stories from the Silver Age, mostly Superboys, but also some Wonder Womans, Green Arrows, and an obscure cowboy hero called the Vigilante.

One highlight was a center spread advertising the CBS Saturday morning line-up for 1976. At that point I was a junior in high school and didn't watch as much Sat. morning TV. Interestingly, there were more live action shows at this point like Shazam and Isis. The best cartoons then were the Bugs Bunny reruns. This layout made me think of that annoying child actress Pamelyn Ferdin who played Felix Ungar's daughter on the Odd Couple. She also did the voice of Lucy on several Peanuts cartoons. She had been on one of these live-action Saturday morning shows (Space Academy) and I hated her. Maybe because she was working all the time, but there was something about her that just drove me nuts. But I digress.

I had a Off-Broadway matinee that afternoon, so I left after about an hour with my four-star spectaculars. I read them while eating as chicken sandwich at Burger King on Fourth Ave. In a Superboy story, the Boy of Steel is menaced by space pirates whose costumes contain a special explosive material. If Superboy attacks them, they will blow up Smallville and themselves. Whaddya know, suicide bombers in 1960s comics.

After the matinee--and sighting Andrea Martin on the street at Union Square--I resolved to go to Time Machine and get more comics since the trip to Brooklyn was so unsatisfactory. At Time Machine I found what I thought was a Superboy 88, but upon examination, I discovered someone had taped the cover over an Adventure 276 from 1960. Roger wasn't there but the guy who works with him threw the bizarro comic in for free when I bought another Superboy, three Flashes and two Green Lanterns for only $25. He called this bogus comic a Frankenstein Superboy.

Four Star Spectacular 1, 3, 5,6
Flash 176, 180, 184
Green Lantern 27, 37
Superboy 115

Scenes from an Amatuer Comic Collector's Life (5)

Last Saturday I went back to Time Machine and bought two Jack Kirby Thors (141 and 143), a Batman 80 page Giant (no. 203) , a Superboy 80 page giant (No. 10) and a Magnus Robot Fighter. I remember buying that Batman when I was 9. Batman was on TV with Adam West and this comic was a collection of Secrets of the Batcave. The cover is a spectacular Neal Adams with Batman going over blueprints of the Batcave with Robin.

The Superboy had an interesting exchange between the Boy of Steel and a youth from Titan, a moon of Saturn. Kral, the Titanian kid is about to kill some crooks with his heat vision. Superboy intercedes and says, "No, Kral! Stop! On Earth we give all criminals a fair trial. Men become criminals because they're mentally sick! The job of our prison doctors is to try to help them become good citizens." All of sudden Superboy is a psychologist. In another weird story, Superboy splits into two beings--himself and Clark Kent. To disguise himself, Superboy poses as the son of a Native American. The gentleman says, "Me say you are my son, Flying Spirit. Me got so many kids nobody know the difference." How offensive! The Smallville census taker wouldn't even notice a teenager suddenly showing up? Well, it's another Native American, he would probably think. And so Superboy goes to school in "Indian" dress complete with bow and arrow. "It's part of our tribal law," the thought balloon says. (The cover at left has nothing to do with the comic I bought, but it is so cool!)