What's the earliest comic book you can remember owning?

Joe Kubert, August 1974

Memory.  Unless you have eidetic memory, don't trust yours, especially when it comes to tracing formative events from your early childhood.  This week I started thinking back to the first comic I could remember owning and once I started doing a little digging both in my brain and online, I came to a conclusion that's shaken my understanding of myself as a lifelong comic book fan.

For years, I've had this persistent memory I learned to read from DC's Our Army at War #271, a book with art by the incomparable Russ Heath and a story by the inimitable Robert Kanigher. In the autobiographical film I constantly project in my mind, DC published it when I was three or four and there, on its pages, heretofore ignored ink marks inside the balloons coalesced into words, which formed into sentences and from there, the world of literacy opened to me.  Then I looked Our Army at War #271 up online and learned it has a cover date of August 1974, a mere month before I started first grade.  I was already six years old, and, according to family lore, I had already been reading for quite a while at that point.

So maybe Robert Kanigher didn't teach me mah letters, but I thought there was still a decent chance his story "Brittle Harvest," the book's Sgt. Rock-starring lead, truly was the first bit of fiction I read that didn't star a persistent weirdo with a fixation on oddly-colored breakfast foods.

But maybe it wasn't...



Jack Kirby/D. Bruce Berry, August 1974

Because I also owned Kamandi #20 and Strange Sports Stories #6.  I could have sworn both of those came out a year or two later.  This week, I discovered DC published them that very same August.  August 1974 was a good month for me as far as comics go.

How did I manage to obtain three comics when my income consisted entirely of spare change I found under the sofa cushions or dove for in the deep end of the local Elks' Club pool?  Gifts, maybe.  I can't imagine what fool would give me three comics at the same time.  One, yeah.  Two is stretching it.  Three invites rumors of decadence, of profligate spending on a scale unheard of in our little clan during the Ford administration days of energy crisis and Whip Inflation Now. 

Or else I somehow managed to collect enough pennies to buy them myself.  Yet, I have trouble imagining any scenario involving either of my parents allowing me such an extravagance.  Again, one comic, maybe two if I'd been especially well-behaved.  Three would be, in my mom's words when I bought a second aluminum baseball bat during my "athletic" period years later when I actually had a job and income of my own, "Ostentatious."  My parents, both products of hardscrabble Depression-era childhoods, instilled in me a financial caution I maintain even now that I'm as rich as the guy on the Monopoly game box.  Even with their permission, buying three comics at the same time back then would have given me the same guilty feelings I get now whenever I pick up a new Rolls or sports franchise.

Whether from false memories of learning to read or from inspiring a lifelong love of Jack Kirby's work, each of these comics has stuck with me in ways I've learned are as foggy and treacherous as some jagged coast in an old sea story.  I once again own both Our Army at War and Kamandi, so I've read them recently.  In this way I've corrected a number of misconceptions I carried for years about their stories.

A physical copy of Strange Sports Stories, on the other hand, remains elusive and, therefore, its contents a jumbled mishmash of mistaken impressions. 

The cover is easy to find online, though.  Let's take a look and see what recollections it inspires.  Wow!  It's by Nick Cardy!  What a treat!  I've really underestimated myself all these years.  Kid me really had good taste in cover artists.

Nick Cardy, August 1974

Let's look at the cover copy.  Interesting story titles.  I thought so at the time, but I may have been alone there, since this was actually the final book in the series.  Another one of those failed DC experiments.

"The Monster in Hole 18!" inspires a vision of someone being pulled through the hole into an alternate dimension, his body grotesquely thinned and stretched in the process, leaving his midsection resembling a great noodle.  At least during the transition.  I'm pretty sure he came out the other side in whatever state for him passes as normal. 

I may be conflating this with the events of "The Great Cross-Country Cloud Race," which I believe is about a couple of young guys seriously into boating who travel into another universe where people race through the skies in little sailboats made from solidified clouds.  Perhaps these guys were the ones who went through a physically distorting transportation process of some kind. 

The cover suggests the book contains just two stories.  So why do I feel so strongly there was a third?  One about a young guy who injures his arm in such a way he can throw baseballs at ridiculous velocity, gets signed by a major league team and pitches in a game against a New York Yankees-type powerhouse club before crashing his expensive sports car and losing his magical pitching ability when the doctor re-sets his arm.  The same accident injures his hip, and there's a little matter of drop-kicking a football...

Jerry Grandenetti/Creig Flessel, July 1973

Let me see what I can find out about this.  Hey!  It turns out there is such a story, but it isn't in Strange Sports Stories #6.  We find it instead in Champion Sports #1. 

And it isn't the New York Yankees he pitches against and wins.  It's the Oakland A's.

That brings back a whole lot of memories!  The A's of the early 1970s featured a potent line-up centered around a hard-slugging clean-up hitter by the name of Reggie Jackson, and a pitching rotation starring Vida Blue, Ken Holtzman and Catfish Hunter (Rollie Fingers was on the team, too), each of whom won 20 or more games in 1973.  They beat the New York Mets in the World Series that year. 

My family hated those guys and their evil mustaches because we were National League fans and my oldest brother, a catcher himself, idolized Johnny Bench.  This meant we were Cincinnati Reds boosters, and they lost in the Series to the A's the previous year.  It didn't matter that my uncle had caught for the A's when they were the Kansas City Athletics and personally knew and greatly respected Hunter.

So, in fact, the story is called "The Kid Who Beat the Oakland A's," and I've just learned it's written by the great Joe Simon, drawn by the nifty Jerry Grandenetti, with inks by Creig Flessel.

And you can read it in all its glory on Diversions of the Groovy Kind, a super-cool website that's one of my favorites.  The Groovy Agent must be one of those people with eidetic memory.  He knows it all, baby.  He took the comic's tag line to heart and joined the winning team!

The "kid" is David Wexler, a would-be writer and sports nut.  He ends up enjoying a brief career in the Major Leagues, not as stellar as Catfish Hunter's or Vida Blue's, but still something to be proud of, especially the climactic event, which is spoiled by the title.  The most telling detail, though, is the caption towards the end, when the kid's swelled head leads to his comeuppance:  "You may have read about that game... What you didn't hear about was the dumb, wild things I did off the diamond."  It's a single sentence Simon uses to introduce the off-the-field aspect of big time sports, and gives the story a gritty background verisimilitude to help put across its rather improbable premise.  Shades of Jim Bouton's Ball Four (1970) and the stuff the newspapers didn't print about Mickey Mantle.

Which reminds me!  I could tell you a rather funny story involving my dad, my uncles, Mantle and Joe Pepitone down at spring training in Florida.  Maybe one day I will, but for now let me just tell you my dad swore me to secrecy and I've already told you too much.

What about the other stories?  Well, "The Little Racer" is about a soapbox derby kid who gets run over by a one-percenter motorcycle gang who then help him rebuild his racer with stolen parts.  He ends up with quite a hotrod, but his innate honesty causes him to revert back to his green wooden crate for the final race, which he loses but fairly and squarely.  Then the cycle dudes stomp him good, the same way the Hell's Angels did Hunter S. Thompson when they learned they weren't getting any of the money from the book he wrote about them.  Okay, I made that last one up.  The story thing, not the Hunter S. Thompson thing, which really happened.  The comic may or may not have a happier ending.  But even though our theme today is how crappy my memory is, I feel confident about its other details.

On the other hand, "The Last Hurdle" brings absolutely nothing to mind.  I'm guessing it has to do with at least one hurdle.  Perhaps a final one of some kind.  Literal?  Symbolic?  Shambolic?

No, that's this blog.

This has been a day for shocking revelations, hasn't it?  Let's conclude this mess with two more.

First, in December of 1997, the FBI investigated the possible theft of the artwork from this very comic, along with hundreds or even thousands of other pages.  The entire sequence of events found near the bottom of the document makes for some interesting (if difficult due to formatting and spelling errors) reading.  My oh my!  The things you uncover when you take a memory trip.  I'm completely flabbergasted.

And second, the answer to that nagging question that provides this post's title.  Champion Sports #1.  Look at this:  it has cover date of November 1973, same year the A's won their second World Series.  Diversions of the Groovy Kind puts its actual release date as July, which means, depending on their own street dates, it hit the stands more than a year earlier than Our Army at War #271, Kamandi #20 or Strange Sports Stories #6.

Champion Sports #1.  I was five years old when I read it.  It's now the earliest comic I can remember owning!

Teen Titans #1 (February 1966): Nick Cardy makes a splash, Bob Haney makes a point

 

This is the colorful splash page to Teen Titans #1 (February 1966), drawn by Nick Cardy.  Written by the great Bob Haney, this first issue of Titans is essentially a positive, happy-go-lucky propaganda piece about the glories of the Peace Corps, which was a big deal for socially-conscious youngsters back in the early- to mid-1960s.

Officially established by John F. Kennedy with Executive Order 10924  in March 1961, the Peace Corps has been sending young Americans all over the globe to win hearts and minds by doing good works in developing nations ever since.  Back when the Titans made their collective bid for membership, the United States was still basking in the afterglow of having helped defeat fascism in the 1940s and taking leadership in facing down communism ever since.  World War II and the Cold War had frosted isolationism (except for a few backwards people living in mountain shacks and dank caves) in favor of internationalism, engagement on a global scale, and we Americans believed in solving humanity's problems and fostering democracy abroad by providing clean water and education.

In fact, we learn that almost every adult hero in the DC universe is some kind of Kennedy Democrat, a bunch of gaudily costumed but easily recognizable Eastern Establishment types of the kind hated and feared by Tricky Dick Nixon.  Or at least Rockefeller Republicans.  It's not enough that their young wards regularly risk their lives fighting crime.  It's joining their the Peace Corps that makes Batman, Flash, Aquaman and Wonder Woman beam with pride.  Not a single hero expresses anything but almost giddy enthusiasm for this Peace Corps thing.

We miss only Superman's reaction.  Why?  Because Superman is a god who needs no teen sidekick.  He's the father figure to all the other adult heroes, not a bunch of shirt-tail kids.  He's off trying to solve galactic entropy while they're fighting mutated fiddler crabs and giggling morons with chemical burns.  Superman does have his famous cousin, but Supergirl is probably digging canals, inoculating babies against tuberculosis and smallpox and teaching birth control and crop rotation on her own time.

Incredibly, even though he lives with Robin in palatial Wayne Manor, Batman has to learn of his ward's decision from a newspaper headline while he's scaling a drainpipe on a building in downtown Gotham City.  In the "dark of night."  Great night-vision this guy has after years of nocturnal crime-busting, hug?  The Caped Crusader may be on a case-- unless he practices urban mountaineering for fun-- but he still has time to turn, eyeball a handy newsstand through the gloom, make his discovery and loudly proclaim his joy to no one in particular.  I'm guessing he doesn't bother to buy the paper because the fabulously wealthy Bruce Wayne very wisely refuses to carry loose change in his Batman costume in case he gets into combat, kind of like Colonel "Bat" Guano in Stanley Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove.

The teen heroes let Wonder Girl choose their destination by sticking a pin in a map, which she does with an athletic flourish and characteristic joie de vivre.  So it's off to the Andes Mountains after a quick training montage to lend a helping hand to those in need.

And, as you can see from this splash page, the Teen Titans version of Peace Corps work doesn't differ all that much from the organization's directives; it's just a bit more aggressive.  They aid the needy using their personal expertise in punching, hitting and kicking things.  But that's not all they do.  They right historical wrongs, as well.  What else is toppling that giant conquistador but the defeat of  the lingering effects of European imperialism and a refutation of criticism America is merely engaging in a modified, cleaned-up twentieth century version?

In case you miss the point that America isn't like all those other old, abusive world powers, the ultimate villain turns out to be a greedy landowner run out of the village before the story even begins by the hard-working campesinos-- all your rapacious developing-world pirate capitalists out to thwart progress, one ruffle-collared bastard representing the kind of repressive guys who made communist revolutions in places like Cuba and Nicaragua necessary because the U.S. sided with them instead of doing what the Titans and the Peace Corps do here.  Of course, there's even one continuing in Peru to this day, but not for lack of Titans effort.

But this book isn't just politics.  After all, it would be a dull-ass comic with just Sargent Shriver making speeches to the Titans.  We readers demand some kind of giant menace for the kids to clamber all over (plus angry, attacking animals with human faces), and Haney knew how to deliver his patriotic, yet somewhat socialist, message in a colorful, action-packed way (like those sneaky vitamins in our chocolate-coated sugar-frosted rice puff cereals).

Looking back, it's obvious what this prescient story is telling us is the U.S. could have avoided a lot of grief in the coming decades if we'd only modeled ourselves after Wonder Girl, Robin, Kid Flash and Aqualad and taken on the real menace instead of merely replacing recalcitrant dictators with more compliant ones.  But there's none of that cynicism in this story.  Haney makes me wish I'd joined the Peace Corps back when I was a teen-aged superhero.