Magic Moments

I began to collect comic books in 1970 when I was in junior high school. As told in previous postings to this blog, I had been buying them since before I knew how to read, but the idea that collecting comics might be a hobby like collecting stamps had never occurred to me before then.

To fully appreciate the story I am about the tell, you have to understand that in Iowa in 1970 many of the things a modern collector takes for granted did not exist. There were no comic book stores, so there was virtually no place to buy back issues. Comic books were purchased at supermarkets off those squeaky wire carousels. After a few weeks on the stands they were pulled by the magazine distributor and destroyed if they weren't sold. Furthermore distribution was very spotty. When I first started collecting I visited three to five different stores that sold comics on a weekly basis just to make sure that I got every issue of the ones I collected. There may have been comic conventions, another source for purchasing back issues today, but if there were, they weren't anywhere near Cedar Rapids, the city I lived in.

It is in this particular time and place that my story, my magic moment, takes place. I was checking out the newsstand at one of the grocery stores that sold comics. It was a small store called Jack and Jill, about a fifth of the size of a modern supermarket. It was so small and the aisles were so narrow, that they had miniature shopping carts for their customers. It was a place my parents shopped every Saturday as I was growing up because they had an old fashioned meat market where the butcher cut, weighed and packaged the meat for each customer to order. You wheeled your cart up, told him what kind of meat you wanted, pointed through the glass case at the piece you wanted and he cut it for you right then.

In any case, one day in particular in the early, early seventies, I was browsing the comics on the stand and I came across five comics that didn't belong. Comics at the time cost 20 or 25 cents, These comics were 12 cents. One was a Teen Titans comic, which I knew from the issue number was several years old. I picked them up, looked inside the front cover at the indicia a the bottom of page one. They were all from 1968! How in the world did four comics from 1968 arrive on a newsstand three years later? Had someone walked in with them, set them down and forgot them? Had they road around on some magazine distributor's truck for four years hidden in the back until he unknowingly pulled them out and put them on the stand with their contemporaries? Or maybe, just maybe, I was the beneficiary of an honest-to-god space-time anomaly that had deposited four and only four periodicals from the near past in the present. And maybe if I returned to this store frequently enough, I would be its beneficiary again! Maybe next time there might be comics from a few years in the FUTURE!

For several minutes I leafed through them, not certain what to do. If they were left by someone else, maybe that person would come back to get them. If I took them, I might be stealing them. What would the checkout clerk say when she rang them up and saw they were only 12 cents. But the price of comics was completely beneath the notice of adults. She'd never notice anything at all.

So, with my palms damp, I snagged them up with the two or three other books I planned to buy that day and took them to the checkout counter. As the clerk rang them up, I mentioned that they looked old. I mentioned the date inside the cover.

"Probably just a reprint," said the woman at the cash register.

Not likely, I knew. It's true that comics publishers published reprints, but they NEVER printed exact replicas with the original indicia and all the original ads!

So I paid my 48 cents for all four, plus sales tax and walked out, my feet just an inch or so from making contact with the ground, excited at the small mysteries of my world, hopeful that they might somehow continue, but pretty certain that nothing that impossible would ever happen to me again in all my years of comic collecting.

And you know what?

Nothing nearly as magic as that ever happened to me again.