Wednesday, June 12, 2013

My Reading Pile: August, 1979

I'm returning to these posts about what I read during any given month at various junctures in my life. This time around, I am looking at comics that would have been on spinner racks in August, 1979. I would have been two months shy of my 7th birthday. Again, I must give kudos to the Amazing Mike and his Newsstand: http://www.dcindexes.com/features/timemachine.php?site=

I have always loved Mysterio and I have to think it has to do with the fact that I read so many great Mysterio comics as a kid. He was also featured in the 60s cartoon, which was in heavy rerun rotation in Toronto at the time. Amazing Spider-Man #198 still holds up today, with a ton of good background on the 2nd Mysterio and very solid work by the Buscema/Mooney team. Great cover, great book.

As I have likely mentioned a million times on here, Justice League of America was one of my 'go to' books for years. From the house ads I'd seen, this storyline seemed to be so earth shattering. In reality, the outcome in Justice League of America #172 did not blow my mind. The question I was asking wasn't really 'Who Killed Mr. Terrific?' but rather 'Who the heck is Mr. Terrific?'. In the end, the story didn't have much punch, but I'm still a sucker for JLA/JSA crossovers.

 
UFO & Outer Space #23 would have been at the top of my reading pile that month, as I absolutely loved that series. The covers were usually fantastic and the stories was all very intriguing and sent a shiver up my spine. The Reader's Reports were such an innocent and charming way of presenting these stories. I'd like to find out where the stories came from. Actual letters? Tabloid mags? Or just made up by the writers? I still feel very nostalgic about the old Gold Key gems.

Must like the JLA, I could not live without the Avengers as a kid. Avengers #189 features one of those super dramatic covers that I loved so much, the cover to #181 being an all-time favourite. Who is in? Who is out? I loved that stuff. I also loved the Hawkeye being mad at the Falcon angle that played out over the entire year. This one is almost a Haweye solo book, and that's just fine by me.

Cool books I totally missed the boat on that month include Daredevil #161 and Iron Man #128. Oops.

3 comments:

B McMolo said...

Comics I read during this period are as close as I can physically get to time travel. Seeing the Gold Key logo alone brings me a whiff of being 6 or 7 like nothing else.

I was almost exactly a year/ 12 issues down the road from your selections here, but (with the exception of UFO and Outer Space, which I'd never heard of, alas) on the exact same titles.

Four-Color Kid said...

I was about midway into my high school years by that time, and had recently came back to comic book reading/collecting (like many misguided moms, mine had thrown out my first stack of comics to the trash a few years before...).

Since I was a 'serious' (hem!) teenager and not a 'kid' anymore, I wasn't quite ready to get back into the superhero business just yet. So most of my reading was more science-fiction:

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA # 9 (back when Starbuck was a dude and not a lass or a coffee shop!)

STAR WARS # 29 (I was a huge fan of the first movie, but was getting tired of Infantino's art on this series and would drop the title pretty soon.)

MICRONAUTS # 11 (Just too old to play with the toys, but my younger brother had a couple of them. Still, I couldn't see much resemblance with Mantlo's cool series. I was so enjoying Michael Golden's art! I didn't know then that he would soon drop out of the interior art.)

SHOGUN WARRIORS # 10 (There was a a very popular french translation of giant robot Mazinger called 'Goldorak' on TV which I really liked.)

MAN-THING # 1 (He had just guest-appeared a few months earlier in Micronauts, and I just thought he looked so cool!)

I was pretty much a Marvel Zombie back then and would soon jump back into superheroes when a friend of mine would point me into Byrne's FF, Miller's DD, and Simonson's Thor. SO I too missed out on Miller's early work on DD, and Stern/Byrne's all too short Captain America run.

Scott M said...

I find it almost more interesting to see what I missed at the time!

Good stuff.