Origins of MARVEL COMICS

 

It is almost impossible to explain or convey the feeling of being pulled into an old memory from an unexpected discovery.

My daughter and I were exploring a new bookstore in our town and enjoying ourselves immensely.  It is beautifully decorated and arranged with cool little reading nooks interspersed throughout and some comfortable furniture situated under a large skylight in the middle of the store.  

I was lingering in the SciFi section as I have a sweet tooth for that sort of thing when I glanced down and realized they’d tucked the graphic novels under the SciFi section on the bottom few shelves.  I also have a sweet tooth for graphic novels and I’m always intrigued by those of an  artist’s interpretation of well known novels.  In this case I found Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” and flipped through some dark and colorless panels consistent with the book’s mood.

I little further down that row a book with a white spine standing out from the darker ones on either side of it caught my eye:  “Origins of Marvel Comics by Stan Lee”.  My first thought was it was the story of how Marvel Comics was founded and might give clues as to why Stan likes to say “Excelsior!”  So I pulled it off the shelf and when I saw the cover I let out an audible *gasp*.

This very book was the first one I ever bought some time in the mid-70’s at a Waldenbooks in the mall about 10 or so miles north of our tiny town in Southern Indiana.  This mall had an Aladdin’s Castle arcade with rows of stand-alone video games, a RadioShack with the latest in personal computers (I got a TRS-80 for Christmas from there), and a music store.  I loved all these places, but there was something about the bookstore that drew me in more fully and completely.  A video game storyline could only take you so far and was repetitive.  “Personal computers” at that time were very basic (the programming language was even called BASIC)  and had very little memory and limited functionality, but a book could take you on a far flung adventure that a small and inexperienced brain could hardly fathom.  This included comic books which were the prelude to novels and short stories.

I clearly remember holding “Origins of Marvel Comics” in my small hands and wondering at finding a book that reproduced the original comic books that introduced various new superheroes with their origin stories.  These were rare comics that might only be found at some used comic shop far from me in a bigger city and would cost a lot of money, even hundreds of dollars.  Each comic in this book was introduced by Stan Lee who provided interesting details at how they came to be.  I stood in a kind of daze looking at it, drinking in the images on the cover, and yearning for it like I’d never yearned for something before.

It wasn’t cheap and when I presented it to my mom for possible purchase I seem to recollect some kind of negotiations that included waiting for a time, doing some chores, and maybe returning at a later date if the terms were met.  I was terrified someone else might buy it in the meantime but I eventually acquired it and I treated it like a priceless relic.

And here it was in my hands again after an almost 50 year gap.  I found one of the employees in the front putting books on a shelf and shared the abbreviated story of last holding that book in my hands in a bookstore in the 70’s.  He smiled and said “Wow, that’s really cool!”  It was just something I needed to share in that moment as it seemed so oddly momentous.  I was a boy in a man’s body having almost forgotten that sense of wonder that time and cares can take away.

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