Grownups I know who collected baseball cards as kids can usually tell tale after woeful tale of cards of baseball legends they would have neatly boxed up and stowed away even today were it not for little brothers who wouldn’t leave them alone or the Moms who went on cleaning frenzies and transformed comfortable—if messy—bedrooms into spotless, card-less antiseptic areas. These are bittersweet “what if?” memories. Similar tragic memories haunt those of us who were comic book collectors.
Just like ball card collectors, in our memories, each of us comic collectors had rare Supermans or first editions Spidermans lying around our rooms, and now these rare gems are gone. “What possible joy could be had,” I used to ask myself, “by turning a pristine copy of The Incredible Hulk No. 1 into a ripped, wrinkled and unreadable mess?” But even as I asked it, I knew the answer: it is a brother’s birthright and duty to annoy his siblings until he get a rise out of them. Now, I will admit that desire to annoy worked both ways.
My childhood friend Doug and I spent countless kid hours slouched in chairs or sprawled on floors as we followed the sagas of our favorite heroes. We were on the same page, so to speak, when it came to the true literature that was the comic book. He was not only my good friend, the grandson of our next-door neighbor, but his mother worked at a drugstore. This was fortuitous because she regularly brought home stacks of previous month’s comics. It was at his house where I first discovered Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men.
I read comic books cover to cover.
Literally.
One of my favorite parts was the inside back cover which had fun stuff a kid could order by mail. Mom could barely squeeze out a dime for a comic book so actually ordering anything on the back page was out of the question for me. Considering the menagerie of brothers — and one sister — whom she needed to feed and clothe, I accepted that I wasn’t going to be ordering much, but that didn’t stop me from longing for the cool things the Back Page had to offer.
X-Ray Glasses, for example. A pair of these would be the perfect tool for any adolescent boy. Even after I saw the Ray Milland movie “The Man With the X-Ray Eyes” and realized there might be serious downsides to having the power of X-Ray vision, I thought I might be able to handle it. A related device was a mysterious “Hypno-Coin” which was a flat disc with swirling lines that would “hypnotize” anyone who looked at it.
Chewing gum loomed large on the Back Page. You could order a pack of “chewing gum” that, when the unsuspecting victim tried to pull a stick out, a spring-loaded wire would snap his fingers. Playground hilarity would then ensue. Or you could offer a kid joke gum that would make his teeth turn black. And using essentially the same prank, you could urge a friend to look through a tube which would leave him with a “black eye.” Classic “Whoopie Cushions” and “Atomic Joy Buzzers” were available to order. The comic book’s Back Page was a treasure chest filled with sixth-grade comedy gold.
Of course, my memories are of the shenanigans of my young adolescent peers, who were all males. Girls seemed to be off in another world on the playground. They were not, as far as I knew, trying to trick each other with snapping gum or joy buzzers. They certainly were not hanging around us rambunctious, goofy boys. Each group was just beginning, tentatively trying to learn the quirks and peculiarities of the mysterious Other. It has been a long learning curve, to be sure.
Thinking back, this might explain the playground fascination with X-Ray Specs.
Norman Knight, a retired Clark-Pleasant Middle School teacher, writes this weekly column for the Daily Journal. Send comments to [email protected].
