And it's old and I've had it a long time. I started collecting comics when I was about seven or eight. My mom was the one who first bought comics for my sister and I. When I was really small, about five or so, we had a bottom drawer in the kitchen for comic books. Whenever my sister and I would show interest in some comic at the grocery or drug store, my mom would buy it and it would go in that drawer. Looking back I can remember some of the ones we had from that long ago time...the first issue of the Fantastic Four (how we happened to get that one, I'll never know); several Classics Illustrated comics ("King Thrushbeard," "The Elf Mound," "The Little Mermaid," "Thumbelina"), and several Harvey comics ("Spooky," "Hot Stuff," "Little Lotta"). They were in various stages of dress and undress--meaning some were missing covers, pages, etc. They were pawed through and read and loved.
However, I really didn't become attached to comics until my sister started reading Archie. The first one she got was printed in about 1965, and was drawn by Harry Lucey. It contained this really great story called "A is for Archie." It went through the alphabet with the characters and described them. I still remember the picture showing how Archie was literally hanging on to the little finger of Veronica Lodge (he was described as being "wrapped around her little finger"). A couple of years later--about 1967--I got old enough to want my own copies of the comics, and my mom started buying one apiece of Betty & Veronica. Unlike my sister, I also wanted to read Millie the Model, and started collecting that. She concentrated on buying issues of Scooter, which she let me read.
For several years, my mom continued to buy two sets of Betty & Veronica comics--one for my sister, one for me. She would also buy any other comics we were interested in. However, about 1972--the point my sister entered high school--she quit collecting comics (she was fifteen). I however, didn't get the message, and have continued to collect them to this day. I branched out in my teens into super-hero titles (which I left behind in the late eighties) and started buying manga in the late nineties.
All those comics over all those years adds up to a rather largish collection. And recently I got the idea that maybe I might write a blog about them, since others might be interested to hear about the rich history of girl's comics. Now, I'm not going to go into intimite details about them--others have done all that heavy lifting. What I'm going to do is share comics from my collection and relate my thoughts and memories about them. I'm not interested in doing political commentary about them (from a "feminist" perspective or otherwise) and I'm not interested in doing a complete history. I just want other people to be aware that outside of all those big muscle-bound boys out there in Comicbookland, there was and is a world of stories about fashions, dates, friends, rivalries and romance. And it makes for some really fun reading.
