I first discovered comics with a Superboy issue found on a Chicago bus.
Amazing Spider-Man #7 was the first Marvel to really hit me. It was issue #9 that started me collecting.
Back in the day, issue numbers were meaningless. Stories had little or no continuity, and each issue could be read as you found it.
ASM #7 is supposedly the issue where co-creator Steve Ditko began to plot the stories (he’s credited with #10). The plot was great and more involved than most the comics I’d read until then and Stan Lee’s dialogue was engaging and funny (Spider-man telling JJ Jameson to go slide down a barbed wire fence was a comment every kid could savor, and save).
The next issue I came across was #9. And even though Electro had his debut as a villain, I was shocked for other reasons. Issue #7 had introduced me to Flash Thompson, the loud-mouth bully, so familiar to most schools.In #9, however, he briefly has second thoughts about Peter Parker, referring to the fight they had. A footnote said that it had occured in issue #8.
I remember looking through my stacks of comics more than once, hoping, SOMEHOW, that I’d bought the issue and had forgotten to read it. Shortly after I bought issue #10 off a schoolmate (for a QUARTER! He thought I was crazy). And shorty after that, at a small grocery store on Fullerton Avenue, I found, in a rack of used comics up on the wall, issues #6 AND #8! For a nickel each!
They fight was different than I thought, but thoroughly satisfying. Now the issue numbers meant something to me, and I began the long ascent, or descent, into collecting.
My First Comic by Earl G.
