My First Comics: Marvel's Fireside Books

As I've gotten older, I've become a more selective collector. I'm more interested in gathering complete runs of certain books, whether its a nostalgia bug for a character I love (The Thing solo series) or an under-appreciated run that will likely never be collected into a colossal omnibus editions (like Gerard Jones' outstanding work on Green Lantern). One of my recent objectives is to amass a full set of Fireside's Marvel books.

Fireside was a Simon and Schuster brand that published Marvel collections in a format we'd recognize today as the trade paperback, before that ever became a term synonymous with a bound collection of comic books. The big seller for Fireside was How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, which is still in print, but it's the collections that I have the most nostalgic attachment to. Like the orange-spined Crestwood Monster books, the Fireside Marvels were the hottest things in the elementary school library for kids of a certain generation.

Paperback cover to The Incredible Hulk, art by Bob Larkin.

These books were always checked out, and if one was actually on the shelf -- didn't matter if you'd read it before -- you checked it out and read it again. The one I had memorized was The Incredible Hulk, and it was the first one that I purchased for myself as an adult (from a backwoods antique shop) that set me on the path to nabbing them all. Some of the books are assembled by theme (Origins of Marvel Comics, Bring on the Bad Guys, The Superhero Women) while the ones that centered on specific characters contained their origin issue and usually three or four stories that captured the essence of the characters, as curated by Stan Lee.

I'm assuming Lee curated them, as he gets sole cover credit as the writer on all of the Fireside books, whether he wrote all of the interior tales of not. There's no credited editor on the books, but the small bits of prose and historical context that separates the issues within the Fireside books certainly sounds like Stan Lee (and he does credit the respective creators within the interior pages). Because of the time in which they came out (late 70's, while the Marvel Superheroes were just over a decade old) and because Lee supposedly picked the stories, the Firesides provide a timely snapshot of what Lee felt defined these characters (most of which he had a hand in creating). You end up getting these superheroes in their purest forms, and the Fireside books remain one of the best ways to quickly learn about Marvel characters.

Most of the Firesides can be found for peanuts on Amazon and eBay, with the exception of Fireside's Silver Surfer -- the only book that tells a full-length original story and ended up being the final collaboration between Lee and Marvel cornerstone Jack Kirby. If you have kids in your life, interested in Marvel from the blockbuster films, the Firesides still can't be beat.

According to Wikipedia, the Fireside collections are as follows:

• Origins of Marvel Comics (1974)
• Son of Origins of Marvel Comics (1975)
• Bring On the Bad Guys (1976)
• The Superhero Women (1977)
• The Best of Spidey Super-Stories (1978)
• The Incredible Hulk (1978)
• Marvel's Greatest Superhero Battles (1978)
• The Amazing Spider-Man (1979)
• The Fantastic Four (1979)
• Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts (1979)
• Captain America, Sentinel of Liberty (1979)

Links to purchase through Amazon are provided above, and the books are pretty much all available in both paperback and hardback versions. Wiki doesn't list Mighty Marvel Team-Up Thrillers, a 1983 collection that looks just like a Fireside book (including the "By Stan Lee" cover credit), but without it here in front of me, I can't confirm that it's actually from this publisher.

My First Comics: The Whitman 3-Packs

Most of the time, I'll have very specific issues to discuss, but this entry is a little more free form, mostly because I have no idea which issues I had -- I just know the Whitman 3-packs were a huge part of my comic book upbringing. These were sold at pharmacies and grocery stores and such and contained three comics, usually based on familiar cartoons, but sometimes containing some of the Gold Key heroes, in a clear plastic bag. (I know I discovered Doctor Solar: Man of the Atom this way, and I also had my first exposure to horror comics, Grimm's Ghost Stories, which I couldn't give away fast enough. I was a real scaredy-cat as a child.) You could only see two of the comics in the 3-pack, and a savvy kid would try to squish the other two comics around in the bag to catch a glimpse of whatever title was sandwiched in the middle. These 3-packs were mainly purchased for me as a treat meant to last me through a couple of days of something, often weekend trips to my grandparents' house.

Example of the Whitman 3-Pack of comics.

I vastly preferred the comfort of characters I already knew and loved from television to the low-rent Solar, and the Whitman books I liked the most were Popeye the Sailor, Woody Woodpecker, and Road Runner. There's a particular Popeye issue that stands out to me, as it focused primarily on short order cook Rough House (I liked -- and still like -- stories that expound on underused supporting cast members), but I wouldn't even begin to know how to track that one down. I have no such lasting memories of Woody Woodpecker or Road Runner other than general warm fuzzies. Looking at them now, they all seem pretty disposable, apart from my nostalgia for them.

So why mention them here if I can't get specific? I snagged some of these 1960s Dell funny animal books at Dallas Comic-Con recently (content that ended up being reprinted by Whitman during my childhood) and was just caught up in a wave of nostalgia that saw me chasing down a couple issues of Whitman's Popeye the Sailor at a local Half Price Books. Until getting my hands on them again, I'd forgotten what a part of my earliest comic book reading they were, and how important the books were to my own drawing ability. I taught myself to draw duck bills and pants with belts from these trifling books. I'm still more comfortable drawing in the "funny animal" realm than the superhero one and I can clearly remember studying the panels with these characters in a way that their appearances on television did not allow.

Through reconnecting with these books, I also discovered that my inclusive comic book tastes are something that I've had my entire life. I like comics as a storytelling delivery format, and I'm down to try most anything. This openness had to have been created by having stiff-legged  DC stuff alongside kiddie Whitman stuff alongside action-packed Marvel stuff in my formative collection. It was just comics, as far as I was concerned. In my young eyes, it was all a treat.

My First Comics: 'Amazing Spider-Man' #124

A great piece on Screencrush, counting down the top 15 Spider-Man segments from Electric Company got me all nostalgic thinking about how that show was my first exposure to Spider-Man as a character. Some of the episodes have burned themselves into my brain (particularly the one with the Yeti...and the measles one...and the Dracula one...and the Mets wall one...heck, all of them), which is crazy as I haven't seen them in roughly 35 years.

My first Spider-Man comic was a book and record set from the 70's, based on Amazing Spider-Man #124. It's a combination radio-play/read-along abridged version of the story where J. Jonah Jameson finds out his son is Man-Wolf. I remember thinking it was kind of creepy as a tyke (I was a pretty timid kid when it came to monster stuff), but not nearly as frightening as the Man-Bat record that I had from the same company (and which I'll get around to in a later post). Though I had Spider-Man Underoos and Mego toys (the doll and the smaller action figures and vehicles), for some reason, I didn't really get into Spider-Man comics in any real way until the late 1980's. Maybe this record was too intense for me?

You can listen to the whole thing above in the embedded video.