Comic Book Collecting and a puzzle for you

 

Haven’t had time to post lately. I spend more time on my facebook page (click on link to go to my facebook) than here. But I want to make longer posts - and this blog is a great place to do it.

I’ve been a long-time comic book collector. From the time I was a little kid, I loved comic books. I started out with the usual kiddie stuff: Richie Rich, Little Dot, Little Audrey, that sort of stuff. And I read the comic strips in the newspapers. As my reading skills progressed I started reading comic strips of Brenda Starr, Superman, and others. 

I had already been watching Superman on TV - The Adventures of Superman with George Reeves, so naturally, I began to read his adventures in the comic books.
Time frame here: 1959-1960, and I was 8 years old, and began spending my allowance on comic books. 

As time went on, I bought Superman in comic books titled ‘Action’ and ‘Adventure.’ Those books introduced me to Supergirl, Lois Lane, Superboy, and The Legion of Superheroes. 

As I entered my teens, I continued buying and reading comic books, along with other books. Science fiction and fantasy was my ‘go-to’ genre, although I read other genres. 

I continued buying and collecting comic books up until the late 1970’s - I had to stop because they were getting too expensive, and my collection was getting too much. I did continue buying some comic books during the early 80’s - but those were ones that were outstanding in a certain way to me. 

Lately, I’ve been purging things. And my comic book collection has been one of my targets. I’ve bought CDs that contain scans of the comic books that I have been collecting all these years. Some books I’ve been scanning myself. A tedious process, made easier by me listening to some music while scanning.

My comic book collection isn’t really worth anything. They were bought to be read and re-read. I never bought them to re-sell later at a profit, nor did I ever store them in fancy protective covers. Some were placed in specially sized plastic bags, and they and the ones that were not in bags, were stored in plain cardboard boxes, or plastic storage boxes. My comic books are old friends, not commodities. And they ain't worth anything - beat up, yellowed pages, ripped or missing covers. 

A few years ago, I put together about 4 boxes of comic books and comic magazines that I had on CD or scanned onto an external hard drive, and gave them to a cousin of mine. I also gave him my collection of Starlog magazine (a science fiction genre magazine). 

I still got lots of comic books to digitize and save. Last night I worked on an anthology series DC comics put out in the 70’s called ‘The Superman Family.’ They stopped publishing individual books of Lois Lane, Supergirl and Jimmy Olsen. And what they did was put out one ‘giant’ book (100 pages) that ran stories of those three. Every month they rotated between the characters, presenting a new story of one of them. The rest of the book were reprints of stories of the other characters. They rotated the characters so that they each were spotlighted every couple of months. The book also ran reprints of stories of other peripheral characters in the Superman universe - Krypto the Super Dog, Braniac, Lana Lang, Perry White, Bizarro World and even Mr. Mxyzptlk! (good luck pronouncing that). 

Anyway, last evening while working on The Superman Family issue 168 (published Dec-Jan 1974/75) I came across this ‘Super-Puzzle.’ A word search puzzle - that uses a lot of peripheral characters in the Superman Universe. 

Click on the picture (you may have to click on it a few times to enlarge it - this blog site has a glitch in seeing images). Right click on the enlarged picture to save to your computer and print it out to do the puzzle.

Enjoy.
copyright DC comics.