posted May 12, 2003 09:22 AM               

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Is there any way to surmise the extent to which Golden Age readers tended to buy/read only Timely, only National, only Quality, only Fawcett, etc.? I don't mean market shares, relative popularity, etc. Just whether more or less brand loyalty prevailed, and if so how commonly. Or did the fandoms completely overlap? I gather many of us in the Silver Age were brand-loyal in this way. I figured that if anyone had any way to find out, it would be you gents. Thanks.

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posted May 12, 2003 10:03 AM               

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This is something that has often intrigued me. I've always been interested in the various mixtures of titles, when batches of old comics are found in attics, closets, etc. From what I can tell, there was very little brand loyalty for golden-age comics. More often you find a certain consistency in genre (funny animals; archies plus romance; crime/horror; westerns; etc.). Super-hero titles are often mixed in with Fiction House adventures and titles like Big-Shot, Dick Tracy, Target Comics, and such. Sometimes you might denote loyalty to a specific title, but not often to a brand. At least, that's what I've observed over the years.

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posted May 12, 2003 11:53 AM               

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That's pretty much how I see it, too.
It's pretty rare anymore that stashes of Golden Age comics are found intact--usually by now they're in the hands of collectors who acquired them since the 1970s or thereabouts, but in the few cases in recent years that I've seen a small batch appear, they've been more genre-specific than anything else--Disney and other funny animal, or westerns, or mixed superhero and aviation adventure titles.

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posted May 12, 2003 05:28 PM               

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I don't have any firsthand experience with this, but anecdotal evidence (like Jules Pfeiffer's recollections of his comic reading in The GReat Comic Book Heroes, or Harlan Ellison's recollections in Canuck Comics)suggests there wasn't particular brand loyalty. (A kid could read BOTH Superman and Captain Marvel; Hawkman and Sub-Mariner--and Plastic Man.) If you lived in a city, you had a lot of comics available at newstands; if you lived in a small town, you had fewer comics available in drugstores or grocery stores. Most kids probably sampled whatever was available to them--and no doubt fans of the Blackhawks would also read Skyman or Airboy, etc.--following genres like war comics, aviation comics, and so forth--or sampling all of them.

I wonder of some of the Silver Age brand loyalty wasn't built out of the growing sophistication of the fans on the one hand--the older fans, that is--and the stronger brand identity built out of crossovers, sustained continuity, letter columns/editor's columns that promoted the whole comic line. I mean, the DC comics of the 1940s carried house ads, and the Justice Society and Seven Soldiers of Victory provided some sense of a shared comic universe. But otherwise, most Flash or Hawkman stories were no more relevant to Batman or Superman stories than they were to Human Torch or Captain America stories. All those characters were isolated in their own independent worlds. By the 1960s, there was more of a DC house feel, as its major characters were connected in one universe--preceded by the Superman and Batman family universes. And Marvel definitely had an identifiable house style and editorial presence.

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posted May 12, 2003 06:54 PM               

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I never was lucky enough to come across a stash of Golden Age comics, but when I was a kid in the mid-1950s, I did from time to time get hand-me-down piles of comics from different people. They were all of "recent" vintage, with rarely any issues earlier than 1950, so I guess they'd be what we call Atomic Age comics.

They were always pretty much genre-specific: War & Western; teen humor (Archie, Patsy Walker, Katy Keene; romance (ick!).

Unfortunately, I never found anyone interested in superhero comics. I had one issue each, that I remember, of Wonder Woman, Plastic Man, Green Hornet, Blackhawk, and Capt. Flash. I couldn't tell you in which batches of comics I found these.

One thing about being a pre-teen: All comics were good.

Personally, from the beginning I was hooked on superheroes. Since DC was about the only purveyors of spandex in the late '50s, I tended to buy mainly their titles. I was willing to buy comics by anyone else who would publish capes & cowls, but there weren't many of them.

Of the mighty collection of 150 to 200 comics I had when I was 10 years old, I'm sure fewer than 20 were non-superhero, and therefore non-DC.

I got lucky a couple years later and became interested in the Lee-Kirby-Ditko-Heck monster comics just in time to stumble across Fantastic Four #1!

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posted May 12, 2003 08:51 PM               

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quote:

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Originally posted by Old Dude:
...One thing about being a pre-teen: All comics were good........

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It's true.
I remember, at about 10, even liking an issue of Super Duck, a truly wretched Archie funny animal knockoff (once I got over my puzzlement at his not being in any way "super"...)

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Originally posted by Old Dude:
......Personally, from the beginning I was hooked on superheroes. Since DC was about the only purveyors of spandex in the late '50s, I tended to buy mainly their titles. I was willing to buy comics by anyone else who would publish capes & cowls, but there weren't many of them....

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Same here. I bought Private Strong and The Fly and the early Charlton Space Adventures featuring Captain Atom, but there just wasn'tmuch else.
I was familiar with the concept of non-DC superheroes, and I had very early fuzzy memories of Captain Marvel.
But I was lucky enough to come across a bunch of GA stuff in '57, when I was 11, including five issues of All-Star and a small deposit of Fawcetts and Sensations and a couple odd issues of Green Hornet and Comic Cavalcade. Slowly over the next few years, I got my friend, whose older cousin's comics these had been, to let go of them. So I knew about Green Lantern and Hawkman and The Atom and the JSA before those characters were revived (and for that matter, about The Flash before I saw his revival, though it was already underway). Exciting times to be a kid fan.

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posted May 13, 2003 11:25 AM               

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I originally read and bought the DC stuff and not just because other publishers were rarely seen on my newsstands. I was raised on DC, Disney, Fawcett and, later, the EC stuff.
As a collector from the 1960-period on, I BEST liked DC, but bought all publishers (except Timely), and thought Novelty Press and Centaur the most interesting outside of DC and Fawcett, and often wondered what their characters would have been like had they been written and illustrated in the DC bullpen.

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posted May 13, 2003 11:35 AM               

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I might continue my previous thoughts with the fact that I didn't buy alot of Timelys because although they had some great characters and pretty well drawn, the stories were poorly written, even for unsophisticated me!
I remember that a nice Golden Age find was made by a comic dealer over in Grandview, Missouri, circa 1977 in a garage somewhere, and he offered them to me in trade for my complete Marvel collections of FF, Spider-Man, Tales to Astonish, Avengers, and 1-3 other titles.
In return, I got NM, pristine copies (with pure white, supple pages) of Superman #2 & #3, Action #6 & #7, Adventure #44 and a few others I can't recall now circa 1939.
My Marvel collection was near mint, bought off the stand, read once and bagged, so my "investment" in them was minimal compared to the value I received in those GA books!
Ahhhh, those were the days!

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posted May 13, 2003 08:36 PM               

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quote:

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Originally posted by Craig Delich:
I got NM, pristine copies (with pure white, supple pages) of Superman #2 & #3, Action #6 & #7, Adventure #44 and a few others I can't recall now circa 1939.

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Sounds like you no longer have them. Where are they now?

If you still have them, would you like to trade them for some magic beans? That's all I have of comparable value.

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posted May 14, 2003 07:36 PM               

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Originally posted by Old Dude:
Sounds like you no longer have them. Where are they now?

If you still have them, would you like to trade them for some magic beans? That's all I have of comparable value.

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Well, Old Dude, I sold my entire collection in 1989, a collection begun in 1956, and containing complete runs of All-Star, All-American, All-Flash, Comic Cavalcade, Green Lantern, Flash Comics, Batman, World's Finest and Detective....PLUS early runs of Adventure, More Fun, Superman, Action....and also to include complete runs of JLA, Green Lantern, The Flash, Brave & Bold, Showcase and many, many more!

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posted May 16, 2003 04:40 PM            

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Since you are still active on the boards, are you still reading DC comics?

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posted May 16, 2003 09:53 PM               

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Originally posted by bruce:
Since you are still active on the boards, are you still reading DC comics?

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I actively collect the JSA and Hawkman, 80-page Giant reprints, DC Golden Age Archives and collected all the Millenium editions, and a few other things as they strike my fancy.

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posted May 17, 2003 03:59 PM               

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Craig,

I have precisely the same list, though I like Johns's writing so much I get the current Avengers, too. And I made an exception for the Hulk as written by Bruce Jones of Twisted Tales fame.

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