Comic Books in the Sixties

Somewhere around 1962 or 1963, I received a post card from National Publications. It was magnificent. It featured a drawing of Superman on the address side, and Batman on the message side. The message? I was being thanked for writing a “letter to the editor”, and I was told that my letter might be printed in one of my favorite DC comic. It was the greatest thing to happen to me in my 11 or 12 years of existence.

I immediately ran out and showed it to all of my friends. I kept it on the top of my comic book box / old shoe box, so that when I got together to read comics with my friends, everyone could not help but see it. I was the king of the block until it became evident that my epistle was not going to be printed.

In the sixties, we were comic readers, not collectors. We sat on somebody’s porch and read our books. We traded books and borrowed books. We traced the artwork into our school notebooks. We mowed lawns, raked leaves, shoveled snow just to get money to buy more comics to read.

We stained them with peanut butter and jelly. We left them outside in the rain. We lost covers; we lost whole books. We did not read them once and place them in plastic bags never to be seen again. We went down to the drugstore whenever we had 10 cents, or 12 cents, or 25 cents. We didn’t wait until Wednesday to wheedle our moms to drive us across town to buy this week’s books.
Most of the time we didn’t even know when our favorites would be published. And if we missed an issue, we knew that Ricky or Dave or Frank had probably already bought it.

We were the target consumer for the “illustrated periodical” market in the Sixties. We wanted space adventures, super fights, and good guys in cool costumes beating bad buys. We didn’t want physics lessons, complex plots, examinations of social issues, and most of all we didn’t want to keep track of year-long storylines.

And people like Mort Weisinger knew that. Over the years, good old Mort and his contemporaries have been made the goat for publishing thousands of comics that were loaded with scientific errors, unrealistic personal relationships, glaring inconsistencies and plain old silliness (eg. Any Mr. Mxyzptlk story). They knew we wanted comics that were fun to read and that we wanted lots of them.

Mort introduced the Legion of Super Heroes, three teenagers with colorful costumes and amazing abilities, who brought Superboy 1000 years into the future with fantastic ice-cream parlors; just to play a joke on him.
What a great story. Plenty of pre-teen boys must have written to Mort, because they showed up again, this time to visit Supergirl. Then they were written into some Superman stories.

When they received their home in Adventure Comics, the Legion faced more incongruities (dozens of characters from different worlds and only the villainous aliens didn’t look like us) and more silliness (Bouncing Boy, the Legion of Substitute Heroes). And we loved it all.

Sitting here in the dawn of the 21st century and poking fun at the early Legion stories for being unsophisticated is like criticizing Shakesphere for being boring and obtuse. I admit that I have been guilty of such temporal bias, and I am a professional historian.

So, as we re-explore the beginnings of our beloved Legion, please remember this one important fact: It’s only a comic book!