Comics

I liked comics when I was young.  In my house they frowned on the DC and Marvel superhero stuff, I recall, but I read a lot of Gold Key material.  Stuff like Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. (Carl Barks was a master!) I also liked Little Lulu, and read quite a bit of Archie and Harvey Comics.  And I read a lot of Classics Illustrated, though that can seem dorky.

My interest started when we were in Britain, and we read British comics like Beano, Dandy, Beezer and Topper. (We also collected some of those comics' annual hardcover publications, a particularly British institution.)  The British approach can be more literal than American equivalents:  when showing someone tugging something, they'll write "Tug, tug!" in the same way as writing "Bang!"

And I also followed comic strips for a long while.  Our local paper's weekend comics included LI'L ABNER, DICK TRACY and PEANUTS. (Re-reading LI'L ABNER in recent years, I noticed that the Lower Slobbovians speak in Yiddish accents!) There were also MARY WORTH and REX MORGAN MD, but I didn't follow them much.  And we often got the magazine THE STAR WEEKLY, which somehow arranged to publish their weekend comics a week earlier than the regular papers.  Their comics included TERRY AND THE PIRATES, PRINCE VALIANT, MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN and THE HEART OF JULIET JONES.

I also developed an interest in daily comics.  The first daily story strip I followed was probably ALLEY OOP.  And my first daily adventure strip was RIP KIRBY, the coolest man in the world when I was 10 or 11.