Did Your Parents Read Comics?

[Parch]

I'm pretty sure my parents never read a comic in their life.

[Richard Bishop]

My father has told me that he read some of his fraternity brothers' comics back in college in the late '60s, stuff like Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer and other Marvel books.

My mother actually read comics growing up as well, but as a child in the 1950s, that isn't surprising.

[MDG]

I don't think either of my parents read comics. I was introduced to them by my uncle, who apparently still had a pretty big collection that was thrown out with a stash of radio premiums, movie cards and god knows what else when my grandparents sold their house in '64. (I was 5 at the time. Two years later, I would've saved them.)

Something that I always thought was interesting: when i was 10 or 11, we went away with 4 other families, sharing a floor of a hotel with a common living area. Every time I went into that living room, one of the fathers would be reading one of the MADs that I brought with me.

[Rabidwolfdog]

Both my mom and Dad liked Casper and all the Harvey comic characters.

[destro]

My mom read Archie when she was a kid. My dad read a lot of silver age Marvel and DC. In fact he saved most of them and gave them to me as a kid. So at the same time I was reading 80s comics off the stand I was also reading silver age comics. They were all torn up and of no resale value...but quite readable and invaluable to me.

Later when I was a teenager my dad tried reading a few of my comics with mixed results. He liked Dark Knight Returns, Daredevil, Rocketeer and some of the Dark Horse Alien comics. I remember he tried to read Crisis on Infinite Earths and gave up after the 2nd issue in total confusion.

[md62]

My Dad read comics as a kid. He was the one who got me hooked on this hobby...

[Anthony D]

Don't know if either of my parents read comics as kids (which would've been during the 60s); I haven't asked. Both didn't mind my interest in cartoons/newspaper comic strips, or later interest in comic books, but neither got into comic books at all (besides Dad buying an issue or two of Iron Man when I was a teenager).

[Reptisaurus!]

My dad was REALLY hardcore, and knew a lot about 'em. As I mentioned before, I still have the comics from my parents used book/record/comic shop.

[berk]

This happened to come up when I was home for Christmas a week or two ago: my uncle mentioned that they never saw or even heard of comics when they were growing up. This is my mother's younger brother. They got radio when he was about 12 years old, which would have been around 1950 or 51, I figure from his age, and that was pretty much their first contact with the world outside the place they grew up, a small island off the coast of Newfoundland. It's hard even for me to get my head around the idea of how different their world then was to ours today, even though I saw the last vestiges of it as a young child, going out every summer to visit the grandparents.

[Phil Maurice]

My grandmother was a school teacher and devout Catholic, born in 1907. My father (also Catholic) was born in 1942 in Lockport, NY, and was a young teen when he encountered the ONLY comic story he said he remembered (or cared to remember). It was a horror comic in which a young bride refused to have congress with her groom until he had shaved! Though he returned time and again to the washroom to prepare himself, she was never satisfied, continually exclaiming,"Ugh, you're still so rough. Go back and shave again!." Finally, the groom emerged as a ghastly, grinning skull shrieking something like,"Is THIS a clean enough shave?!"

You must believe that my father would deliver that final line with the credibility of a fine actor, which he was not. It turns out that my school-teacher grand-mother had callously discarded all of my father's comic books during the 1954 Senate hearings, herself regarding them as "instruments of evil." My father would grow up to be a Marine, and veteran of the Vietnam War. And years later, his own son would become fixated on those damnable comics which had caused such upheaval in his own house so long ago.

Based on this scant and dubious information, I've searched for this story for many years with no luck. The closest I've come is Chamber of Chills #18, but I've never seen the contents.

[Michael24]

I'm actually not sure if my mom ever read comics as a kid.

My dad read them, although he wasn't a hardcore follower. But he was familiar with most of the big names. FF's The Thing was always a favorite character of his. In the early-90s when I first got into comics, I used to occasionally find him in the living room on a weekend morning checking out my latest books, if I'd left them there the night before. He liked to check in on Batman and Spider-Man occasionally, and I remember him digging on Spawn, too. One of his favorite comics as a kid was Classics Illustrated #124.



He still has it, put up in a box somewhere. He also bought the oversized version of Marvel's The Empire Strikes Back adaptation when it came out, and even had Volume 1 of Jim Steranko's History of Comics. I have them both now for safe keeping.

[Phil Maurice]

and even had Volume 1 of Jim Steranko's History of Comics. I have them both now for safe keeping.

Steranko's History of Comics is an invaluable font of comics truth and knowledge. Your Dad has excellent taste, and is lucky to have you as a caretaker.

[Michael24]

Steranko's History of Comics is an invaluable font of comics truth and knowledge. Your Dad has excellent taste, and is lucky to have you as a caretaker.

I'm ashamed to say, I've actually never even read it. (I've been meaning to for a long time; just always forget about it.) I used to love flipping through it as a kid and looking at all the pictures, though, and the gatefold cover with all of those characters on it always dazzled me.

[FoxMulder2012]

My Mom read Archie Comics as a kid. Little Lulu and the like as well.

My Dad read the occasional Marvel Comic here and there. Being 11 when Fantastic Four #1 was released, he was really the perfect age for the Silver Age at Marvel. He was never hardcore, pretty much just read what his friends bought and they traded them week to week. I really wish he still had some of them both because they could really be worth something and because I really love that era.

My Grandfather was probably more into comics than either of them. He would actively seek out Batman, Superman, The Flash, Green Lantern and All Star Comics when he was in the war. He saw them as a bit of solace during the really horrible time. He stopped when he came home from Europe, but he was still able to talk about them with me when I finally got into comics as a kid. He got a kick out of me reading new adventures of Alan Scott and Jay Garrick, two characters that he loved as a young man.