Redartz: Good day, all! Today we find ourselves in the heady mellow days of June (Northern Hemisphere, anyway). However, for our topic, we will think back to our school days and remember when we had to 'beat the bell', get to our seat, and (hopefully) have our homework ready.
More specifically, do we have any memories of comics at school? Perhaps you sneaked a few comics in between the pages of a textbook. Maybe you had a few friends with whom you would trade at lunch. Could be you have experiences I'd never think of! So while we wait to hear about yours, here's a couple of mine.
One of my early school tales concerned a friend who learned I'd just started collecting comics. It was middle school, 1974, and I had very few comics at that point (and even fewer back issues, like maybe one or two). This friend brought to school a couple of old comics he had around, and just gave them to me. They were pretty worn, but incredibly cool: Fantastic Four #63, and Spider-Man Annual #2. I instantly fell in love with that FF cover, and of course Spidey was my favorite anyway. Needless to say, the remainder of that schoolday was spent sneaking peeks at those books between lessons and amidst bookreading.
Within a year, comics had grown to an obsession with me (yes, "My name is redartz, and I'm a comic book addict"). Conveniently for school, that fall Mead came out with a series of Marvel Comics folders and notebooks. Well, you just know what happened. Every class had to have a different hero folder, and the big notebook featured the Fabulous FF from issue 159. This notebook replaced a comic notebook I created myself:
I took the opportunity to buy an extra copy of a few comics at that time, especially since I was cutting out the Value Stamps. I took an old, plain notebook, glued comic panels all over it, and covered the whole thing with clear contact paper. The result was a cool comic-themed notebook that held up to punishment (that contact paper was pretty thick). Among the comics cut up for that notebook were Marvel Two-in-One #2 and Amazing Spider-Man #130. Sadly, somewhere over the years, that notebook disappeared. But I'd still take an FF Mead notebook off ebay, any day.
Finally, a geek admission. My comics friend and I would frequently be found discussing anything comics oriented, during breaks, before and after school. We found the old monster reprints in the back of some of the Giant-Size books particularly amusing. So our fellow students would witness us walking down the hallway, advising them to "Beware the Terror of Tim Boo Ba", or to Look Out for "Goom, the Thing from Planet X". Yes, we got looks. In retrospect, deservedly so. But we were having a blast...
Okay, now's your chance to 'tell tales out of school'. Fire away...
