During my early teen years, 1974-1977, I was an avid comic book reader and collector. I lived in Hawaii and a lot of the neighborhood teens read the same kind of comics that I did. Each family bought four or five new comics a week and we swapped comics nearly every day. During that period, I know that I read thousands of comics. It would be a Herculean task just to try to remember all of the titles; I read titles from Archie to X-Men. My favorite, of course, was Spider-Man.

You have to understand. The time period was before cable TV became ubiquitous, before video games, and definitely before the Internet. It was before CDs, before video tapes, and most definitely before DVDs. There weren't many entertainment options. We could listen to the radio, play the vinyl albums on the phonograph (or record player if you prefer to call it that), listen to 8-track or cassette tapes, watch the limited channels on TV, or go to a movie. The music was all the same, just in different packages. Television channels broadcast the same tired repeats day in and day out. I became acutely familiar with Gilligan's Island and the original Star Trek. Reading comics became another entertainment option that I preferred over the others.

I stopped reading comics when I left Hawaii in 1977 and never found time after joining the military in 1978. The recent movie adaptations of some of my favorite comics have fueled my nostalgia on more than one occasion. I even found a website with thousands of images of comic book covers: Cover Browser

Here are a few covers I picked from the 70s, that I actually remember: