Chello again!
Well, are we up to #4 already? Excellent!
Number 4 has a special place in my heart; it's
Detective Comics #450, August, 1975.
Why is a pretty mediocre issue in my top ten? Well, glad you asked. That's because it's the first comic I ever bought myself.
It was summer and my grandmother took me to the grocery store with her. Next door to the grocery was a drug store (Louis-Morgan, to be precise, on the corner of Marshall Ave. and Alpine, Longview, TX). She gave me a quarter and told me to "go and buy a funny book." Really? All by myself? Cool! (I was only 5!)
Well, I went in and looked and saw..Batman! Now, even as kid, Supes was my favorite, but Bats was "ok." (As I got older and more "mature," Bats would win out. The circle is now complete and I'm more of a Supes fan these days.
)
Well, I went to the counter where a teenage girl was working to pay for my "funny book." "26 cents," she said, after ringing it up.
26? I only had a quarter (sales tax was beyond me at the time). I must have looked crestfallen, because she laughed and said that the quarter would be fine. Ecstatic, I took my purchase outside to read on the curb while granny finished shopping.
I still have that comic. It's not as good as the one in the picture, probably fair to good. A lot of my comics didn't survive over the years--they were scribbled in, lost covers, had pictures cut out. But, somehow, this particular one has made it with me, to the army and now in my own home. It's the pride of my collection.
Louis-Morgan Drugs is no more. There are a couple left around East Texas (it was a chain), but that store was tore down in the early 90s to make way for a bigger and better "super market." My grandmother died last year. But I have my memories of her and the comic she gave me a quarter to buy.