Are they any books that when you see the covers or read the stories, emotionally takes you back to how you felt when you were a kid? Here are a few for me



Boy did this book knock my socks off. First, seeing the two companies teaming up was always thought of as an impossibility. Then the Oversized art in this treasury edition made it even more powerful, especially the splash page when they meet. I feel like a kid whenever I read it again in that format.



Your friend's stuff was always cooler when you were a kid and my buddy had a coverless copy of this one and the Batman II story blew my mind and I have loved this concept ever since.

Also appearing here, along with the classic "first" Batman story



Finally, as I mentioned on another thread, I was a young boy when my mom took me to Macy's so she could go shopping and I was bored out of my mind when I found a table of books for sale and this one was there. I devoured it while she shopped, sitting on the floor, and learned about the early days of Marvel, back in those spotty newsstand days.

Yep. I remember carrying that Superman-Spider-Man book to school with me and showing it to classmates. Nearly lost it
to a teacher who thought paying attention to class was more important. The same book was also held up by one of the
TV hosts on the kids' show, Wonder Rama, so I remember that moment, too, when a comic book was on TV.

Also my Dad had those Batman books and it was my first real experience reading any Batman books, so they stand out.

When I see the cover of this one, I tend to feel transported back to early 1973; I am home with the mumps, alone with just my
grandmother, but the rest of the family has gone to a movie. I read this one two or three times that evening. I'm nine years old.

This one takes me back to 1979, when I was 15. I had been regularly buying Daredevil for years, but,
distribution of comics to my small town was rather poor back then, so I frequently would miss at least two
issues of each title per year. While the family was on vacation (in June), I found this one in a grocery store
where we stopped to buy a few on-the-road snacks. As the book had come out about five months earlier,
I was lucky to find it anywhere still on a spinner rack: Daredevil #158.


I read it while lying in the back of the family station wagon, so that's where seeing the first Frank Miller DD
takes me back to. Great comic. So happy that I found this one on that trip.

There are too many to list, but these ones stick in my mind...

Lots of 'em. I've been collecting books I read as a kid for many years now. In three decades not a year has passed that I haven't found at least one item that takes me back. Some years I've found as many as half a dozen. Whenever I travel, I make a point of visiting used bookstores, thrift stores, and antique stores--anywhere that you might find old books. This past year I've found four or five. I found three items at three different places in the space of a single week while doing my Christmas shopping earlier this month! So this has been a good year for finding stuff.

Wonder what I might find in 2023? There are about half a dozen items I've been looking for for years that I'd dearly love to find. I can't find them online, either because I've tried and failed, or because I can't recall an author or title to provide a good search term. I'll know them when I see them, if I can find them browsing through a collection the old-fashioned way.

In comic books, the one that most takes me back is the Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge story "The Flying Dutchman." I got a copy of that (later Gold Key reprint, of course) when we were in the county seat shopping. It was a rainy-looking day, but Dad was still working on a construction job. Mom drove by Dad's job on the way back from the shopping trip, which she hardly ever did. The rainy day was a perfect day for reading that story of ships and the stormy sea.

Can't show a cover, because the 1978 reprint in which I saw the story didn't feature it on the cover. Here's the title page:


https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1djwl22-Qq8/ ... 0/dm1.tiff


And a print from a later painting by Barks of the story's most spectacular moment:


https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comi ... 54-92013.s


Actually the later print takes me back too. When I was in grad school in the early 1990s I would take a break from my studies by reading through the volumes of "Carl Barks Library" that were kept permanently in the library reserve room where I spent hundreds of hours reading materials put on reserve for our classes. Reading some collected Barks made for great study-stress relief. I got to re-read most of the Duck stories of my childhood, and a great many more I'd never seen before. And found myself loving the new-to-me stories just as much as the nostalgic childhood stories. Barks was just that good. Anyway, "Carl Barks Library" had full-color reproductions of that and other Barks prints. I love to recall those times in the library reserve room, devouring all those Barks stories.

I haven't had access to "Carl Barks Library" for 18 years now, but we do have a couple of volumes of the more recent Barks reprints at the library. And I've got the "Flying Dutchman" story in a 1990s reprint comic that I found as a back issue somewhere.

Those are the greatest reading memories, aren't they?

I know this story from that big box of comics that some older kids we knew gave me and my brother in the early 1980s. I think I may still have that issue.

Black & White reprint anthologies like this were one of my favourite things to read as a kid, and this comic was my introduction to both The High Evolutionary and Adam Warlock.

Here's a link to the AusReprints site where it mentions what was in this issue.

https://ausreprints.net/issue/2434

I have the early Warlock books, and really enjoyed them but it wasn't until Jim Starlin revived it a few years later that I became a huge fan of the character. That cover looks familiar- is it one of Kane's images from the story? The way it's presented here it looks like Kane (High Evolutionary) and Kirby (machines) with a touch of Steranko (colouring). I really like it.

The Australian/New Zealand reprints were a really mixed bag. It could have been a collage based on any number of things, or a splash page from one of the stories inside, there was no way of knowing.

I can imagine being sick and reading these comfort books would stay with you.



That cover is so powerful and also brings me back