The Mad DC Comic Hunt (or Tales of the Fabulous Bronze Age)

by Nigel Brown

This is an unashamed account of a time long gone, thirty-nine years ago by the calendar. Let me start at the beginning…

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Like most people I was brought up on Dandys, Beanos, Toppers etc. but one day, when I was about seven, I wanted something different. I was getting tired of the wholesome adventures of Desperate Dan and the rest of the gang. My eyes lightened upon a rack of glossy looking comics and I soon purchased my first American comic, Superman No. 190.

There’s no need to tell you how much more exciting those DCs were, and I soon began to collect them at a rate of about one a week. Then I discovered that other shops that sold DCs and it wasn’t long before I had a collection of about sixty comics… collected so that I could read them again whenever I wished.

One day, actually in February 1967, Fantastic Comics came out on the stands, with Thor, Iron Man, and The X-Men. I soon began to collect the American Marvel Comics as well, but DC was still my favourite.


In 1971 I found out that a friend from school, Ian Baker, also collected American Comics. We counted his collection and it came to 146. Wow! This was an unimaginable amount of comics to me, for my collection had never really numbered more than about seventy. When I’d accumulated more than that number, I tended to sell them to get more cash for newer comics. I resolved to give up selling my comics and build up a large collection… at least as many as 146!

The Mad DC Comic hunt was on.

By way of explanation for these reminiscences, I was browsing through some old fanzines the other day, and came across ‘Memories Are Made Of This’ by D.Jackson in Comics Unlimited No.33. It’s a kind of ‘Fan Spotlight’ as he recalls his younger comic collecting days, but the angle is really on Portsmouth, the place where he lived - and where I happened to be at the time. Despite this, I never knew him. After reading his account, which I found very interesting, I realised that those days of comic collecting can never be repeated.


This is due to three factors, the first being that people tend to hold onto their comics these days, not selling them to dealers as before. Whether rightly or wrongly, they believe that old comics are “worth money”. The second factor is that with the advent of so many dealers and Comic Shops, with non-distributed and directly distributed comics around, it’s impossible for a decent run of decent comics to be collected with any regularity just from the local newsagents and the local second-hand shops (for back issues). The third factor is that American Comics are simply not for sale locally anymore.

Thus an era has passed (a bit dramatic, that, but I guess it’s true), and I feel that something should be said about it, for those too young to remember it and those, like me, who had a fun time whilst cycling round shops with a haversack to be filled with the day's collection of comics.

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I think it was Ian Baker who coined the term ‘Mad DC Comic Hunt’. And if it wasn’t, it was certainly Ian who worked it all out, as I really knew little of the roads and routes through Portsmouth. Ian knew about six or seven second-hand shops that stocked comics, and about ten or eleven newsagents that sold new comics. He worked out a bicycle route around Portsmouth that took in all of these, in one large circuit, and once a week - usually on a Saturday afternoon, after school - we would set out on the hunt.

At that time, about 1973/74 the comics found in a second-hand shop would cost about a penny to three-pence each (at the very most). That’s 7p to 22p in 2011 money.
Ten years before that time was 1963, so it was still possible to find the very early Marvels and DCs from that period, and some second-hand shops would have as many as fifty or sixty comics for sale. Of course, if you were to go into those shops now, and if they still sold such comics, you’d buy the lot; but way back when, we were limited to about 60p pocket money a week ( £4.30 in 2011 money) so we only collected certain titles, rejecting all those Ditko Spider-Mans and early Kirby Fantastic Fours that we didn't collect!

I think the reason why I got on so well with Ian on those trips was that I only collected all three Superman titles (Superman, Action, Superboy), plus a few others, and Ian only collected the Batman titles (Batman, Detective, Brave & Bold etc.). I’d always found Batman a little too mysterious for my taste (and this was before Miller’s Dark Knight version!); and I preferred the more science fiction outlook of the Superman titles. By that time, I had already read as many Heinlein novels as I could find, and I used to haunt the science fiction section in the local library, as well.

The newsagents in those days provided rich pickings, as DC were going through their ‘New DC’ phase at the time, with Neal Adams doing a lot of work on the Batman titles, Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson reaching an artistic peak on the Superman books and Kirby’s Fourth World epic (New Gods, Forever People, Mr.Miracle) in full swing. If we missed out on a comic that month, or wanted to catch up on a few back issues of a title we were just starting to collect, all we had to do was pick them up at the second-hand shops. The shop owners, and an odd bunch they were, soon got to know us; a few of them even added a half-penny onto the cost of the comics when we saw how keen we were.

I remember being horrified when DC Comics went up to 7 1/2 p (54p in 2011 money) from 5p (36p in 2011 money), and this was for those 52 page issues that often contained first-time colour reprints from DC’s Golden Age!

Another time, I casually went into one of the second-hand shops near where I lived and found about two thousand comics for sale, almost complete runs of the major titles, plus Annuals, and all for a penny each! I dashed round to Ian and we both went back there to buy about a thousand of the comics between us. That had been my biggest purchase to date - £5 for five hundred comics. That particular second-hand shop was bricked up a few years ago and converted into a house.


This was before the days of mylar, plastic bags and de-acidifying sprays. We both kept comics in pile on shelves in our bedrooms, with neat little cards pushed in between them to indicate which titles they were. Most of the comics we had collected were in good to mint condition, but we weren’t too unhappy with a fair or even poor condition book if it filled a crucial gap in a run.

Thorpe & Porter were the distributors of American comics at that time, and the red-letter day was the last Thursday in every month. The new DC comics would arrive at all of the newsagents, and we would arrive soon after to ‘gather in the harvest’. We would buy ten or twelve new comics each (for less than £1 in total!). There was hardly any non-distribution going on… if we looked around we’d find pretty much everything we collected. Most of those comics sell for at least £30 each in top condition at dealers’ today.


When Marvel Comics brought out ‘The Mighty World of Marvel’ in 1972, it looked like a cheap way of getting reprints, and, of course, something new to collect. But things soon turned sour after that when Marvel stopped the distribution of certain of their American comics to prevent them being sold in competition with their British venture. Because of this, the first major comic to become a non-distributed title in this country was The Amazing Spider-Man, at No. 121. It wouldn’t have bothered me that much, but Nos. 121 and 122 were classics, featuring the death of Gwen Stacy and the Green Goblin. They were advertised all over the Marvels that were coming in, which made it particularly frustrating. I think that marked the beginning of the end of those halcyon days.

For the moment, however, things were looking up on other fronts. Ian had seen ‘Fantasy Unlimited’ advertised in Exchange & Mart, and had sent off for issue 14. Alan Austin had a sales list at the back of it, and I remember telling Ian how mad he was to send off the huge amount of £2 just to buy some comics! After his order arrived, about sixty comics - all of which he needed to fill his gaps - I was soon sending off a postal order for double that amount!


By issue 18 of Fantasy Unlimited (March/April 1974) I had subscribed and, together with all the articles and sales lists now available, interest in comics grew even greater than before. Just looking through Fantasy Unlimited 18, I note in the sales list that most of the comics I would have wanted at that time would have been ten or twelve pence each (79p in 2011 money), so I can see why, looking back on it now, I used to send off for so many.

Fantasy Unlimited put us in touch with Comic Fandom and Comic Marts. We were soon paying regular trips up to London to visit Dark They Were & Golden Eyed in Berwick St. and Alan Austin at his ‘Crypt of Comics’ basement in Clapton. I always managed to save about £11 for these junkets (£78 in 2006 money – still a respectable sum). Usually every half-term and school holiday, I had enough money to get all the comics I wanted. Geoff Cousins, another comic and science fiction fan from our school, would join us on many of these trips; the three of us would have a great time on this more long range ‘Mad Comic Hunt’.

My collection grew like an epidemic… but soon things were getting tighter as we came to rely more and more on the London dealers for the comics we needed, which were less and less likely to be found in the second-hand shops. Now that a few non-distributed comics, like Spider-Man, were only available through the dealers, the new comics in the newsagents seemed to have lost their lustre as well.
There’s no need to relate the story of the savage days of comic price inflation (a Neal Adams comic going from 8p to 15p to £3 – a x37 increase in price) or about the rise of comic investors and shark dealers; for by then the days of the ‘Mad DC Comic Hunt’ were over.

By 1980, just six years later, W.H.Smith were about the only people who had new American comics for sale, outside the dealers and comic shops. Distribution at the local newsagent was just too poor and unreliable to hope to keep a comic collection going from them.

I wrote in 1984: “The Direct Sales trend in comics today is a further erosion of the past, and, coupled with the high price of these ‘quality’ mags, ten new comics for under a pound seems even further away than before. If you combine the Graphic Novel concept with inflation, how soon will it be before we see ‘Just under ten pounds for a comic’?”

Given that so many comics today seem to be parts of a serial that only make complete sense when published together in their ‘Graphic Novel’ format, it seems that we passed the £10 mark a long time ago. Of course, that means that these items are no longer the ‘throwaway’ cheap reads for children.

Twenty-seven years ago, I also wrote: “Of the second-hand shops we haunted, on a recent trip I was only able to find two that possibly had some comics for sale. In one, a shop, in Angerstein Road where they always had sixty to seventy comics in a pile in the corner, I was told, “I can’t get them for love nor money.” In the other, Gibb’s in New road, I was shown a mangy pile of Charltons and a few badly damaged Marvels (last months, I think!). Oh yes, and a copy of Detective Comics No.426 (1972) that wasn’t even in good enough condition to buy at 6 pence. These were the only two second-hand shops, of the ones we used to visit that I could find at all! Some, like the old Book Exchange have been knocked down to make way for a rubbish tip, and some, like a smelly old place in Arundel street that was always good for 1960 to 1964 DCs have been boarded up and lie derelict.”

Since then, the rise of the charity shop has exterminated the private second-hand shop, and most of the secondary, or tertiary, shopping centres in Portsmouth that were the natural habitat of the second-hand shop species have been redeveloped into vastly more profitable residential dwellings.

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Looking back on it, the key element of our enjoyment was that the comics were so readily available. So many newsagents had a rotating wire rack stuffed with glossy colourful comics, changing weekly, that it’s not surprising that so many of us were lured into those fantastic worlds on our doorstep.

It’s arguable that with today’s Internet, DVDs and downloading, there’s a lot more going on in 2011 compared to the early 1970s, but I don’t envy those growing up in these times, when I think back to the days of the Mad DC Comic Hunt.



Note: Some parts of this article were originally published in ‘SuperStuff’ No.11 (August 1984)

copyright.Nigel Brown