Funny Animals: A Collection of Comic Book People

By David Macpherson

Some people like comic books. They read them. They collect them. They grade them and sell them for a profit. Or, at least, they try to sell them for a profit. Comic book people love their comics from superheroes to romance to funny animals. These are the books that define them. Comic people love to talk about comics.

Here, in these pages, comic book people have a chance to take center stage and tell about their comics. Each chapter is another person telling their story.

Some tell of collecting books and characters. Some love certain artists. Some talk about stealing some one else's comics. Every comic book person has their origin story. They all have the chance to be something heroic or villainous. They all have a chance to talk about it. Every comic book person has a lot to say.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Macpherson
• Release date: Mar 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393659624

Book preview

Peter

Our mothers hated comic books. Couldn’t stand the idea of them. I guess, when I was a little kid, there was a big Senate hearing that showed comic books creating juvenile delinquency. The comic books. They did that. Don’t ask me how. I can’t figure.

Drink all of the gin you can, kid. And while you’re at it, smoke this pack of Lucky’s. Just don’t read that Batman and Robin filth. Be a drunken ten year old with a smoker’s cough, as long as your mind is pure and away from those comics.

They had changed the comics, made them safer for us tykes. Took out all of the violence and the ghouls. Each comic had a seal of good taste, like it was a quart of milk inspected to insure you that it wasn’t sour.

The comic books were in the back of the store, like they were like porn. There were in two spinner racks. Moving them generated a tremendous squeak from the rusting joints. Everyone knew you were looking for a comic.

I have to admit something. Even though I bought a lot of comics, like a comic every few weeks for several years, I never was that excited about them. Maybe because even then I knew that I was being pandered to. That bad guys never stood a chance. Or it was a cutesy story with animals that talked and acted like people. If I was an animal, like a crow or a fox, I wouldn’t want to act like a person and be worried about human nonsense. I would be excited to be an animal and live my own animal life..

No, I went because my friends liked comics. I liked hanging out with them. I liked going to the park after school and reading them and talking about them while we were drinking sodas and eating Hershey bars.

I didn’t care for the superheroes that my friends loved. They were talking Justice League and Challengers of the Unknown. Man, how did I remember that one? Don’t ask me what the story was about or what they looked like, just that I suddenly recall that Jimmy Phillips liked Challengers of the Unknown. Guys in pajamas, wearing masks. Can you imagine how much they sweated. It must have been a major funky stinkfest to be saved by a superhero.

The ones I liked were the monster comics. Not vampires or werewolves, though they would have been pretty fun. No, it was giant monsters coming from outer space trying to take over the world. The humans always lucked out in the end and defeated them in eight or ten pages. Each comic had three of these invasions. That was a lot of monsters wanting our real estate. Take over the town, destroy all the liquor stores. They had the greatest names. Let me see. Fin Fang Foom. Orrgo. Spragg. Sometimes the scientists made them. And the scientists were usually eaten. They probably tasted funny.

When I got home, my mother always asked what that comic rolled up in my hand was. I always said it was Batman and Robin. It scandalized her. She was told somewhere that Batman and Robin were queer for each other.  I didn’t even know what queer for each other meant. Just that she said it often enough that I knew it was worth lying about.

When I was overseas, in Nam, I was amazed to see soldiers my age reading comic books. Most of them were the undergrounds, the dirty ones. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want a dirty comic book. Made no sense. This one guy in my unit was into Sgt. Rock comics. A seasoned soldier fighting the righteous fight in Germany during World War 2. The guy reading them seemed envious about that.

I didn’t read much. I liked getting letters. I wrote letters to every girl I talked to in high school. All my friends who beat the draft I wrote to, but they didn’t write back regularly. My mother, I hate to admit it, was my best pen pal. Wrote every two or three days. And once a month I got a huge care package from her. In each care package? A big handful of comic books. Mostly, Batman and Robin.

Tad

I am done with Marvel. Hell, I might be done with comics. But Marvel really pissed me off. They changed their download policy. What idiots. They are charging four bucks, sometimes five dollars, for each book. That’s a lot, but they gave decent value for the money.

For the past few years, Marvel had a digital download policy. You bought the book, you also got a code to get a digital version of the same book. I read them on my IPad. This was the ideal way to do it because then I never had to destroy the actual book. My only contact with the book was when I opened it up to get the download code. Then I bagged and boarded the book and put it in a storage box. It keeps its near pristine condition and I get to read the book without worrying about the oils from my fingers destroying the book and its value somewhere down the line.

But then they changed the policy. Marvel just ended the downloads of the actual book. Now, they offer five downloads a month. They pick what five books I might be able to download. That’s not the point. That means I might read a book I have no interest in and destroy the value of the comic I bought.

Now I am not a crazed investor. I like reading comics, always have. I can’t understand the people who bag and board comics that they never intend to read. They are just in it for the investment. I read them. But if I can recoup some of what I spent on the comics down the line by reselling them, that’s great. That will not happen if I’ve ruined it by reading it. One read through of a comic destroys five percent of its condition. Just one.

Marvel offered a way to preserve the quality of the comic, and I was appreciative. I only bought Marvel because of that. DC has never offered same comic download, which is dumb on their part. 

And now Marvel has drunk the stupid kool aid. Well they will not have my business. I spent thirty or forty bucks a week on my stack. That’s not for nothing. And now I have to spend that money to ruin the books by reading them? No, thank you.

I canceled all my Marvel books in protest. I hear that a lot of people did that and they are thinking of reversing this strategy, and allowing us to purchase the digital download with the book. But I don’t know if I will go back. They are not a company that can be trusted. And besides, I suddenly have more money now that I’m not dropping them on Marvel books. I’m hardly broke. It’s kind of a nice feeling. Something that I might want to continue. Not that I’m thanking Marvel for this sudden windfall.

John

It’s a rite of passage. When a young man is thirteen or fourteen, they go on a quest of discovery.

This quest of discovery is diving into your old man’s things looking for money. It is a beautiful tradition and it’s a shame National Geographic never did a photo spread about it.

This was a while ago, but do I ever remember it. I guess I was looking to see if my straight laced, rules and regulation, father had weed or pills. I think valium was still a thing back them, and though I never tried it, I was willing to take one for the team if the chance arose. Damned if it didn’t.

The attic space was converted to an office for my father. He did personal tax returns on the weekends and when he could. This was his place. It was always locked. But he told all three of us kids where the key was.

I went through the drawers, the filing cabinets. After forty minutes of searching, I came up with a crumbled up five. This was not the kind of treasure I was hoping for.

At the one hour point I finally found something in a trunk, underneath an army fatigue jacket. Don’t ask me who’s jacket it was, my dad wasn’t in The Viet Nam War. He said the greatest day of his life was when he learned how high his lottery number was. I didn’t know what that meant, but he seemed to go on about it like it was important. So the jacket wasn’t his, I tossed it over my shoulder and found.

Well, I didn’t find anything that was going to help me buy beer from the upperclassmen who were selling it three dollars a can. The fiver I pocketed was good for one and two thirds cans of Hamm’s. What I did find was a pile of black and white comics.

They were underground comix. It was dirty looking guys smoking pot. It was cats getting