Here’s another vintage newspaper article about comic books from the dawn of the Silver Age. This is the earliest such piece that we’ve run, and it’s interesting to see the writer’s attitude towards comic books–both the titles that he clearly remembers from his own youth and their scarcity in the present moment–that moment being August 3, 1963. it seems as though the writer missed noticing the comic book witch hunts of the 1950s that drove companies off of the racks in droves–he was no doubt more invested in more grown up pursuits at the time. But this is almost a piece that you could find online today, with the writer predicting the demise of the industry and lamenting the fact that the once-ubiquitous comic books of his youth are now difficult if not impossible to find. The idea that we’d not only still be talking about this stuff but that Superman and Batman would still be in periodical publication almost 60 years later would have seemed like the remotest impossibility. But so it goes. (I do sort of love that he misremembers Green Lantern as the Red Lantern, possibly conflating GL and the Red Tornado.)
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
If only he’d found a Justice League #22, which should have been on the stands then. Golden Age Green Lantern front and centre on the cover! He could have joined forces with Jerry Bails, Roy Thomas, and all the other adult fans enjoying the resurgence of superheroes…
He seems to be particularly nostalgic for kid superheroes, Billy Batson and C.B., so he might have been disappointed with the 1963 almost-entirely-adult lineup from DC and Marvel. Spider-Man might have appealed, though, if only the Hollywood newsagents had stocked it…
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Twombly was born in 1935, so he was not yet 20 when SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT was published. Still, he clearly wasn’t paying attention at the time. Though young Mark Evanier, who was 11 when this article came out, was having much better luck finding comic books in LA than Twombly; maybe Twombly simply didn’t look all that hard.
Oddly, that Savage Sam comic — WALT DISNEY’S WORLD OF ADVENTURE 3 — is listed at the GCD as coming out the week after this article ran, but I guess it was on the stands a bit earlier than that.
And his disappointment that Green Arrow didn’t have his own book any more is another faulty memory on his part, since there wasn’t a GREEN ARROW series until the 1980s. He’d been a backup feature or a team member for his whole existence at this point. Perhaps he’s thinking of LEADING COMICS, where Green Arrow was at least on the covers (along with the other Seven Soldiers of Victory).
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Yes, but he was cover featured in More Fun Comics for a couple of years.
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