It occurred to me the other day that there was a whole other category of comic books that I had read in my formative years that hadn’t been otherwise accounted for. And that was comics that I didn’t own but which I was able to borrow and read from my circle of friends who also read comics. In this manner, I got to experience some choice material well before I ever had copies of my own, and so this seemed like a rich vein to tap into to bring a bit of variety to these proceedings so that we aren’t inexorably stuck in 1979 for such a long time.
In my earliest days as a comic book reader, comic books were slightly more ubiquitous. Everybody I encountered that was my age had a couple lying around, including my next door neighbor Johnny Rantinella and the kid down the block, Charles Grella. I never really got to read any of these books except in instances where we might have traded or swapped for them, which happened on a few occasions with Johnny next door. As i got older, the number of comic book readers dwindled proportionately, but the ones that remained were a bit more steeped in the experience. These were kids that had some abiding love for comics, even if they might not read them for their entire lives. They were also uniformly interested in making comics of their own, something that I was doing obsessively during my school hours.
This group include Don Sims, who I met in fifth grade and with whom I was inseparable until we transitioned into Junior High and moved into different social circles, and David Steckel, who was a year younger than me and whom I met in the School District’s Gifted Program that I was a part of in my last year of grade school. David and I remained close friends until my family relocated to Delaware in my freshman year of High School. In both these cases, there were times when we might lend one another comics from throughout our collection that we otherwise didn’t have access to. There was a basic level of trust that the other person would return our books once they had digested them, and to my memory this was always the case. Nevertheless, I got to read some formative stories in this manner, and so I want to recapture that experience among everything else. So that’s what this category is going to be all about.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
Growing up with comics in the late 70s and 1980s, me and my neighborhood friends did more trading than borrowing. Trading upped the stakes of the reading experience. But, like you, having a network of friends who read and enjoyed comics, I enjoyed being able to see stuff I’d never have in my own collection. It all fell apart though when Frank Miller DAREDEVIL became a thing — then we all became hopeless capitalists trying to make a deal to expand our most expensive and valuable issues. The story wasn’t enough anymore.
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I didn’t know many people who read comics when I started, which is why I wound up kinda press-ganging Scott McCloud into reading a run of the Silver Age X-MEN and distorting his future forever. But I did read a mess of comics owned by my friend David Nickles, who had a lot of Silver Age Marvel, and once I met Richard Howell and Carol Kalish (and later started working for them, writing articles for COMICS FEATURE and LoC), there would be times when Richard would hand me, say, a complete run of TOMB OF DRACULA and say, “I need to you write a review of this,” or things of that nature.
In the Before Times, when I wasn’t reading comics regularly, I’d visit friends and they’d have scatterings of comics, and I’d read those — almost always Harvey Comics, so that’s how I met Richie and Casper and Wendy and the ubiquitous Sad Sack.
And then there was that one time a kid loaned me a Batman Annual to pass the time backstage at a school play in elementary school, and I got so engrossed in it I missed my cue…
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If you helped lead to Zot! and Understanding Comics, much favorable karma will accrue to you.
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It’s certainly true that none of the comics Scott has made would have existed if I hadn’t badgered him into reading comics, the universe turns on such minor events.
But in the case of ZOT! and UNDERSTANDING COMICS, I worked in an editorial capacity on both…
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If I wasn’t already impressed with your work I would now be impressed with your work.
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As long as I’m bragging, I named Zot, too.
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I had a small circle of friends from the mid-70’s who would read and trade comics. I recall conversations about Kirby’s square fingers and one kid having a strong positive reaction to Bob Brown and Cockrum’s Scarlet Witch. We traded back and forth but not too significantly. What stuck with me was kids having opinions about what art they liked and why they liked it. Comics had some range so it provoked opinions. So did candy bars but those were different discussions.
I think the greatest trough of borrowed comics I got was from my Uncle who was significantly younger than my dad. His comics were left in a box at my Grandma’s and they included things like Showcase #9, Batman #59 and a bunch of Jerry Lewis and Blackhawks comics from the 50’s. I’m going to his 90th birthday next week.
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“…a strong positive reaction to Bob Brown and Cockrum’s Scarlet Witch.”
The only kind to have, really.
kdb
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My local library had a comic swap bin. I never swapped any comics from there but I did get to read a lot of older comics that I wouldn’t have been able to if someone hadn’t donated them to the bin. I would spend hours at the library just reading those comics.
Early X-Men and Avengers come to mind. Nova, and quite a few of Marvel’s short run series from the 70s.
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I think I’ve had one friend IRL that also collected comics and that was forty years ago.
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I borrowed a bunch of 1969-1971 Marvels from a classmate (that was my big interregnum in comics buying) and that’s about it. I was more likely to be the pusher than the user.
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