Saturday, October 16, 2010

My Favorite Comic Books: King Kong (Dredging Up The Past Part V)

(I've written, and will continue to write in the future, quite a bit on this blog about my favorite comics, especially the comics I first encountered and loved as a child.  Here is one of the earliest such posts from back in the early days of 2006 when I was doing The Word From On High.)    
So, I was scanning some other blogs to try and find something to write about and I came across a recent entry from Mark Evanier's News From ME in which Mark reminisces about the over-sized "Treasury Edition" comics of the 70's. Y'know, I loved those books, mainly because they were BIG, just like the pages of the newspaper Sunday comics sections that first sparked my love for the comics medium. Plus, being mostly reprints, they gave me a chance to see classic comics stories that I was too young to have seen the first time out, such as the origin of the Earth-2 Flash, Batman's first clashes with arch-foe Ra's Al Ghul, Superman's races with the Flash, and my all-time favorite tale of Marvel's super-team The Avengers, issue #58's "Even An Android Can Cry."
My favorite book in this format, however, was a Gold Key adaptation of the original King Kong. I came home from school one day to find it lying on my bed. My dad, despite his frequent bitching that I spent too much time reading comics, had bought it for me, and for that reason, along with my inexplicable affection for giant ape stories, it was one of my favorite comics.
Unortunately, I left most of my comics at home in the care of my brother when I went off to pursue my short-lived radio career in Kane, Pennsylvania,and when I retrieved my collection I discovered that almost half of them were missing; lost or stolen--we never found out which. I've since purchased new copies of most of the lost comics.
But not Kong. That book was irreplaceable.

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