INTRODUCING BARRY PEARL'S WORLD OF COMICS - PART ONE...

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BARRY PEARL is as fine a chap as you could ever hope to meet - even though I've never actually met him.  However, I feel that I have, via our email exchanges, in which Barry has kindly tolerated and indulged my annoying tendency to edit everything* he writes.  Which, it must be said, is no reflection on Barry's writing (after all, he's just written an introduction to one of the MARVEL MASTERWORKS volumes) - it's just that I can't help myself; I automatically edit everything I read as I'm reading it.  Give me a shopping list and I'll edit it for spelling, grammar and punctuation.  What can I say?  It's a disease!

(*I'm indulging in hyperbole of course - I don't literally mean 'everything' he writes - it just probably seems that way to Barry.)

Anyway, Barry hosts a great blog called Barry's Pearls of Comic Book Wisdom (check it out soon), and he very graciously acceded to my request to write something about himself for my own humble blog.  So, without further ado, here's Part One of what Barry kindly cooked up for our entertainment and edification.  Take it away, Barry...

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Kid Robson is one of several friends, colleagues and editors I have happily met on the internet.  He asked me to write something about myself, so I thought I'd tell the untold story of how I became interested in comics, left them for a while, then had a funny return.  The secret thread of the entire story is my weird memory.  My family moved to Nashville, Tennessee and then Kentucky for business reasons when I was a mere youngster.

The first movie my parents ever took me to was Fantasia, and that's where the memory thread begins to click in.  If I can remember the movie I can tell you what movie theatre I saw it in.  In fact, I could probably tell you on what TV set I have seen most TV shows.  Fantasia began the development, for me, of a love of visual storytelling, be it drawn or live-action.  I love that movie, its colours, its music and its abstractness, which would stay with me for my entire life.

My Aunt Gussie & Uncle Leon, in Woodside, Queens, N.Y., owned an old-fashioned candy store.  They would send my brother and me boxes of candy and comicbooks.  The first comic at the top of the first box was Lois Lane #1, with Lois flying like a witch on the cover, but I was too young to read it then.  Very soon after, however, we moved back to New York, to a strange place known as Brooklyn, and en route my father bought me World's Finest #102 - 'The Caveman From Krypton', the first comic I ever read.  I loved it!  I even loved the Tommy Tomorrow back-up strip.

I can tell you that I had chicken pox in the spring of 1959 only because I remember my mother buying me a comic to take my mind off the itching and to stop me scratching.  It was Challengers of the Unknown #8, my first encounter with Jack Kirby and Wally Wood, although I didn't know it at the time.  That's when I fell in love with comics.  I then began to use my aunt’s store as a library, reading dozens of comics several times a month!  But nothing was as good as Challengers…. until Marvel got started.

At first, being so young, I thought that Charlton, ACG and Marvel (which wasn't called Marvel then) were all the same company.  This was because their stories were similar, they often used the same artists and their comics weren't as brightly coloured as DC's.  But soon Marvel began to distinguish itself, first in better anthology stories and later with great superheroes. I loved them, having finally found stories as well-written and drawn as the Challengers.  Of course, those first ones were the Fantastic Four, also drawn by Jack Kirby (who I still didn’t know at the time).

I shared a small room, no bigger than four single beds, with my brother.  There was only so much space to store all my comics, baseball cards and records.  My mother would let me know when I got to my limits by throwing out my comics - including Lois Lane #1 and the Brave and the Bold #s 28-30 (Justice League).   So I had to decide which ones to keep.   Let me tell you the reasons I decided to keep my Marvels.

Firstly, I really, really liked them.  Secondly, Marvels had continued stories and a growing continuity.  It was great fun to pull out a bunch of comics and read them all in order.  But there were other more important reasons.  I was there at the beginning.  There is a 'completist' gene that many collectors have and I knew that I could never have all the Superman, Batman, and Archie comics.  ( I started with World’s Finest #102 and Superman #132.)  However, I could have all the Marvels.  Fantastic Four #1; the first Spider-Man (Amazing Fantasy #15); The first Thor (Journey Into Mystery #83), etc.!  I loved that I was there at the beginning!

Finally, 50 years ago, I had a long stay in the hospital.  I wrote Stan Lee a fan letter with a funny parody poem, 'The Rhyme of the Sub-Mariner'.  Stan and Flo Steinberg, his assistant, sent me a nice letter (above) and stack of comics for me to read.  I was hooked.

To thank them, I started writing what would eventually become 'The Essential Marvel Age Reference Book'.  I took every Marvel comicbook, as it came out, and wrote an index card featuring its plot, references, credits, dates, history and what-not.  I kept a separate file of cards for all the guest appearances.  I also kept many pages of notes and quotes that became the first part of my book.

By 1977, Stan, Kirby, Ditko and several other great contributors had either already left Marvel or had begun to leave - and so did I.  My aunt’s candy store also closed, so no more library.  I estimated at that time I had read about 15,000 comics, most of them from my aunt’s store.  The stories and even the printing were not what they used to be.  I now needed a typist to retype my book and I needed illustrations.  So I put everything aside and gave up on current comics.  I still kept up the hunt for older ones though, which I enjoyed more.

I was very bad with computers and never got the hang of DOS, but when Windows came out with pictures, icon and sounds, it clicked into my memory, just like movies and comics did.   So, at the turn of the millennium, after them being in storage for a quarter of a century, I took out my comics.  What prompted that you may wonder?   I had gone to a comicbook store just to take a look around and saw that there were books such as 'The Justice League Companion' and the 'Warren Companion'.  I thought that if there should ever be a 'Marvel Companion' and it wasn't written by me after all that work, I’d hate myself!  So I learned desktop publishing and started working on my book!

 

The white story cards and the orange tabs were 'merged' to become this sort of page (above)
from my book.  Below you will note that I typed character appearances onto blue cards and
they became my character map pages.  I did this every month as the comics actually came
out - and as I read them for over 15 years.

When I finished my first draft, I sent a copy to Stan Lee, complete with a photocopy of the letter he'd sent me a half a century ago.  And he sent me a wonderful reply.  He was also to say that he was so glad he sent me the comics and he made me an F.F.F., a Fearless Front-Facer, the highest rank of Marvel.  We also began emailing, which we do to this day.

And that leads to a funny part of the story.

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And be sure to join us for that funny story (and a lot more besides) when we publish Part Two of Barry's fascinating reminiscences in our very next blog post - at this link!

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