My Oldest Comics

I'm not much of an actual collector of comics. I prefer the stories themselves to the artifacts they were originally printed on. But there was a long time where those two approaches were one and the same. For most of my years as a comics fan, reprints just weren't that widely available for a lot of older books. So I do have a few older comics in my collection that I've picked up over the years.

For no other reason than it struck my fancy, here are the oldest three comics in my physical collection, all of which were published about a quarter-century before I was born...

WHIZ Comics #114 circa 1949. My copy is actually coverless. It was actually my dad's and I picked it up when he gave me his comic collection several years ago. No idea where he got it or why, but I expect he picked it up just for the Ibis story.

Classics Illustrated #10. This is the reprint from 1947, not the 1943 original. My copy is in bad shape; lots of water damage. It was found by a relative in the back of a garage with a handful of other Classics Illustrateds and given to me. Why this particular one was so much earlier than the others, I don't know.

Green Lama #5. May 1945. I found this in a consignment shop for a couple of bucks maybe 15-20 years ago. (Well before the Golden Age revival stuff that Dynamite and Image have put out since.) I'm not a big Lama fan but I'd heard about him when reading about Lou Fine, so I figured this was a good way to see some of his work first-hand.

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