My Marvel Memories: A Personal Reflection on Marvel’s 70th Birthday

One of the things my late grandfather was always lamenting to me was his treatment of comic books when he was a youngster in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s.I started collecting comic books when I was in high school, the mid-1990’s, and my grandfather was always quick to tell me about how they used to be a dime, how he couldn’t believe he got rid of them, and of how they burned so many of them for warmth or used them for various bodily functions and household cleaning.I know for a fact, based on his observations, that several of those long-lost comics came from Marvel, then known as Timely Comics.The comic book collector/reader/writer I am today cringes when I think of all those lost gems and characters and my grandfather’s memories of them, but I know, on this 70th birthday of Marvel’s, that I will have plenty of my own memories for years to come.