GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #414: CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED

To the best of my memory, I had this one.

 

So I watched The Many Saints of Newark when it came out, and I liked it. It was good. Not great. But something happened in it that reminded me slightly of my own childhood. There is a scene where a young Tony Soprano is reading a comic book. It's the Classics Illustrated version of Ivanhoe. When he's caught, he's given shit for not reading superhero comics like a regular kid.

It didn't happen that way in my own childhood, but it kinda-sorta happened. Aside from reading actual books, I had a collection of Classics Illustrated given to me by my paternal grandmother. She was a teacher, so it was very important to her that I became a reader. She was a little late to the party on that one. Mom had already started me reading at a very early age. I've been told that my first word was "book."

My favorites of the CI issues were A Christmas Carol and a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories. But the best was probably Poe's The Gold Bug. That was a lot of fun.

A lot of people know my love of comic books, but they're puzzled that I have no love of superhero comics. That started at a pretty early age for me. My dad tried to get me into them, and I still have copies of Spider-Man and Incredible Hulk that he got for me, but even then I thought they were kind of stupid. I liked the TV shows, but the comics bored the hell out of me. I stuck to the Classics Illustrated books until I discovered GI Joe and Transformers. Those books were the shit! They were so good that when Marvel canceled them both, I gave up on comics entirely and refused to read another one until my friend, CJ, put a copy of Evil Ernie into my hands during senior year of high school. I still don't read superhero books, unless they're written by someone I respect a great deal. I only read one superhero book currently: Batman: Reptilian. That's because Garth Ennis is writing it.

I still have my Classics Illustrated books somewhere. I think I know where, but they're under a lot of other stuff right now. Very hard to get to them. I'm thinking I should dig 'em out again to see if they still have the same power.

Well shit. It just occurred to me that not all of them were Classics Illustrated, after all. Some were the knockoff King Classics. But what the hell. Look at that glorious cover!

Behold! the glory!