This blog is the project of yours truly, Alan Stewart, a retired librarian by profession and a comics geek of long standing, who lives in Memphis, TN.  I also maintain another comics web site I founded in 2000, Camelot In Four Colors:  A Survey of the Arthurian Legend in Comics, which I hope you’ll check out some time.

The blog features recollections of comic books posted around the date of the 50th anniversary of their original publication.  I began it in the summer of 2015, around the time of the 50th anniversary of my own first comic book purchase, and I hope to keep it running for as long as I have interesting 50 year old comics books to write about, and something I want to say about them.  Or until I’m too old and infirm to keep going, which is a lot more likely to happen first.

From the inaugural post:

50 years is a significant span in any human lifetime.  It seems like as good as an excuse as any to take some time and look back at (and yes, wallow nostalgically in) some of the memorable stories that hooked me on this medium of illustrated narrative in general, and the genre of superheroic adventure in particular.  I’m hoping to entertain other fans of a certain age (i.e., geezers) with these recollections, but I hope younger fans may also appreciate this window into what it was like to read these classic and not-so-classic tales back when they were fresh and new.  If I’m really lucky, I may achieve a greater understanding as to how and why this crazy comic book stuff became such an important part of my life.  If not, I still think it’ll be a fun ride.  I hope you’ll join me.

Since the blog is intended to be a sort of document of my own personal history as a comics fan, the subjects of blog posts will be limited to those books I actually bought off the stands as new.  For that reason, even though I do now own a number of Marvel comics from 1966 and earlier (and am every bit as fond of them as the DC classics which of necessity dominate the first few years of this blog), you won’t see any entries for Marvel books dated earlier than October, 1967 — simply because I didn’t start buying Marvels until then.

And now, a few housekeeping notes:

All cover and interior art scans are the property of their copyright holders.  The characters depicted therein are the trademarks and generally all-around intellectual property of the current legal owners of those characters.

Information about the contents of the comic books discussed in this blog is derived from the comics themselves, unless credited otherwise, and all opinions expressed are my own — again, unless credited otherwise.

Initial references to names of comic book series, characters, and creators are usually accompanied by a link to a more detailed descriptive entry about said series, character, or creator, usually (but not always) from Wikipedia.  I don’t link to such entries in every successive blog post that mentions the subject, however, so if you want to access the original link you can click on the tag for the name in question and locate it in the first post.  Or you can just, y’know, Google the name.

This blog would have been much more difficult to produce in the absence of a number of stellar Internet reference sites, most critically the Grand Comics Database and Mike’s Amazing World of Comics, to both of which I owe a great debt of gratitude.

Your comments and questions are always more than welcome!