Where do I get this stuff?

The question has been asked and so I will answer.

Everything that I post here, comic-wise, belongs to me. The first comic I can remember was a Walt Disney compilation and that would have been around 1965 (when I was 4). I lived in a very small town and no comics were sold there, but my grandma lived in a less small town where drugstores and grocery stores sold comics out the wazoo.

There was one 5 & 10 where the owner would tear the top half off the cover of the books (redeeming them for the cost) and then sell those books for half price. And the comics in this town stayed on the rack until they sold (except for the 5 & 10, where he tossed the old ones in a box). We went to grandma's at least twice a year and since everything was within walking distance for a small kid, I usually came back home with over 50 books a trip.

I always bought DC, because it didn't matter if you missed an issue. I really liked the horror books but my sister made me buy Archie. I could tell when I was really desperate when I started buying Marvel.

On day in the 70's my dad came home from work and dropped three books in my lap. I was staring at three Carl Barks duck books from the 50s. HOLY CRAP!!! These books were twenty years old! Dad didn't say where he got them but that was my first introduction to Carl Barks (I think the first book had the seven cities of Cibola in it). After that, once a week, dad would walk in and drop three more books in my lap. Jimmy Olsen? Detective? Joe Palooka? Dick freakin' Tracy? Woody Woodpecker? This went on for months.

Finally dad told me where he was getting the books. From our basement. WHAT?!?!?! Dad worked with a guy that collected comics and he had just gotten married. His wife thought it was silly so either the books went or she did. He thought about it for a few weeks and ended up giving the books to dad. 600 comics, dated between 1954 and 1964 dropped into my lap.

Granted, a lot of it was crap, but a lot of it was gold. Add that to what I already owned, I ended up buying my 1,000 comic in 1977 (Sgt Rock).

I've kept most of them. After I got married, we hit some hard times & I ended up selling some very good issues for grocery money (Cockrum X-Men for $10 a pop, my old Superman's & Adventures for $200) and I got rid of some books that I didn't want my little kids reading.

I kept collecting for a while, but eventually quit. Then Gladstone started publishing the Don Rosa duck stories and I started up again. These were books my kids could read!

Now the boys are grown and I'm back to buying books.

So everything I scan here is from my own collection, I don't own any softcover/HC compilations (that whey you don't see any b&w) and sometimes what I scan is from a reprint (DC did that a lot for backup stories).