For generations of kids in the twentieth century, few pleasures were as intoxicating as a trip to the comic-book shop with the week’s allowance fresh in hand. Those of us who grew up in the nineties had any number of high-production-value paper superhero spectacles from major publishers on which to blow our money. Personally, I preferred the greater value of Carl Barks’ old Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck stories then being reprinted. But nothing offered quite so much value as the cardboard boxes, kept below the main shelves, filled as they were with previously owned comic books from the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. As I recall, a couple of dollars could get you a whole afternoon’s reading material.
Now you don’t even need the couple of dollars. Comicbooks.com has opened an online reading room stocked with more than 20,000 digitized and restored golden-age comics, with several hundred more issues added every day. Though you may not find Donald Duck there, you will find other “funny animals” — as enthusiasts call them — like Dizzy Duck, Lucky Duck, Super Duck Comics, and Wonder Duck in Adventure at the Rodeo of the Fearless Quacker.
Those already familiar with the all-American exploits of Archie and his Riverdale High coterie might consider such alternatives as Candy, Tippy Teen, and Hap Hazard. And who needs Superman and Batman when you can enjoy the super-heroic adventures of Skyman, Bulletman, Cat-Man, and Strong Man?
Given the mainstream prominence of comic books in the mid-twentieth century, these mostly forgotten publications now constitute an especially vivid — at times even lurid — means of pop-cultural time travel, through their content as well as their advertisements (for itching powder and other practical joke supplies, muscle-building and jiu-jitsu courses, war bonds, etc.). In any genre, whether superhero, western, romance, funny animal, horror, science fiction, they offer a connection with readers of decades past. In their form, as you can see on Comicbooks.com’s timeline of the evolution of what the French call le neuvième art, they offer a connection with even more distant ones: those of pulp fiction, humor weeklies, chromolithograph cartoons, penny dreadfuls, and twelfth-century Japanese chōjū-giga scrolls — the original funny animals. Enter the free comic collection here.
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Free: Download 15,000+ Free Golden Age Comics from the Digital Comic Museum
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
