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Bryan Munn On The 1968 Sub-Mariner Series
posted January 26, 2009
 

When I was a kid in the 70s, my little brother, who was much more anal than me in certain areas, collected those Submariner comics. I suspect that, for him, it was the perfect merging of his twin passions: all things aquatic with a pre-pubescent fondness for serial collecting. He kept the comics sealed in plastic bags and spent his share of our paper route money (which I now suspect was more than his fair share) on adding to the collection.

At the time, my collecting was considerably less sophisticated. I kept my own collection of Beagle Boys comics in old bread bags and made bad trades for wrinkled old copies of Marvel's Greatest Comics featuring late-run Jack Kirby Fantastic Four reprints. For awhile, my most prized possessions were MGC #72 (The Skrull Takes a Slave!), Fantastic Four #200, the giant KISS comic book, Micronauts #7, and Howard the Duck #16.

My brother, on the other hand, was working on complete runs of the 1960s-70s Submariner, Black Panther, and Iron Man, the covers of which he would sometimes reproduce using tracing paper and pencil crayons. Those Submariners, the oldest comics I had available at that time, were like forbidden fruit to me. I would steal into our shared closet and secretly crack open the tape-sealed bags to read the adventures of Prince Namor, who seemed trapped in a murky, downmarket version of the Marvel Universe, where everyone was perversely obsessed with water, Atlantis, and New York city piers. A wonderful weird comic book world with art that seemed far removed from the slick Joe-Sinnott-inked planet of Kirby, Perez, and Romita. In my limited experience, only Sal Buscema, Carmine Infantino and Frank Robbins seemed to draw weirder. Thanks for the memory jog.