What it is, Groove-ophiles! You seem to really be digging these titanic trips down memory lane to summers past, so Ol' Groove thought he'd share the covers to the mags I remember my 6 year old self getting in July of 1970. Now, by this time, I'd finished first grade and was a pretty decent reader (thanks to Dear Ol' Mom giving me plenty of reading lessons before I ever even started school). Because of this, Li'l Groove was buying more comics, but they were still pretty random--just characters or covers that caught my eye. Some were hand-me-downs from aunts and uncles who'd just finished reading them and just dropped 'em in my lap for keeps (Ol' Groove has a far-out family, lemme tell ya). Bear in mind, the biggest compulsion to for Li'l Groove to get a comic was familiarity via seeing the cartoons on TV. I was an Archie cartoon nut, and Superman, Batman, Aquaman, the Justice League, and the Teen Titans had loomed large in my Saturday mornings, hence the large number of DC's. I was just discovering the Marvel heroes via cartoon on Cincinnati's WXIX Channel 19 through the wild and wonderful Larry Smith and His Puppets show (which all of us kids referred to as "Hattie the Witch" since that was Smith's main character), but they were really capturing my imagination. I looked ahead (via Mike's Amazing World of Comics's nifty Newsstand) at August 1970, and found that of the eight comics I got that month, five were Marvels. Yeah, it would be a few more months before my infatuation grew into full-blown fanaticism, but it was a-comin'! Anywho, check out these covers and see if any of 'em ring any bells for you!
The comics world of 1970 had so much variety and so many companies putting out all kinds of genres. I miss that. We had a slight echo of it in the mid 80s when many independents started. But I think something was forever lost when companies went under and superheroes became the dominant force within the four color world.
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