My Oldest Comic Book

My oldest comic book is from the Classics Illustrated series. The front cover depicts a smiling Huckleberry Finn, looking very Disney-ish. In fact, he looks a lot like a young Kurt Russell. An oddity on the front cover is that it’s authored by Samuel L. Clemens, not Mark Twain. Mark Twain is the pen name of Mr. Clemens, but I don’t recall any of Mark Twain’s books using his real name. When I searched online, there were issues of Huckleberry Finn with his pen name and some with his real name. Hmm. A mystery.

This is issue No. 19, January 1945. I don’t remember buying any Classics Illustrated comics, and, as I was born in 1955, how did I end up with comics before I was born? Did my folks buy them and give them to me as gifts?

Like many of my old comics, the cover is about to fall off. Yeah, I was pretty rough on my comics back then. All of us kids who read comics swapped them around. We didn’t know about collecting them. We read ‘em and tossed ‘em. It’s amazing any of mine survived. Apparently, I tried selling it to friends around our neighborhood, as I marked through the 15 cent price and wrote 5 cents on the cover. In pen.

I’ve never read Huckleberry Finn, a deficiency in my education, I know. The version in this issue has Huck escaping from the home of Widow Douglas and her sister. They had tried educating and civilizing him, but Huck wanted none of that. On the run with his friend Jim, a slave seeking freedom, they run into several colorful characters.

Huck and Jim build a raft and make their way along the Mississippi River to Cairo, Illinois. Their plan was to eventually “… go up the Ohio River among the free states.” I remember little about the story from when I was little, but as I reread it now, one part is familiar. It’s when Huck’s father (Huck called him Pap) was drunk and tried to kill Huck with a knife. That really scared me when I was little.

Huckleberry Finn is an outlandish and fun adventure as Huck meets up with Tom Sawyer. Along the way, they get in all manner of scrapes as they help Jim get his freedom. I know a lot of the humor I wouldn’t have understood when I was little. I’m curious now. Perhaps it’s time for me to resolve that deficiency in my literary education and read the full version by Mr. Twain.

As the Classics Illustrated series were educational, there’s a postscript at the end of the comic that reads, “Now that you have read the Classics Illustrated edition, don’t miss the added enjoyment of reading the original, obtainable at your school or public library.”

Here are a couple of other interesting items – there are no ads in the comic other than for the Classics Illustrated series itself. Plus, there’s an order form on the inside of the back cover with a New York address. There’s no ZIP code. How about that?

Gonna sign off for now, kids. Next week’s comic book adventure jumps ahead of some of my Classics Illustrated comics to the 80 pg. giant issue of Jimmy Olsen. Dated September, 1964, it’s issue no. 2, and a favorite of mine. One of the exciting stories inside features “The War Between Superman and Jimmy Olsen!” We’ll see you here next week, same bat-time, same bat-channel. Keep reading comics. They’re good for you.