Back in the Golden Age of my childhood we never even considered keeping comics preserve in mylar bags with backing boards. We just read them regardless of condition.
I have told you before how I got a big box of comics from the military hotel that people stayed in when they first arrived in Europe or were leaving. A lot of times comics and magazines were left behind. My mom had a box at the check-in so the cleaning staff could just throw anything they found into it. After pulling out the porn, the box went to me when it got full enough.
When I was done reading, I would go to the doors of all the kids I knew in our apartment complex when we lived in Europe and traded comics one for one. That's just the way we did it in those days.
Kids would buy the comics from the store that they knew I didn't have to get at the ones I did have. And I usually had multiple copies of the more popular titles like Spider-Man. I was like a travelling salesman and they knew that the wares in my cardboard box were always desirable.
I would trade any comic that I had read. For me it was all about the new stories. I especially loved the 80 cent 'Giants' that reprinted old stories of the Silver Age from such characters as Batman, Superman, and the Justice League. They didn't tax my brain too much.
As much as I loved to read the DC horror comics like 'House of Mystery', 'The Witching Hour' and 'Weird War', it was the 'Twilight Zone' comic from 'Gold Key' that I liked the most. Those I would never trade with anyone. It was the first title I 'collected'.
The stories were no better or worse than the DC horror comics but there was something about the picture of a REAL person on the cover (Rod Serling). It was like HE was telling me the best scary campfire stories himself.
'Dell' and 'Gold Key' did a lot of photo covers compared to the other comic companies and for some reason those really appealed to me. I once traded TWO comics for a 'Dell' like this one that had an photo of an astronaut on the cover.
