I still read the comics. Every morning, one of the first things I do after I check email is to go to two of my favorite internet comics sources and check out the latest adventures of some of my favorite strips (the ones that are still running). It’s a habit I’ve had since I was in my early teens.

Of course, that was decades before my macbook was invented, so I grabbed the Philadelphia Bulletin off the front steps every afternoon and immediately dove into the back pages. There I got lost for a while in the adventures of a whole slew of characters, among them, Dick Tracy, Brenda Starr, Kerry Drake, Steve Canyon, Winnie Winkle, the Phantom, Kip Kirby, Little Orphan Annie, and Mary Perkins. 

I don’t remember how I first got hooked on those strips. It might have been through Mama who faithfully followed Winnie Winkle, a single mother and working woman. Eventually becoming a top fashion designer, Winnie was way ahead of her time: since her husband’s disappearance in WWII, she worked hard to support two kids and her aging parents. 

While the daily episodes of the comics were in black and white, the Sunday installments were a real treat in full glorious color. The Bulletin and the Inquirer, Philly’s two major dailies, each had 16 pages of comic panels on Sundays. Our next door neighbor, Margie, saved me the comics pages from the Inquirer every day.

When my Aunt Millie, who was my godmother, found out about my obsession, she began bringing me the special wraparound section from the Monday edition of the New York Daily News on her weekly visits to our house. It was a full-color insert that featured the following Sunday’s strips. I felt special, as if I were the only one who had a jump on what was going to happen in my favorite stories. I don’t think I realized that millions of people bought the Daily News every day.

At some point, I began cutting out the strips and pasting them onto recycled paper from the trash, usually mail that Mama discarded, creating little books that I stapled together. After a while, I had quite a collection of them. 

Highlights of that collection included: Winnie Winkle shot by a rival fashion designer (she lived, of course, to fight her another day); Dick Tracy and Diet Smith zipping off to the moon where Junior met and then married Moon Maid; the various comings and goings of Brenda Starr’s mystery lover, Basil St. John, the man with the mysterious black orchid serum and the black patch on one eye; and Little Orphan’s various and sundry adventures on the road, drifting from one town to another until she became simply Annie (under the artistry of Leonard Starr), the girl who would later star in her own hit Broadway show.

In those days, a boy didn’t brag about saving comics (unless it was DC or Marvel comic books, those were cool to have), so my collection was a top secret. I kept it in a drawer in my room and only took it out when I was alone. I never showed it to anyone in all those years that I kept it. 

I only wish that I had saved it.