Groovin' Back in the Summertime: July 1970

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!

Sunday Funnies: Harvey by Stan Lee and Stan Goldberg

If you have a vague memory of Marvel putting out a humor comic about a red-haired teen bumbler and his kooky friends, you're not imagining things. For some reason, the two Stans created what can only be called an Archie rip-off called Harvey, whose comic made its debut in July, 1970. Yep, Harvey was the name of the competing publisher who produced all those Casper and Richie Rich comics. Weird, huh? But, if you were a kid like Li'l Groove, who dug Archie and occasionally Millie the Model (they were my sister's, I swear it!), you probably thought Harvey and his Riverdale--er, I mean, Midville gang were kinda neat-o. Harvey ran for six issues, with issue #2 coming out in September, 1970, then the third through sixth issues hitting the spinner racks from March through August, 1972. The Stans went on to other things (Lee became Marvel's publisher and Goldberg to took his talents to Archie Comics, where else?), so the 1972 run was mostly handled by Stu Schwartzberg and Henry Scarpelli (another Archie artist). Here are two titanic tales from ish #1 by Stan Lee and Stan G. Nothing's too obscure for my Groove-ophiles!