batusi Check out this thread: dads & comics

Cool, thanks.

It was mostly my mother who read comics to us kids (Tintin in particular) but one of my earlier memories are of my dad reading the Tarzan Sunday strip to me, and using terms like "kreegah bundolo" for fun.

I got him to read the Humanoïdes associés translation of Red nails (originally published in Savage Tales, and reprinted in Marvel Treasury edition #4) when I was 15 or so. We got a few fun discussions about that tale and Conan. 

Dad also enjoyed Astérix. In fact, he's the one who introduced me to the character. There are a few scenes that he thought were priceless, and I can still remember him laughing about them. (granted, by now they might be false memories... but I'll treasure them anyway).

My dad grew up in the Olney-Noble area, in Richland County, near the Indiana border.  Deep Southern Illinois.  Springfield is Central Illinois, for sure, to everyone but Chicago (everything south of I-80 is a vast farmland, in their eyes) .The family name is Nettleton, which wasn't completely uncommon in southern Indiana, Illinois and Missouri.  He was born in 1931, before comic books and grew up during the Depression and WW2.  I asked him about comics and he said that he and his brothers had the few Big Little Books, but they would read the funny pages, when they got their hands on them (I don't recall him saying if they got a regular newspaper.  

He went to the Univ. of Illinois on scholarship, spent some time in the Air Force, then finished his degree, then settled near Decatur, as a teacher, where we came into the picture.  Later, he and my mother were living in Springfield, while I was in the military.  They had been living in South Carolina, when my mother took a job back there (Dad was retired, by then).  I went to live in Springfield, after I got out of the Navy and they then went back to the Carolinas to stay, while I lived in Springfield, and then Champaign.

As a kid, we got the Decatur paper and my Dad loved Alley Oop, Peanuts, Steve Roper & Mike Nomad, Steve Canyon, and Apartment 3-G.  I mostly recall enjoying Peanuts and Alley Oop, plus Short Ribs and Tiger, in the Sunday supplement.  In later years, he became quite a Calvin & Hobbes fan and we used to talk about some of the strips.  He even passed along a note from my grandfather, who was a farmer and Baptist preacher, who was a little troubled by a strip where Calvin asks what if god is a chicken, so he doesn't have to eat the dinner his mother prepared.  My Dad asked me to try to answer it.  I wrote back that Calvin is not deliberately being blasphemous, he just doesn't want to eat his dinner and comes up with the most outlandish thing as an excuse.  Calvin was a little different than my grandfather was used to.  His paper had things like Snuffy Smith, Tumbleweeds, and Blondie.  Pretty sedate stuff, compared to a boy and his tiger.

I especially love this Calvin strip,as it reminds me of Saturday mornings, at my house...

My Dad never read my comics, but he never really said much about them. Other than he loved to call them funnybooks. Which drove me nuts at the time...and which I now call them.

He did read them as a kid, as did most kids in the 40s. My Grandpa worked for the Union Pacific and brought home funnybooks that were left on the train by passengers.

I read comics with my boys. None of them have gotten the bug the way I did. But my youngest son recently read the first two League of Extraordinary Gentlemen minis on his own. When I found out, I told him about Jess Nevins' annotations and now he's re-reading them.