Not Brand Echh: "Who Says a Comic Book Has to Be Good?"

 

Click to read, 'The Silver Burper' from "Not Brand Echh" #1.

I have three boxes of comic books from my youth, none of which are in mint condition because when I was young I would actually read my comic books instead of creating altars to their potential value. I did eventually buy those little plastic bag/cardboard backing jammies for them that are all the rage, but the condition of my comic books remain in "well read" condition. They are thus of little worth on the open market, but their value to me is imeasurable, even if it only on the rarest of occasion that I actually pull one of them out and read it.

In my youth I would buy comic books on a regular basis, and my favorite characters would change over the years and my buying habits would reflect this. Despite my mercurial tastes in comic books I will always have one favorite comic book, "Not Brand Echh" #3. By the time they published the last issue of "Not Brand Echh", I was too young to even read it, much less buy it.

I still have the first comic book that I ever bought, which was an issue of Harvey Comics' "Hot Stuff". Around this time, the son of a friend of my parents gave me a whole stack comic books one night after a dinner party, as he had "grown out of them." At the time I had only read a few "Archie Comics" titles, and of course my personal favorite, "Hot Stuff". I was not accustomed to these "grown up" comic books.

The stack was probably only about 40 comics, but he gave me Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Agent Fury and the Fantastic Four. I was ecstactic! I could not believe how lucky I was. That was one of the happiest moments of my life. I read all of those comic books over and over. There was one odd comic book in the stack, "Not Brand Echh" #3, my favorite comic book ever.

By the time I reached high school, I pretty much stopped buying comic books, but I would still read from my collection on occasion. Then in my twenties while looking through my comic books, I came across my dog-eared issue of "Not Brand Echh" #3. I had always wanted to read the rest of the issues, and I had some money squirreled at the time, and so I got the brilliant idea one day to go and buy every back issue of "Not Brand Echh", and so I did just that. It was one of the wisest purchases that I ever made. They are not really worth a lot of money because their condition is not mint, but they are my favorite comic books ever.

If you don't enjoy reading comic books, then you probably won't enjoy this story because "Not Brand Echh" is a series of stories that are parodies of existing comic book characters. They are probably not as funny if you don't know who the character's are that are being parodied.

The Title, "Not Brand Echh" [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ] is a reference to advertisements of the day that would compare the represented product to "Brand X." Marvel, the comic book's publisher, is a rival to the popular publisher DC Comics.