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Grandma's Comics 3: The Eager Beaver Space Book

DateGrandma's Legacy:View:Attached to Forum:
11/28/139: Grandma's Comics 3: The Eager Beaver Space Book(Blog) (Forum).Eager Beaver.
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It's been almost a month since I did one of these, and that's partly because it's painful...partly because I kind of turned the corner in my grief, shortly after Grandma's Bible...partly because I've been working a lot, and trying to deal with some real world stuff...and partly because I had to create wiki pages for Eager Beaver and The Eager Beaver Space Book, before I could properly do this blog. (I mean, duh, I have to have a forum to post it in, right?)

...These blogs are incredibly painful to do...I mean, grandma was my last living grandparent. I lost my other grandmother not quite ten years ago, the only great grandfather I knew twenty-plus years ago, both of my grandfathers thirty-plus years ago, and the only great grandmother I knew (ever so briefly) even further back (f___ me, that makes me feel old). This grandmother is the grandparent I was closest to, and as stuff finds its way to my desk from mom's trips to the storage sheds of my grandma's stuff, I'm realizing that she is probably the only person in my family who has ever shown any kind of support or interest in my chosen hobby and dream to be in comics...I miss her so much.

Especially when a couple of gems like this pop up. The Eager Beaver Space Book was a comic/ activity book that was put out by Cities Service Oil Co., the year after Alan Shepard became the first American in space (a close second to Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human in space). A comic gem from the company that would twenty years later become CITGO, the story finds Eager Beaver chosen to become the first beaver in space- something he sees as an opportunity to serve his country. It's full of delightful cartoon antics, and a few different activities. Keeping in mind that thirty-two page comics weren't made in the 1960's (thirty-four, if you count the inside covers), this comic is huge!

I was shocked to find that grandma even had these, because it wasn't something I had given her. The comic predates my birth, and she had two of these- which tells me that they may have belonged to my mom and my aunt. Unfortunately, the activities in the books had been done, to one degree or another, but that kind of made them all the more charming.

I don't normally scan full comics, but this was such a delightful find- a comic new to me, that came from my grandmother- I just wanted to share it with everyone. The pages aren't perfect. The activities were done, and that includes a page in the middle where the activity was to cut the parts of a rocket out and glue them onto the rocket outline on the same page. The books got closed before the glue dried apparently, so I did the best I could to separate them, but there was some damage. There were also pieces clipped out of another page, and the coloring/drawing pages were colored and drawn on. I added a closeup from one page, to make it easier to read, and used Microsoft Paint to connect the dots on another page, so you could see what that page looks like when it's completed (they didn't do the dot-to-dot?! I knew they were weird!). Despite all that, I hope you enjoy this gift from my grandma.

Cover, inside front cover, pages 1-8:

Pages 9-17, closeup of info on page 16, page 18:

Page 19-27, dots connected, page 28:

Page 29-32, inside back cover, back cover:

There's one other comic that I want to scan, that came along with this one, but I'll show it in the next blog. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did (although I'm not sure that you could). Thanks, grandma. And thanks to all of you for reading.

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