I’m old enough to remember 3D comic books. I owned several and I sure wish I still had them.
3D comic books were a part of the Three Dimension Craze of the 1950s, spurred on by 3D movies. To see a 3D movie or read a 3D comic, you had to wear glasses with blue and red lenses which created an ocular illusion. It was a color manipulation that caused one eye to perceive one of the printed images while the other eye picked up the second image. The result caused the brain to produce a new dimension, seemingly a 3D image.
It was fascinating at first. How could these images literally jump off the page? But after a while, the 3D fad became boring, and it was a lot easier to just read a plain old comic book.
Some of the early 3D comic book editions featured Mighty Mouse, Captain 3D, Jungle Joe and – of course – Superman. The very first 3D comic book, Three Dimensions Comics #1 Starring Mighty Mouse, sold over 2.5 million copies upon its release. Today, it’s worth far more than it’s original price of a quarter.
A quarter may not sound like much today, but in 1953, other comic books were a dime. A very generous allowance for a youngster back then was 10c a week, so it would have required 3 weeks allowance money to buy one 3D comic. Imagine, a whole quarter?
But as I said before, I wish I had kept those old copies.
