Number 400


The incredible shrinking Sparky Watts


A worn copy of Sparky Watts #6 was the first issue I bought back in the late 1970s. I gave it to a friend when I upgraded to this copy, which I bought at the 1983 San Diego Comicon.

My first copy was well worn probably because the kid who had owned it originally had read and re-read it. There's something fascinating to kids about shrinking down and having the world around you become giant. This wasn't the only time creator/writer/artist Boody Rogers used the theme.

As we find out in this story, when the cosmic rays Sparky has been bombarded with wear off he gets small. Like the movie, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, a popular movie for Disney a couple of decades ago, Sparky finds a whole new world in his yard. He even finds out that as small as he is, there are people who are smaller. You've got to wonder if the guy who had the idea for Honey remembered this comic book from 1947. Who knows? He could've been the kid who wore out the copy I gave away in the mid-'80s!

Those were the days when you got a lot of value for a dime...even though this story is 26 pages long, there are two more Sparky Watts stories to round out the issue. I'll be posting them one of these days.