So I was telling my Dad about this thread and he told me a story I had never heard before, and the reason is its probably his most shameful crime he's ever committed against comics (or kind-of comics, more pulp magazines).
In the mid-60's when he was either 13 or 14 (so 1965 or 1966) he was in a grocery store with one of his buddies and to kill boredeom they were skimming the various magazines that the grocery store sold.
Digression: like everyone from that era, he always talks about how corner stores and pharmacies and other places sold comics on the newstand. But for some reason, certain grocery stores would not sell comic books. Instead, they had large displays of magazines.
Anyway, back then there was like a thousand magazines, more than today, including a whole genre of movie monster magazines. My Dad, a big fan of Hammer horror then (especially at that perfect age of 13 or 14) was looking through a random Warren magazine--either Creepy or Eerie--and was SHOCKED to find out it contained black & white comic book stories. He was then even more shocked to find that his beloved favorite comic artist, Steve Ditko, had a 5 or 6 page story in it. Within, he discovered that you could send away for the prior issues of the magazines through a subscription with the company itself. Having a paper route and priding himself on always having money, he promptly did this. Over the course of the next few months, he sent away for the entire runs of Creepy and Eerie up until that point, which was like #8 or something like that. Over the next few years, as his comic book habit waned for the first time, he still managed to keep up nearly complete runs of Creepy, Eerie and then the first few Vampirellas too.
Then, in 1970 he stopped collecting comics all together. He would not come back until 1981. His numerous Silver Age comics were boxed, bagged and stored away where he would eventually reconnect with them, fill in the gaps and complete his collections.
However, the various Warren magazines received no such treatment. Not bagged, they were crammed into a cardboard box and tucked away somewhere in a very messy basement through the ensuing decade. Somewhere along the way, the basement had some light flooding and all of those beautiful Creepy and Eerie magazines were brutally damaged by water.
It was only in the 80's when he realized what he had and what had been ruined that he understood the true nature of this crime.
As an aside, some of them still survived. I remember finding them randomly in my teens and wondering what they were. They're in pretty poor condition but that's better than not having them at all, I say.
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