The schedule for the upcoming San Diego Comic-Con International will be the size of a phone book, with thousands of program items and dozens of tracks. On the other hand, the agendas for the first comic-book conventions I attended barely filled a single sheet.

I don’t think I saved the schedule from my first con in 1970, but I still have the program from Phil Seuling’s 1971 July 4th Comic Art Convention, which I attended when I was 16. It consisted of one 8 1/2″ by 11″ sheet of paper, and was folded in half to form a slim four-page pamphlet.

You already know what I looked like in the audience at that convention, but this is what I was watching up on the stage. There was a single track of programming, and looking at the listed items, I realize that I attended every one.

(Well, every one except for the Saturday evening cocktail party for comic-book professionals, as I was but a crazed fanboy then … though I’m not even sure whether the term fanboy had been invented yet.) You’ll note—if you can read my handwriting—that I scrawled in an additional last-minute panel.

Even though that weekend was just a few weeks shy of 37 years ago, I can still (now that my memory has been jump-started by seeing this schedule) remember heckling Jim Warren (publisher of Creepy and Eerie) on Friday afternoon and getting hectored from the stage, hearing Harvey Kurtzman tell stories about that crazy Will Elder on Saturday night, getting an autograph from Kirk Alyn (the screen’s first Superman) on Sunday morning, listening to Gerard Geary defend Fredric Wertham on Monday morning, and so much more.

These few program items on that one printed sheet will be dwarfed by what awaits us all in San Diego, but still, I wasn’t bored for even a moment. And I don’t think you would have been either.