How did you get started with comics?

[nezchan]

So we're all comic fans, that's a given. We all love words and pictures together, but the question is, how did we discover that we loved them?

That's my question. I wanna know your story.



When I was growing up, my mom worked at the post office and my dad worked nights at the railroad. That left my older brother and myself to fend for ourselves on Saturday mornings while one was at work and the other asleep. So every week, in return for our silence and some household chores, my brother and I got two comic books each.

Being the younger, I always ended up with the standard kid fare of the late 70's. Archie and his spinoffs, the dozens of Harvey books, Uncle Scrooge by Don Rosa and other Disney stuff, Hanna Barbera adaptions like Speed Buggy and Top Cat, and so forth. My brother, on the other hand, got Detective, Action Comics, Metal Men, Green Lantern, Batman Family, all the great superhero books of the day. Never more than two in a row of any given book, of course, so I got accustomed to only getting bits of a story, or coming in partway through. I know it sounds horrible in that sense, but I never felt like I was getting a bad deal.

After all, I had all this magic spread out in front of me. How could I be unhappy?

So that started the love affair, honestly. And a few years later, we were both a bit older and my brother started getting things like Heavy Metal, the big-format Space 1999 and Star Trek comics, the giant-sized Marvel Star Wars adaption that came out in two enormous volumes, and so on. And still later came Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Cerebus, and Albedo Anthropomorphics, which was one of the early subversions of the "funny animal" trope, and on and on. By the time my brother left to go to college in Toronto, the black & white boom was in fully swing and I'd discovered the Local Comic Shop (Odyssey 2000 and Johnson's Books (later renamed Wilkie's Wonderful World) in Halifax, in case you're interested), and I was off and running.

Good times, great memories.

So how about you?

Here's a Richie Rich cover for legality. I had a bunch of these, although it's funny to look back now and think of what a little stalker he's being here.

Comments

[falseaesop]

I remember my first comic, Infinity War #2, summer of 1992. I was a wee lad of nine years old on a cross country road trip with my family. After so many hours in the car the boredom takes hold, and while stopping at a rest area... back in the days when they still had comics on the newstands, my brother and I asked if we could buy some. My parents agreed to get us to do something other than fight in the back seat.

I picked it of course because it had so many heroes on the cover. It had to be cool right? What it amounted to was a whole lot of heroes arguing amongst themselves and me trying to figure otu what the deal was with these two Thanatos guys everyone was so concerned about.

That might have been it, had that summer not also see the release of Batman Returns! Which after my first taste of comicdom got me and my brother to get my mom to take us to the comicbook store... were we soon found ourselves faced with The Death of Superman! Which we diligently collected, and funeral for a friend, and world without Superman, then Reign of the Supermen... I ended up reading Superboy and Green Lantern regularly after that.

So yeah I'm a product of the 90s era of comics. My Superboy was known as 'kid' (I even have Superboy and the Ravers), my Green Lantern was Kyle Rayner, my Green Arrow was Connor Hawke, and my Flash was Wally.

I don't have anything against the return of Hal, Ollie, or Barry (or Conner's growth as a character, though I miss his supporting cast)... but they weren't my heroes.

How I came into comics, teal dear

[jazzypom]

Long story short, my mother and brother.

My older brother just wasn't into reading, and my mother was an English (and Languages) teacher and insisted that he read for an hour a day, and he just wasn't having it. He was too old for fairytales, too young for books with dense prose and no pictures, so she went out and bought a clutch of comics: Archie, X-men, Superman, Batman... just a clutch. She thought that the pictures and the word bubbles would have made him get into the habit of reading - and she was right.

The first X-comic I remember reading is the one where Carol Danvers comes back to the X-mansion, sees Rogue and cold cocks her into orbit. I also remember feeling the betrayal that pumped off the page when Carol realised that Professor X was going to help Rogue, whether she was on the side of right or not, she needed help.

From then on, I collected comics, and my younger brother started collected comics too. My older brother loved Spiderman (collected all four titles), I dug the X-men, Cloak and Dagger and Daredevil, and my younger brother read the ones we didn't.

Comics were brilliant. We didn't get to see much movies (three children and life is expensive), so comics were like our movies - or at least serial dramas (we didn't watch TV in the weekdays; only on weekends, but we were allowed to read pretty much whenever we liked as long as we got our homework done), every month, we'd tune into what The Avengers, Spiderman and co got into then .

In terms of the special events, I don't remember them being so much in the 80s, whereas in the 90s they started happening a lot more frequently. But that didn't matter, because comics were fun. I remember falling in love with the Storm/Forge pairing, and my heart breaking when Rogue had her first kiss and it put the boy she kissed in a coma. I grew up with the overwraught stylings of Claremont, the slick pencils of Jim Lee, and had to be consoled when Jean Grey died for the first time, then fretted over the same thing happening to Storm. I discovered Iron Man, and pretty much got introduced to 'Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night' by way of Tony Stark, but no one seems to remember that scene. I do. I still remember the story with Sersi and when she helped a Thane get his people to rally around to take down The Collector. The story was challenging, difficult for me to grasp at twelve, thirteen, but I loved it. I liked the fact that it made me grieve, love and think at the same time.

I pretty much hung around comics until Image came along. I was in the Caribbean then, and heard rumblings of Image, and because my brother went to a posh school in the capital (you had to be in the top two percentile to get in - if you weren't rich), we saw the comics as soon as they came out. From my perspective, Image ruined comics for me for a time. Sure the paper was better, but the comics seemed more like an artist's portfolio rather than say, actual stories with art and gratuitous ass shots everywhere (I see you, Liefield). So yeah, I pretty much left comics then. In addition, I had A levels and life to be getting on with.

Fast forward some years and I'm pretty much in another country, and hear rumblings about Captain America's demise. I was working then, and picked up knitting as a hobby, and collecting a stash of yarn - instead of comics. The library in the posher part of town (where I met with my knitting group) had trades, loads of Marvel and DC trades, and I started reading - nostalgia, probably - or wondering if certain things faded with time, like magic in daylight.

Soon after I found a store that sold American comics in my neck of the woods, and pretty much nibbled at the edges there, but still didn't jump in, just because. Then, the primaries between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama happened. As a person of a diaspora (for there are many), Obama pretty much piqued my interest, but the race stuff came out and got real old, real quick. So by the time I became a mod of a Knitters for Obama group later down the road, I was ready to spit bullets, and as such, found myself hunting down things of interest - scans_daily 1.0 popped on my radar, and it was cool to see a comics community in LJ. Then you had some iron man and captain america shippers and I was like, "Cool, I can dig it."

But I still wasn't committed into coming back into comics, or even interested in a fandom, until I struck up a relationship with someone called jynx, who introduced me to CD displays and torrents and stuff that wasn't even on my radar when I first got an email account back in 1994, and then from that I started buying comics, because as much as there's stuff you can read onscreen, nothing beats the magic and the wonder of opening up a comic book. Sliding it out of its plastic sheeting, looking at the marriage of art and narrative and dialogue, and having a warm glow of contentment when it's done just right.

So yeah, the deeper I got into the Captain America/Iron man ship, the more comics I started to acquire, and the more scans_daily I read, the more magic I got (until that race fail bit, but w/e).

That's my story, of how I came into comics (by proxy), why I left, and why I'm here again. Comics still have that magic, the ability to stun and engage (eg The Last Testament), which is why I pretty much take it to heart when people who have the opportunity to participate in comics pretty much screw them up (see: Fraction at turns).

[auggie18]

Geez, let's see...


My first stuff was Archie, though the real thing that brought me into comics was Batman TAS. When my dad had to work late, my mom would make me a big bowl of mac and cheese and let me watch it. Actual comics didn't feature until the first X-men movie. I remember leaving the theater and going straight to the Barnes and Noble next door. I sat down and slowly made my way through all of the New X-men collections they had. After that, I was hooked.

[taggerung301]

I really didn't get into comics until I was older

The comics that I did occasionally glance at when I was young were random: X-men, Superman, Batman, Spiderman, etc.

My parents didn't give me very much spending money, and they were rather insistant that I save up what little money that I earned, so I never bought any comics.

A few years ago, I was browsing through the library and I discovered that there was a section for comics. I picked up a spiderman comic from the mainstream 616 universe and read through it (I think it involved the lizard? I can't remember now).

I enjoyed it, but I was a little disappointed because I felt that I was out of the loop since I had never read any of the earlier spiderman comics.

I then noticed another spiderman comic on the shelf: Ultimate Spiderman #1. I read it, loved it, and have been reading Ultimate Spiderman ever since. It was great to be able to start reading about a comic book character from his very beginning.

Now I've branched off to reading other random titles off and on (Batman, Teen Titans, X-men, etc.), and I've really gotten into manga (I've read and am currently reading dozens of series).

Perhaps it's a little strange for me to only just now start getting involved with comics, but whatever. I enjoy them.

(This was way longer than I thought it would be)

[joasakura]

1974. My dad bought me my first comic ever. It was Wonder Woman. She had regained her powers and had to go through all these trials to get back on the justice league. IIRC , she fought Mars (not Ares, mind you) with Aquaman as her reviewer.

I was hooked from then on in.

[nezchan]

I think I might have had some WW from that period, it's hard to remember it all. I know I had some JLA, which I loved.

Come to think of it, I think I (well, my brother) had a couple of the original run of Teen Titans, how's that for the Wayback Machine?

How Did I Discover I Loved the Comics

[star_of_airdrie]

Mine is not a typical one. To say I was a late bloomer is an understatement. It's not like I wasn't exposed to the archetypical comic book lover through my early years...high school... college... I dated gEEks, I married a fanboy. Hell my matron of honor can't get by without her Wednesday evening run to the comic book store at the mall. I had some passing interest in the live action Batman and Superman films, but that was it.

But then there was Teen Titans the cartoon in reruns about a year ago. It was age appropriate for my son and we watched it as a family. From there, I've run up my Paypal account on eBay, recently put in for my first commission, and at age 47, walked into a comic book store for the first time. And I write fanfic.

'all the time, all the wasted time, all the years, waiting for a sign...'

or something like that.

Thank you for letting me tell my story!

LJ

[quicksilver]

I never picked up a comic until I was 28 years old. A friend bought me "The Complete Maus" because he knew that I loved learning about that era in history (WWII/Holocaust), and I really enjoyed it. Then I saw a preview for the Watchmen film, and I was intrigued, so I read "Watchmen" before seeing the movie. I really liked the story, but I still didn't consider myself a comic book fan.

A friend told me that I had to read "Cable & Deadpool." And that was the series that hooked me on comics. I loved the two main characters, and I had to read more involving them, and then I discovered other characters, and I had to read more about them, etc, etc. :)

[northstarfan]

Fab icon!

[jkcarrier]

I got into comics after seeing the characters on tv -- reruns of the George Reeves Superman, Adam West Batman, and the "Merry Marvel Marching Society" cartoons (Cap, Hulk, Iron Man, et. al.) that ran on the local station every afternoon. When I saw the same heroes peeking out from the spinner rack at the convenience store, I had to have 'em!

[nezchan]

Oh, man. I remember those old spinner racks, complete with "Hey Kids! Comics!" on the top.

So surreal to remember seeing early Moore Swamp Thing stuck in those with all the rest.

Though in hind sight Vertigo might not have been appropriate reading for a 10 year old girl

[lissa_quon]

Hilariously enough, Free Marvel comics that came with my kids meal at Pizza Hut. They were badly written and made little sense but they got my attention.

A little later when I was ten or so my sis started dating a geek and ended up laving bits of his comic collection laying around the house.

The first real graphic novel/comic book I remember reading was the first graphic novel of Books of Magic. After abit of time it became fairly obvious that I was clearly reading and enjoying the stuff sitting around and my sis and her boy friend started actually lending me whole piles of comics to read so I'd leave them alone in the summer.

So mainly lots of Books of Magic and some Vertigo odds and ends when they found something they liked that they figured wouldn't warp an innocent 10 year old too badly. I think my first real shot of male nudity and sex scenes were from these if I remember correctly.

Re: Though in hind sight Vertigo might not have been appropriate reading for a 10 year old girl

[nezchan]

Oh, man. That four volume set of Books of Magic, what a ride! What got me at the time was that the Fairyland one was drawn by Charles Vess, who I already knew from his work in Epic Illustrated. It was way simpler and way less surreal (if you can imagine), but man. Nobody does faerie like Vess.

[kingrockwell]

I can't remember how small I was at the time, which puts this anywhere from very late '80s to early '90s, but our local library had floppies. It was the X-Men we always paid attention to (maybe because of the cartoon which would put it at late-'92 at the earliest). I got a lot of stuff from there, like bits of the Psylocke/Revanche saga, Days of the Future Past and the whole New Mutants in Asgard thing.

When I was seven, my dad paid me for some chores by buying me peanut butter M&M's and a giant-sized Felix the Cat reprint. When I was ten I had a paper route, and I spent my earnings on X-Men and Spider-Man comics (this would've been around the Onslaught ordeal and the Clone crisis), but more so on Spider-Man action figures. We moved out of state a year after that and I fell out of it for a while.

It was another library when I was sixteen or so and an impressive collection of trades, and I'd used that and places like it to keep me satisfied for a good many years. It wasn't till a few years ago that I started binging on Wikipedia reading about stuff in comics, and eventually found myself on s_d a year and a half ago. The rest, as they say, is history (as have been my paychecks).

[goblinthebamf]

first "comic" was probably the Daredevil PSA on gasoline.

first REAL comic was the Dark Phoenix Saga TPB which I picked up from the library after the X-Men movie came out. then the first floppy was about a year later when I grabbed Uncanny X-Men #389 off the shelf at the grocery store.

[neuhallidae]

My uncle was the one who got me into comics (and rock music). Both of his daughters were major tomboys, but had jack interest in them, so I guess he figured I was his last chance to get someone in the family reading his collection. I read mostly Avengers from the time I was five until the time I was ten (older stuff, because my mother wouldn't let me touch what was on the racks then, since we were getting into Acts of Vengeance and The Crossing, which she found way too violent). When my uncle and his family moved away, since I still wasn't allowed to read the current Avengers stories, I hopscotched over to reading Sonic the Hedgehog until I was in high school and got bored with comics altogether. Junior year of high school, I got introduced to manga and became a squealy fangirl until around my third year of college, where the attraction started cooling off once I no longer had roommates to squee with. I didn't start getting into anything DC or Vertigo until college, either, and started picking back up my Marvel habit, and spent a summer catching up on everything I'd missed out on (considering this was almost right after Civil War ended, that might have been a mistake). So, thanks to my uncle, I'm mostly an Avengers fan (though a rather bitter one these days), and thanks to my former roommates, I'm a Vertigo fan, but I'll read just about anything once, even if I end up hating it.

[darkblade]

Looking back it probably was inevitable I'd end up in comics. To put it some perpective I was born in 1990 and the last comic my Father bought was either Rob Liefeld's first issue of "New Mutants" a good to get off the train if I do say or the end of Gaimen's original "Sandman" series. When your orally given bedtime stories are slightly abridged versions of the "Dark Knight Returns", "Phonex Saga" and "Crisis on Infinite Earths" and every episode of Batman the Animated Series that you watch on Saturday mornings is given in depth lectures on the characters on comercial breaks there is little hope for you.

The first time I read any real comics myself was in about 97 and they were some horrid Image books that a thrift store nearby had. I didn't look back for quite a while.

Years later Dad see is in the bookstore and something catches his eye. A Sequel to his beloved "Dark Knight Returns", now he had been out of the loop for a decade or so, he had no idea that Frank Miller had devolved into hollow shell of his former self so he bought himself a copy of the trade for "Dark Knight Strikes Again". To say he was embaressed by this so called sequel would be an understatement. So much so that he dug out his trade for Dark Knight Returns to reread it and affirm his love for it. While it was out I read it. I thought it was really good and I could now see part pf what those old Image books that horrified me were striving to be. In the end I read it and let it go.

Then came the Justice League and Teen Titans cartoons. They'd been on air before that but we went for extended periods without TV so I hadn't saw them yet. The Perez Titans were one of my Father's favourite books and his indepth lectures like I used to get along side Batman Animated returned. Only this time I was 16 and better able to aprecitate what he was telling me.

Then two things happened really close together. The Watchmen movie was announced and I discovered the TV Tropes entry on "Runaways". This lead to buying myself a Watchmen trade and every Runaways trade that was printed by that time. Naturally once you buy that much you can't stop. It started as just picking up a few trades of non-Runaways series, E-Baying the flopies of ALL the Civil War tie-ins to be able to better understand the Runaways tie-in ($35 a pretty good deal even if the story itself was wasted potential), picking the Runaways floppies, etc

Now I hopelessly adicted to far too many serieses.

[nezchan]

Your dad and I would get along. I was a huge fan of the Perez Titans, and I actually went looking for back issues so I'd have a full set (paid $20 back then for a copy of #1, which sadly I no longer have).

[skjam]

I was formally introduced to comic books by my older cousin lending me a couple of hers. The one I remember was the first appearance of Doctor Destiny fighting the Justice League of America, and the iconic mask that Wonder Woman was forced to wear. I was hooked for life.

[skalja]

Gosh, if we're talking any comics I don't know exactly when. We've always had Asterix and Tintin in the house, thanks to my mum, and when we moved to Japan my parents encouraged both me and my brother to read manga to improve our Japanese (and in my case, my reading skills -- I was four and just learning). He picked Dragonball, amongst others, and I read a lot of Doraemon.

My brother picked up American comics sometime after we moved back to the States, but I didn't really. The first American comic I can clearly remember reading was Amazing Spider-Man #426, the issue before Doc Ock got resurrected. (I'm sure those of you who remember that issue are wincing now.) The gist of my reaction to the best of my recollection was, "Why are the female characters wearing such stupid outfits? Why are several characters talking in weird fonts? What's with the stupid fake ninjas? There's a cliffhanger so I don't even get to find out how it ends? Spider-Man is supposed to be funny but this is dumb. Asterix is waaaaaay better."

(For the record, if anyone from the "marriage ruins Spidey for the kiddies" camp is reading, the issue has a scene where Peter wakes up from a bad dream with MJ in bed next to him and they talk about the dream. I was completely unperturbed. Spider-Man was a grown-up, so of course he'd be married, duh.)

I think I also browsed through a couple of unrelated Spidey issues -- an animated series tie-in and what was probably Spectacular Spider-Man, involving Peter almost dying in the hospital, Ben Reilly, and the Lizard -- and I liked those a bit better but was generally annoyed that none of the Spidey comics had anything to do with each other, storywise.

I definitely had the impression in my early teens that American comics had stupid stories, art that was ugly and looked all the same, and gratuitously titillating women, because I remember a friend of mine from summer camp showing me some of her comics and me recoiling in horror (I'm only slightly hyperbolic there).

So anyway, then I didn't read much comics besides Asterix, Tintin, and Maus. We moved to Europe when I was 11, and manga is much more accessible here so I started reading French-language manga. After a few years my brother went to college in the US and brought comics with him, among them the first two trades of JMS/JRjr's Amazing Spider-Man, so I gave that a try and loved it. Because of that I sought out Spider-Man when I got to college myself, which led to multiple series of Spider-Man, and not long after that I joined scans_daily and the rest is history, really.

[nezchan]

I find that story amusing, since I'm headed in the opposite direction, leaving manga and superhero comics largely behind in favour of the European stuff.

S_D does keep the superhero love alive, though.

[perletwo]

New Teen Titans #3, picked up at a drugstore rack. I had read comics before, crappy late-70s stuff with art by the likes of Ross Andru or Don Heck, but I'd never seen anything like this before. After that it was all, MOAR! MOAR!

[crinos]

I think my first comic was the one Incredible Hulk one where Rhino dresses up as a Mall Santa and fights Mr. Fixit (at the time I had no idea who Rhino was or why the Hulk was gray, but I thought it was awesome).

I also got the issue of Fantastic four where the team gets "killed off" and replaced by Spidey, Ghost Rider, Wolverine and Hulk. (again, didn't know who Wolverine was back then, just thought he was some random guy compared to Spider-man, the guy with the fire skull head, and the big gray mobster).

[nezchan]

They had some good crack in the 90's, didn't they?

[uadlika]

I'm a relative newcomer to comics, but here's my story anyway:

I've always liked comic characters and movies and webcomics but I never read an actual book until my senior year of university, just before classes started again. A friend sent me the link to the Watchmen trailer. I instantly fell in love with that trailer and so when I learned that the movie was based on a graphic novel I wanted to read it. And I did. My first impression was "wow, reading comic books are a lot harder than you'd think" because you had to use both what was written and what was drawn to comprehend the full story.

After that I took the advice of friends and read Sandman and Superman: Last Son (Batmankoff!) and found scans_daily which introduced me to Green Arrow and the Birds of Prey and the Superdictionary and all sorts of delicious crack.

[kamino_neko]

I've been reading comics as long as I've been reading. I've been reading since before I can remember.

So, I can't tell you how I got into comics...one assumes they were just lying around, or my parents bought them for me, because I was an early reader.

My earliest comic memories are of Archie digests (I didn't even realize they came in floppies until I was a teen), Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew, and Adventure Comics Blue Ribbon Digests of the Legion of Superheroes. All of which left a strong impression on me, and, while I now really only read Archie when there's one hanging around, I still like them when I do; I've been a die-hard Legion fan for my entire life*; and the Zoo Crew is bound to get my attention.

I got most of the first volume of Who's Who when I was around 10, and memorized it, and probably annoyed the hell out of people by spouting facts about obscure and not so obscure superheroes endlessly.

* Although I only fairly recently (well...'the last 10 years' recent) read the 80s issues, for the most part - the only post-mid-70s issue I read until '92 was the 1985 annual. Up to then, it was the digests full of 50s, 60s, and early 70s stories. And after reading the '85 annual, the, to me, abrupt change in tone put me off the 80s stories for a good while, and when I started reading the new issues in '92, I couldn't afford to look back to the 80s, even if I had wanted to. Now that story ('Revenge Is a Dish Best Served Cold') is one of my favourites.

[aeolos_sakya]

Well, technically, I started with it when I was ten. I was a great fan of Spiderman TAS, and Superman's and Batman TAS as well. I remember I once bought a Dragon Ball manga, and there were some letters from fans. My dad used to tell me that, when he was my age, he used to write letters as well, since he used to read comics. Then, I got my first issue, it was about Spiderman. I got some others, but I really never try to check them more. Time passed, and I started to check information about Spawn and other characters who had called my attention. Also, Smallville started, and I found interesting pages about it, and it's references to the comic world (I no longer follow Smallville, but it is one of the reasons that I tried to find information about comic books).

It was then when I started to get interested. I was originally just searching for places to download them, and find scans. That's how I found Scans_Daily. It was around that time I started to get comics again, and I also started to follow SD. In fact, finding Scans_Daily was exactly what put me in the geek world, and I thank it. All of you :)

[lovelokest]

A little over a year ago at a friends house I saw the animated X-Men cartoon and she mentioned that Joss Whedon was writing for Astonishing X-Men. That night when I got home, I acquired them and was instantly hooked.

Now? Now I'm a bigger comic book addict than she is!

[mad]

The short version is that I read a few comics here and there as a kid, and loved Batman as a teenager, but I only started reading comics regularly in late 2007/early 2008.

I read this article, and discovered Girl-Wonder.org, and through that I found When Fangirls Attack, and through that I found the wonderful, magical placed called scans_daily. I ventured into my local comics shop in January 2008 and picked up Booster Gold, Robin (it was the start of the return of Stephanie Brown), Catwoman and Birds of Prey.

I'm pretty much hooked now, and comics are stuck with me.

[jelly_ace]

The earliest comic book memory I had was of me stuffing pages of it in my little toy refrigerator and taking them out to eat. Heh.

Suffice to say, I grew up surrounded by comic books. My mom bought for us a weekly comic book in order for us to learn to read, my eldest brother collected them for a time when I was growing up in the 90s, my sister was into independent comic books and zines, and me and my brother grew up with BTAS and other great cartoons then. Getting into comic books was a natural progression. I was onto manga up to last year; then I watched The New Frontier, and I decided to live up to my name as a Batman fangirl, so I looked for episodes of BTAS, JL, and JLU, bought some comic books, and got into S_D. Batman got me into comic books, but S_D made me stay.

[leikomgwtfbbq]

My grandma got me some old Archie and Casper comics at flea markets and yardsales as a kid, but I never really got into them.

Then, years later, when I was about... fourteen? fifteen?, I was an anime/manga nut, not much into Western-style comics. I went to stay over at my other grandma's house for a week, and she didn't have a lot of channels on her TV. But she did have the History Channel, and I love the History Channel. So I turned it on and they had this special called "Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked." I sat through it and was just STUNNED by how awesome it all was, and how much history and culture there was behind it.

So I started reading comics here and there, starting with an old issue of one of the sequels/spinoffs/whatever of The Crow. Then I discovered the magic of Wikipedia a year or two later and started researching Marvel and DC's history madly. XD And THEN I discovered the magic of Livejournal and scans_daily and here I am.

I think I've got that timeframe right. I haven't got a brilliant memory. Except when it comes to useless trivia. Which is weird.

[roibenrye]

I only got into comics really REALLY recently.

I got into manga in Jr. High and then swore it off after some drama with a friend who introduced me to it. Then I somehow found this community. I don't remember how (it might've been that bored on day I went to the chat rooms of the DC comics, in batgirl and found scans in which someone said like "oh, I posted them on scans daily").

I followed Scans_daily silently until the TOS. I started commenting when we moved here. I stepped into the comic book shop not the first time but the first time wanting to read comic books monthly back in September.

I'm still trying to figure out how to get to a shop whenever my comics come in (and how to fit it into my budget now, being a poor student) but yeah. So thanks to you guys I sold my soul and am now tip-toeing to become an avid reader. My first ever con is in April. I'm excited.

[dimwit90]

Wow are you me? Seriously the only difference is that I was like rabid over anime in high school and dropped it when I got to college. I had the misguided notion that I needed to get into more 'adult' like things XD

[psychopathicus_rex]

How I got into comics... hmmm. Well, the first comics I ever got into were probably Tintin - I have no idea when I got my first album of Tintin, but it must have been pretty damn early, because I can barely remember a time when I was NOT reading Tintin. Big Tintin fan. Also Asterix at some point, although I'm not sure when - it was well after Tintin, I know that much.
After that, I started picking up issues of Donald Duck/Uncle Scrooge stuff - I don't remember precisely when, but it was some time around when Disney Comics was transferring back over to Gladstone, if that means anything to anyone. Early '90's. There were also various issues of Harvey comics, Archie, Scooby-Doo, Felix the Cat, Sonic the Hedgehog - that kind of stuff. I was pretty much limited by what was available on the spinner rack at the local market - there wasn't a comic book store anywhere near where I lived at the time, so I went with what I could get. Most of it has NOT dated well - I thought most of the Harvey stuff was pretty dumb even when I was the right age to enjoy it - but I'm still a big fan of Donald and company.
As for superheroes - well, that was a rocky road. I had a major attitude about superheroes from an early age. Sure, I knew who Batman and Superman and Spider-Man were - a badly-drawn caricature of Spidey is actually one of my doodles from kindergarden - but I eschewed them for reasons that now seem rather ridiculously narrow-minded. I really was a pretty damn snobbish, opinionated little kid in retrospect - I refused to debase myself by reading 'comics' (by which, of course, I meant superhero comics) because they were for losers. EVERYBODY knew THAT. Tintin? Uncle Scrooge? Don't be ridiculous - THEY weren't comics, because they were GOOD. I LIKED them, so they COULDN'T be comics. (I had a similar opinion about Looney Tunes VS Disney cartoons - Disney was better, end of story, full stop, despite the fact that I had barely SEEN any Looney Tunes - and I wouldn't, because I had already decided that they were inferior, so why watch them? I don't know precisely how long I kept this circular logic up, but it was well into the third grade, at least. I was pretty weird back then. I've gotten weirder.)
Then - epiphany! Or almost. Someone gave me what should have been a gold mine for a kid my age - a package of an entire month's output of DC Comics. Every single comic - there must have been at least twenty or so of them. (This was, I believe, during the big Eclipso crossover.) I don't know whether this was some sort of package deal that DC used to do, or what, but damn, do I wish I had been a little bit older when I'd gotten it.
Because I was still in my no-superheroes snobby stage back then, you see. I accepted the gift - I had to, it was a present - but complained loudly about it as soon as I could do so without being rude. It was dumb! It was stupid! Everyone knew that superheroes were for losers! Rant! Rave!
And yet, I still read them, at least partially because I was a voracious reader, and would read anything. And... I liked them. Sorta. They were very different, and I couldn't quite admit that my snobbish views had been wrong, but they were... well... hmmm....
Just at the point where I had gotten around to admitting to myself that yes, I WAS kinda sorta enjoying these, I got home from school to find that my Mom had given them all away to someone else, since I'd been so vocal about how dumb those stupid ol' comics were. And given my position on the subject, I couldn't really complain, now could I?
But the seed had been planted. That little voice going 'hmmm' was there now, and there it remained.
Fast forward to when I was about thirteen or fourteen and saw 'Batman Returns' for the first time. Whoa! It was cool! OK. That did it. I was now officially interested. In rapid steps that I can't quite remember the details of, I went from being interested to enthusiastic to obsessive - and here I am, just over a decade later, an ardent fanboy, and looking into making comics of my own.
In a sense, I think my earlier snobbery was actually good for me, because it gave me a slightly objective distance from things. Comics weren't woven into every fiber of my being from the word go, so I can appreciate them more for their own merits than simply because they've always been there. There's no 'YOU'RE RUINING MY CHILDHOOD!' moments for me, comic-wise, because I didn't really get into them until my age hit double digits.
Anyway. Sorry that this got a little wordy, but there's my comics history for you.