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.

[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.

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

[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?

[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. :)

[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.

[northstarfan]

Fab icon!

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.

[joasakura]

I still have a giant-sized JLA from that era- with the origin of Golden Eagle/Charley Parker ;D

[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.

[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.

[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]

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).

[darkblade]

I'm sure my Dad would get along quite well with most of this Comm but considering the subject matter of many posts would make it akward to share with him.

Dad gave me most of his old collection recently I've been meaning to go through it but I'm slightly intiminated by the dozen long boxes in which nothing is paged or boarded. I'm too afraid the books will crumble in my hands or something.

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

[darkblade]

Vertigo isn't appropriate for 10 year olds? Huh I might have to rethink letting my cousin's read my books then. ^-^

[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.