My first comics!

I have a lot on my mind, in case you haven't noticed. I've also been brainwashed by 2 Guys Buying Comics (even though there are three of them) into linking to them a lot. Like Chris's post from last week, in which he gets far too verbose about Batman's duds. He challenges anyone reading the post to write about their first comic, which was something I had been thinking about anyway, so I am going to take him up on his challenge! Won't this be groovy?

I have mentioned before that I didn't buy my first true-blue comic book until I was 17. I may have purchased some Archie digests prior to that - my sister was big into Archie, and I enjoyed them to a certain extent, so we probably bought them in the early 1980s. However, it wasn't until September 1988 that I bought my first floppy pamphlet - and a gold star goes to whoever remembers what it is!

Okay, only hardcore and possibly stalker readers ought to remember that it was Batman #426 - the opening chapter of the event that changed Batman's life forever: the death of Jason Todd!!!! The story of my purchase goes something like this:

My best friend Ken (who reads this blog occasionally - hi Ken!) and I were strolling through Willow Grove Park Mall one fine autumn afternoon in 1988 (it may have been Montgomery Mall, but I'm almost positive it was Willow Grove). We stopped outside a Walden Bookstore and were looking at the spinner racks of comics. Ken had been a comic collector for years (something he had picked up from his brother - ah, the chain of pushing becomes clear!) and he was just flipping through some of the titles that were on the rack. I gravitated toward Batman #426. I'm not sure why - the art didn't really do it for me, because I didn't realize that Mignola is freakin' excellent, and it's not like it's all that bold and dynamic a cover design even if I had realized that Mignola is freakin' excellent. I didn't have a lot of exposure to Batman, but I always liked him. Maybe it was just the character and the synergy of looking at a comic book while my evil Faustian friend happened to be there to tell me all about it.

Now, I wasn't the kind of person whose only experience with Batman was the television show or even that show and the Superfriends. I knew all about his "dark" roots in the 1930s and early '40s, and thanks to my local library, I had read his origin and the first Joker story in the early 1980s. My library didn't have comic books, but it did have a section devoted to graphic art, and in that section was a hardcover book with all the origins of the Golden Age DC heroes - so I knew all about Green Lantern and Flash and Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman, even though I didn't collect comics. Libraries are cool. Patronize one today!

So when I flipped through Batman #426, I wasn't shocked to see how "dark" it was. Sure, I remembered the TV show with fondness (who doesn't?) but it didn't bother me that this comic was significantly different in tone than it was. I was wondering whether I should buy it, but then Ken uttered those magic words about them killing Robin. I was totally hooked. I bought those four issues, did not vote either for or against killing Jason, and they became my gateway drug into the glorious world of comic books.

I'm not sure why, though. I mean, they're not that good, are they? Starlin's story is kind of crappy, and the hook of having the bloodthirsty fans kill off Jason didn't really sit well with me. I know Aparo is God among some, but he's never been my favorite, so the art didn't blow me away. It was perfectly adequate (which is how I describe all of Aparo's art, frankly - it gets the job done), but nothing that made me shiver. I really can't say what it was that hooked me. Maybe the fact that the Ayatollah Khomeini was in it - what a weird decision on Starlin's part! Maybe the fact that the Joker was just so evil. Maybe because Batman can't touch his nemesis because of his diplomatic immunity. Looking back on it, it's just not that good a story, but for some reason, I was hooked.

I quickly moved on to other titles. First, Ken introduced me to the real star of the Batman universe at that time: Detective Comics. Alan Grant, John Wagner, and Norm Breyfogle were right at that moment in the middle of a mind-blowing run on the title, and Ken let me read a few (I'm not sure why he bought them, because he's not a big fan of Breyfogle's art - yes, he is a Commie - but it might have had something to do with the fact that comics were 75 cents and you could afford to buy things you didn't absolutely love - I know he liked the stories, so maybe he liked the art enough to continue with it). I'm not sure which one was the first I saw, but it was either issue #590, 591, or 592. Three better covers you'd be hard-pressed to find, and the stories (well, not the first one, which is a simplistic morality tale about evil Muslims and the evil American government) are unbelievably good. That last one features the first appearance of Cornelius Stirk, and I'm pretty sure it was the first issue of Detective I bought. What a freakin' masterpiece. It was my first exposure to what comics with a good story and great art could do, and how the medium could be used to tell gripping tales. Breyfogle's fluid style and wonderful depiction of Batman has stayed with me, and for some unknown reason, when most people talk about the greatest Batman artists, they omit Breyfogle. It's a damned shame.

Obviously, my addiction had flared into full-fledged obsession, and it wasn't long before I began to branch out into other titles. For a long while I stayed with the classics - Batman and, from Marvel, Spider-Man. Soon after I started buying both Batman titles, I saw the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #312 and fell in love with everyone's favorite whipping boy, Todd McFarlane.

I must beg your forgiveness for that. You see, I didn't realize McFarlane sucked and was responsible for all the evil in the history of comic books. I just thought his Spider-Man looked cool - very arachnid-like and almost creepy, and his Mary Jane was hot! Okay, she had too much hair, but I remembered Mary Jane from the early-1970s cartoon, and she was a plain Jane. I also remember her from the newspaper strips and reprints of ASM I had glanced at over the years, and no one ever made her look like McFarlane. Yowza! I had no idea what was going on in the comic, having no idea who the Hobgoblin was and why he was fighting the Green Goblin, but Michelinie's story was intriguing enough, and soon I was collecting Amazing Spider-Man, something I stuck with for well over 100 issues, even after they really started to suck. I also found and bought all the issues back to #238, the first appearance of the Hobgoblin. Issues #238-289 form one of the epic stories in comic book history, even though later writers dropped the ball with the Hobgoblin.

It wasn't long before I became entangled in Marvel's mutant books. I suppose anyone who has ever bought comics gets entangled in Marvel's mutant mess at one point or another. Ken let me read the Dark Phoenix saga and most of the issues since, but for a while I felt no need to go out and start buying them myself. In the summer of 1989 we got Uncanny X-Men #251, with that iconic cover of Wolverine nailed to the cross. I love that cover, and bought the issue. This time I knew what was going on, having read the previous issues even though I didn't own them, and that issue, with Logan's fever dream and his epiphany concerning the fate of the X-Men and Pierce nailing him to the cross and Jubilee eventually rescuing him made me an X-Men fanatic. Many people (Our Lord and Master included) have indicated their scorn of the post-Paul Smith X-Men (from #176 on), but despite a slight drop in quality, the hundred issues post-Smith are very good and very interesting reading. These issues in the 250s are really good, too - Wolverine trying to escape the Outback and the Reavers slaughtering the mutants on Muir Island, and of course, the Jim Lee Psylocke issues. Of course I was hooked, and Psylocke and Dazzler (who starred in issue #260) quickly became my favorite X-Men.

It's interesting looking back on the patterns I established with my purchases back in late 1988 and through 1989. Comics were cheaper, so I was much more able to be a "completist" - I'm glad I was with the X-Men, but I rarely re-read the Amazing Spider-Mans I own after sometime in the #330s, because their quality is just not that good. I also didn't necessarily need to buy Batman and Detective all the time, but I did. I dug through the back issue boxes of the local comic stores - there was one across the street from Willow Grove and one near the mall in Montgomeryville - to find the answers to questions I had about the characters - there was no recourse to the Internet, obviously, and I don't even think Wizard existed. Ken was my resource - he let me read some of his back issues, and if I liked them, I went and found them myself. He also let me read a lot of comics that I don't own, some - the Gruenwald Captain Americas - that I wish I did, and some - the Jim Lee Punishers - that I don't really care that I don't. But I gradually branched out into more underground stuff, and gradually discovered that comics could do a lot more than tell superhero stories. I always have a soft spot in my heart, though, for Batman and Spider-Man. They were the first.

This is the reason why I don't worship Kirby and Ditko as much as some people. By the time I got into comics their day had passed, and I never went back and got all the back issues that they created. This is why I don't have fond memories of the Crisis on Infinite Earths - I certainly own it, but it didn't have any world-altering effect on me because I wasn't reading comics at the time. I don't care about 1970s comics as much as others because, although I was prime comic-book reading impressionable age in the '70s (I was born in 1971), I simply didn't buy them. Therefore, a lot of my knowledge about pre-1988 comics comes second-hand, through the eyes and mind of a teenager or adult. It's strange reading about some in the comics blogaxy waxing poetic about Ditko's Shade, the Changing Man or Gerber's Howard the Duck, because I've never read them and I have no childhood nostalgia factor working for me with regard to them. I'm trapped in a late 1980s universe, which also means by the time Image rolled around, I was a little more able to resist its charms. Comics certainly weren't perfect in the late 1980s, but it was still a good time to get into them.

I hope others let us all know about their first comics, either in the comments or on their own blogs. It's kind of cool to read about the first experiences of people who are now hopelessly addicted. Can't we all share?

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