Some thoughts...
•These are not the first comics I had ever read. Those would have been the funnies pages of the Ashtabula Star Beacon and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the little comics that came packed with Masters of the Universe figures in the 1980s and Marvel's Return of the Jedi adaptation. Rather, these are the fist comics I read that lead to me wanting to read more comics, the ones that got me hooked on particular series, creators and characters.
•These are not the first comics I had ever read. Those would have been the funnies pages of the Ashtabula Star Beacon and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the little comics that came packed with Masters of the Universe figures in the 1980s and Marvel's Return of the Jedi adaptation. Rather, these are the fist comics I read that lead to me wanting to read more comics, the ones that got me hooked on particular series, creators and characters.
•I know I've written about this before, but DC's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons #2, featuring art by Jan Duursema, is what really got me interested in comics as a teenager. I was home sick with walking pneumonia, and my mom had bought me a copy; she and my grandmother had always bought me comics when I was sick, apparently thinking they were the kid equivalent of a magazine. I remember the cover images of some of them quite well, still, and, thanks to the Internet I can identify some of them, like Justice League of America #215, G.I. Joe #44, and Transformers #17. I'm sure there was a Spider-Man in there somewhere, too.
•While some of those cover images were strong enough to embed themselves in my young mind well enough that I can recall them some 35 years later, none of those comics made me want to read another one. But a few months after reading AD&D #2, I happened to be in Perry's Park Street News with my dad, and I noticed AD&D #7 on a spinner rack. The cast had changed somewhat, the setting was different, the characters had all changed clothes (something that seemed unique to me, given the comics I had previously read, as G.I. Joes and superheroes didn't ever change their clothes) and, for the first time, I found myself wanting to find out how comic book characters got from point A to point B. I started reading the book monthly after that, making it the first comic book series I read.
•The Complete Frank Miller Batman and Stacked Deck: The Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told were fancy hardcovers that I bought in the book department of a local department store, which was a thing that still existed in 1989. Both books were presumably published to capitalize on increased Batman interest associated with the movie. They could not be more different, as the former contained Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, (Plus a story that Miller had drawn for 1980's DC Special Series #21, a Christmas story penned by Denny O'Neil, which stood out like a sore thumb). Rather than seminal, mature epics, the latter was a collection of Joker stories from the Golden Age to the '80s, culled from various monthly Bat-books and not, like, I don't know, I guess Batman: The Killing Joke and Arkham Asylum might have been the Joker-focused equivalent of Year One and DKR...
•The Complete Frank Miller Batman and Stacked Deck: The Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told were fancy hardcovers that I bought in the book department of a local department store, which was a thing that still existed in 1989. Both books were presumably published to capitalize on increased Batman interest associated with the movie. They could not be more different, as the former contained Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, (Plus a story that Miller had drawn for 1980's DC Special Series #21, a Christmas story penned by Denny O'Neil, which stood out like a sore thumb). Rather than seminal, mature epics, the latter was a collection of Joker stories from the Golden Age to the '80s, culled from various monthly Bat-books and not, like, I don't know, I guess Batman: The Killing Joke and Arkham Asylum might have been the Joker-focused equivalent of Year One and DKR...
•Interestingly, neither of these were published by DC Comics, or even Warner Books, which I've seen listed as the publisher of some of the earliest DC trade paperbacks I've come across. Instead, they were from Longmeadow Press. How strange it now seems that bound comic books were once such a rarity in the book market that a publisher like DC didn't even publish their own collections back then.
•Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #37 was the first issue of the series I bought new off the rack after having read and reread Mirage's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Collected Book Vol. 1, which contained the first 11 issues of the series and each of the four "micro-series" one-shots. From that point, I started reading the ongoing series backwards through back-issue bins and forward as new issues were released...based, at first, on whether or not I liked the covers. At that point, the book was in a very weird place, having essentially become a very random anthology series from guest-creators.
•TMNT #37 was by Rick McCollum and Bill Anderson. The former penciled, the latter inked, and they shared the writing credit. I loved that issue, and their extremely idiosyncratic art style and unusual take on the characters. They also did TMNT #42 and a series of shorts that appeared in the 1991 full-color Turtle Soup mini-series.
•TMNT #37 was by Rick McCollum and Bill Anderson. The former penciled, the latter inked, and they shared the writing credit. I loved that issue, and their extremely idiosyncratic art style and unusual take on the characters. They also did TMNT #42 and a series of shorts that appeared in the 1991 full-color Turtle Soup mini-series.
•That Robin trade collects the original Chuck Dixon, Tom Lyle and Bob Smith Robin mini-series plus a three-issue Batman arc by Alan Grant, Norm Breyfogle and Steve Mitchell (That Batman arc was my first exposure to what would become my favorite Batman creative team, and one of my favorite all-time pencil artists). That's eight issues total. And the cost of that trade paperback? Just $4.95. I know 1991 was a long time ago and all, but damn, to think that trade paperback collections were ever so cheap...!
•After three years then, I was reading AD&D and Sandman monthly, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles whenever it came out, whatever Batman comics looked good to me (including a lot of Grant/Breyfogle/Mitchell books from the back-issue bins) and I was starting to dabble with the broader DC Universe, thanks to Armageddon 2001, the bookends of which I eventually read. Then came 1992, "The Death of Superman", Spawn, DC's Eclipso: The Darkness Within annual event, Robin II: The Joker's Wild and, well, I had become a regular comic book reader. It would be a few more years before I started visiting a comic shop on a weekly basis for new books, but, by 1992, I was well on my way.
•Looking over these earliest comics I read, the ones that lead me to reading other comics, I see some obvious, apparently perennial entry points into comics: Books based on a license (AD&D), books that inspired mass media adaptations and, in these particular cases, a veritable flood of media attention (Batman comics, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), crossover events (the Armageddon 2001 annuals) and mainstream media coverage (I had read about both Armageddon 2001 and Sandman in the newspaper; an article on Sandman had specifically said that the Special was a good jumping-on point...plus, it had a glow-in-the-dark cover!).
No comments:
Post a Comment