"Your first comic" thread

[angeltread]

i posted this thread on www.comicbookdb.com forum and it has 3 pages of interesting stories... i just thought id try it out here. i know there has got to be some good ones here at pencil jack. hope this thread takes off.
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just thought it would be interesting to see and read the stories of comic fans' first comic(s).

so here are the rules... post the cover(s) (to find covers just visit www.comicbookdb.com where you can search the database- click on the thumbnails of the cover and it will give you a url to the large version... they dont care about hotlinking, up to a point at least) - tell the story of how/why/where/when you got it and the impression it made on you. you can talk of multiple comics. i have definite first but i feel that it was these 3 that made me into the comic fiend i am today.

so here is mine....
although i have a definate first comic... i consider three comics to really be the foundation to my comic first steps...

Amazing Spider-Man #255

this was my first comic. it came out in 1984. my dad bought it somewhere (idk where) and gave it to me probably in like 1987 or so. i remember looking through the pictures and thinking they were cool looking but i never actually read it all the way through.

fast forward to 1989. i was feeling super sick one night with stomach cramps. my mom was fearful that i was going to have an Appendicitis so she puts me in the car to take me to the emergency room. on our way there i burp big and immediately feel better. we get to parking lot and i feel completely fine. so we return home. while away my dad ran to the store to get some asprin or something and when he was there he bought me this issue because he felt sorry for me for feeling so sick.
Fantastic Four #325

this time i actually read it and thought it was awesome. i dug out the other issue my dad bought be years ago (asm255) and read that one finnally and thought it was even better...

so the next time at the grocery store i actually looked at the comics and bought (by myself) my first (3rd) comic.
Amazing Spider-Man #314

i was amazed by the artwork in this one. todd mcfarlane quickly became my favorite (not now, but definatly back then)...

i was hooked from there on out. i now have over 4500 issues (and TPB, HC's)

[Hangman]

First time I bought acomic book was at a cvs. They had three issues of x-force and i thought "they have three issues of this one,it would be easier to get into this book than the others since there's three" pretty soon i was drawing by own comics and was heavily influenced by Liefeld for a while. it is still my favorite title of all time and Shatterstar will always be my favorite character ( although i dont dig the changes by Peter David)

[Inkthinker]

Hmmm... hard to remember. But I do recall reading this at a very early age (somewhere around 8 years old, maybe?)



What makes this book awesome is that it's not one comic, but several of what the editors considered to be the best of the media up to that time (1982). (-EDIT- I included a complete listing below)

I can definitely point to it and say that this book was deeply influential in planting the seeds for my lifelong love affair with comics. I think there might have been earlier books (I have faint, now-horrible memories of handling 60-era Marvel and DC comics that survived about as well as you might expect in the hands of a small child), but this is the first one that I remember clearly. I'd lost it for decades, recently acquired a used copy at a Half-Price, and it's every bit as excellent and influential a collection as I remember.

I think that, because of this book, comics was never about superheroes for me. It's about storytelling of all kinds, and the almost infinite range of potential that comics present.

-EDIT- Just for funsies, I went and pulled it from the shelf. Here's the collection, some of which I had confused with the companion book A Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics:

Anyhow, at a tender an impressionable age I was handed a book containing all of the following:

Superman (Seigel & Shuster)
"Superman", from Action Comics no.1 (1938)
The Bat-Man (Bill Finger & Bob Kane)
"The Case of the Chemical Syndicate", from Detective Comics no. 29 (1939
Scribbly (Sheldon Mayer)
"Scribbly", from All-American Comics no. 20-24 (1940-41)
Plastic Man (Jack Cole)
"Plastic Man", from Police Comics no.1 (1941)
"Plastic Man", from Police Comics no.13 (1942)
Captain Marvel (C.C. Beck)
"Captain Marvel Battles the Plot Against the Universe", from Captain Marvel Adventures no. 100 (1949)
Basil Wolverton
"Dr. Dimwit", from Sub-Mariner no. 4 (1942)
"Powerhouse Pepper", from Tessie the Typist no.8 (1947)
George Carlson
"Jingle Jangle Tales", from Jingle Jangle Comics no. 5 (1942)
"The Pie-Face Prince", from Jingle Jangle Comics no. 5 (1942)
"Jingle Jangle Tales", from Jingle Jangle Comics no. 24 (1946)
Little Lulu (John Stanley)
"At the Beach", from Little Lulu Four-Color Comic no. 74 (1945)
"Five Little Babies, from Little Lulu no. 38 (1951)
"The Little Rich Boy" , from Little Lulu no. 40 (1951)
"The Spider Spins Again", from Little Lulu no. 81
Donald Duck (Carl Barks
"Letter to Santa", from Walt Disney's Christmas Parade no.1 (1949, first appearance of Uncle Scrooge)
Pogo (Walt Kelly)
"Albert Takes the Cake", from Animal Comics no.1 (1942)
"Feelin' Mighty Hale, and Farewell", from Pogo Possum no.3 (1950)
"Cinderella and the Three Bears", from Pogo Possum no. 8 (1952)
"The Big Rock Candy Quarry", from Pogo Possum no. 8 (1952)
The Spirit (Walt Kelly)
"The Element of Time" (August 10, 1941)
"The Sad Tale of Gerhard Shnobble" (September 5, 1948)
"Ten Minutes" (September 11, 1949)
EC Comics (various)
"Air Burst" - Harvey Kurtzman, from Frontline Combat no. 4 (1952)
"Corpse on the Imjin" - Harvey Kurtzman, from Two-Fisted Tales no.25 (1952)
"Superduperman" - Wally Wood, from MAD no.4 (1953)
"Howdy Dooit" - Bill Elder, from MAD no. 18 (1954)
"Master Race" - Bernard Krigstein, from Impact no.1 (1955)

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A lot of heavy stuff for a kid to read, but I'm forever grateful that I started here. It's a good place to start from.

[angeltread]

awesome story. and awesome book. id like to read it.

[Beastie]

This was the first comic I read (I had bits and pieces as a kid - but this comic marked the start of my 'collector' status).

A kid from my school had stolen it and was scared that the shop owner was going to track him down - so palmed it off onto me. I had no idea WHICH shop it had been taken from (therefore couldn't return it) - so kept it, read it, and then bought about 6000 more comics over the following 20+ years

[golgotha]

i can not remember my first, my uncle was a collector and i was always given some by him. this one i folded the pages back on and he got mad and gave to me.



i loved it because it had a recap of spidey's origin and all of his enemies in it. i then went on to collect myself for years. i got all of the byrne x-men and loved the dark phoenix story. then i became a teenager and became "too cool" for comics for a couple years. then one day at 7-11 i picked up this.



i loved the story and thought it was much more like an adult comic than some of the other comics. i have been reading comics ever since.

[dmario]

1984 picked it up in a grocery store, i was 8. I also liked to read encyclopedias so this was fascinating to me. I flipped through pages and saw Nightcrawler for the first time and was AMAZED. This began my love for Marvel Comics.

[D.C.]

My dad got me this one:


And then later after a comic book store opened on my block (which was awesome), this was the first comic I bought myself:


Didn't read comics from 1994-2004. Think I bought the Johnny The Homicidal Maniac trade or Squee as my new first.

[50%grey]

Pretty sure this was my first 2 comics, only because I couldn't reach the X men at 5 years old at the top of the spinner rack. -_-



My mom took me to my first real comic book store at around 8 ,or so. There were so many comics that made me want to freak out.

But my mom would only allow me to look at comics in the 10 cents room, because they were more kid friendly.

So I think the G I joe covers really got me excited..



and the first real mature comic I got was..




I destroyed that comic, I looked at it so much.

[ScottEwen]

I honestly don't remember what my first comic was, because I've been reading comics for as long as I could hold a comic in my grubby fingers. The earliest stuff would have been stuff published by Marvel's Star Comics imprint (mostly licensed properties for kiddies) like Ewoks, Droids, Madballs, Fraggle Rock, etc. Or possibly some Uncle Scrooge comics. I dunno.

But I do remember the first Batman comic I read, which was Batman #397. I believe I still have this issue in a longbox somewhere. From that point on I was hooked.



I read pretty much exclusively Batman and Superman until the early 90s when the X-Men animated series got me into Marvel. This was the first X-Men comic I read, in 1993, Uncanny #303.



This issue, by the way, (SPOILERS) was the death of Illyana Rasputin. That's why it's all "YOU MUST READ THIS!!!"

[shannonh]

I grew up in a small town without a comic shop and no hope of traveling the distance it would have taken to get to one. But, luckily the Kroger my mom shopped at carried these two gems. The art in both of these always blew my mind. Especially the covers.

[Pep]

I remember the cover but not so much the story.

[ScottEwen]

My first year at the Kubert School, we had to do an assignment with a special kind of board that came with two different kinds of chemicals, that you would paint onto the board and it would reveal one of two different patterns: a diagonal line pattern and a crosshatch pattern. I forget what that stuff is called but this looks like it was done on that kind of board. I wish I could remember what it was called. We only ever did that one assignment on it and I never used it again. It's an old fashioned type of method in a time when you can just use a Photoshop pattern fill, but it was fun to do.

[Teratophile]

My mother bought me this when we left her doctors appointment. I was 5.

[weirdozhead]

Probably X-men at the state fair of Texas



It was an insert in the local paper that my mom set aside for me, along with some similar Spiderman books, I basically learned how to read on comics