So, people, what was your first comic book experience?

[scribe54321]

What were the circumstances involving picking up your first comic book?

What happened when you read it? Did it fire up your imaginations?

[Dark Galaxy]

My then boyfriend (now husband) handed it to me and said "Read this."

[Linkara]

Mostly it started with my introduction of Batman:TAS following into my brother starting to read Nightwing as a result of the show. I read it for a bit and got intrigued by the secret files and origins issue that showed the New Teen Titans. Later, I picked up a TPB of the Technis Imperative and I've been hooked ever since.

[singoalla]

I was ten and it was a Mike Mignola Batman cover, Batman leaping off a gargoyle into a sunsetty background, with bats rising up. And inside was Norm Breyfogle's art.
It don't get much cooler than that :D

[shrike]

Super Friends.

[Corrina]

Spinner rack, the local drug store.

[Monkey Boy]

I was ten or eleven and my mom and her boyfriend at the time were dropping me off at the airport to go visit some realtives and he handed me 3 Green Lantern issues. I remember reading them on the plane and enjoying every minute of it.

[Lester C.]

I was eighteen when someone gave me Hard Traveling Heroes part 2. After than I learned that Peter David was a comic book writer after reading and old novel of his called What Savage Beast. After than I began collecting his comics and it all went downhill from there.

[WhiteRose]

Spider-Man TV show, followed by the '95 trading cards. I bought my first comic in '96 and still have it to this day. Then my uncle fanned the fire.

[DocAbsurd]

I was reading comics as far back as I can remember. Used to have boxes and bookshelves in my parents' basement full of Golden and Dell adaptations of Yogi and Huckleberry and Mickey and Unca Scrooge . . .

However, my parents' basement periodically flooded (still does), due a rather low watertable of the surrounding land. Which means my earliest memories were of seeing hundreds upon hundreds of comic books floating in rainwater.

My first super hero comic was a SHAZAM! Super Spectacular, #12 I believe. I still have the issue, although it's horribly dog-eared and worn (and taped together); one of these days I'll get a replacement copy to frame.

Never forgot that comic. Honestly, I believe that's what put me in appreciation of simpler and more fun stories, as well as loving the anthology format.



Doc 'With One Magic Word' Absurd

[Infra-Man]

Had to be first grade. My teacher had a few tattered issues of Spider-Man in her book shelf. One was some story where Spider-Man fought The Vulture. Around the same time my dad started renting episodes of the live-action Spider-Man TV show from the late 70s.

[Jack Zodiac]

Learned how to read when I was four on old Green Lantern comics.

[Buzz Dixon]

When I was four or five, my grandmother and aunt brought me DONALD DUCK and DAFFY DUCK comics when they visited.

The first comic I ever purchased with my own money was RIP HUNTER, TIME MASTER (I think it was issue #2 or 3, the one with the triceratops on the cover; like every five year old I loved dinosaurs).

I remember looking at the funny pages in the Sunday paper long before I can read; my father would read DICK TRACY to me.

One of the most influential comics moments was when I was reading a BUCK ROGERS Sunday strip in which Buck and his crew donned fishbowl helmets to play water polo with with aquatic aliens. When the game was over and they climbed out of the pool, the aliens then put on fishbowl helmets filled with water so they could breathe on dry land! That pretty much forever cemented my love of sci-fi.

[OzBat!]

I'd read old Archie and Donald Duck comics in the past, but the first comic I remember the details of, and remember it being mine, was an Australian publication of FLASH. Back in the 70s, that meant an 80 page black and white reprint of US comics... it had the story where Kid Flash first got his predominantly yellow, open-topped costume, and a solo story for Wally West as well. I dug the Flash, but identified with Wally. The next comic I got not long later, when I was 9 or 10 a friend gave me a comic for a birthday present. This one was a JLA reprint, it had the JLA/JSA crossover with the Per Degaton/nuclear detonation cover. Cuban missile crisis? Something like that.

At this point, I was totally hooked. I found a second hand bookstore nearby that had a box of mixed US version comics. Most of them were crap, but the Green Lantern ones stuck out in my mind easily.

And then in the early 80s we got 80page B&W reprints of the New Teen Titans! How excellent was that??

Seriously, you guys growing up with your measly 22 pages, even if it was in colour... what a rip off! We had it really good. It's also for this reason that I'm absolutely LOVING the Showcases... it really is just like going home again.

[Eliseu Gouveia]

Very first comic I remember was a Batman comic.
Didn´t even know how to read yet.
I only remember the cover, Batman and Robin were in the Batmobile in the foreground and there were shark(s?) in the background.


Very first comic I THINK I read (memory too blurry) was a Mickey comic where he teamed with Goofy and a brainy character whose name I believe was Esqualidus to fight the Phantom Blot.
I still remember this panel where the Phantom Blot sneaks into Mickey´s bedroom at night while he´s asleep. Scary.


Very first comic I´m positively SURE I read was either

- a Tarzan Book called The Secret of the Swamp Barrier (Segredo da Barreira Pantanosa (http://leiloes.sapo.pt/fotos/91/cd/56/ec/91cd56ec82b6ba9b1c7ce2b50f5e00de.jpg))

- or a Supergirl book my sister bought where Kara travelled to an island to fight something.
I only remember the red cape and the yellow hair, they completely mesmerised me. :p

[Flamebird]

First book I remember reading by myself was Fantastic Four.

It was like issue 9 or 11. Can't remember and don't feel like looking it up since someone here will probably know offhand making me look senile.
(Like that's hard to do).

Anyway it was the first FF/X-men crossover. The mad thinker and the puppet master team up to destroy the FF by having the puppet master turn prof X into his slave and ordering the x-men to attack the FF.

Once the plot is foiled, the mad thinker sends "his"(actually Reed Richards, but stolen by the thinker) super adaptoid or android(can't remember what he was called) to attack both teams. It's beaten by the thing and the beast.

The other one I read around the same time(also FF) involved the FF fighting Daredevil and Thor. NO idea where that happened in the series though.

Oddly enough, the first book I bought with my own money was Green Lantern.

One of those 80 page spectaculars or annuals or something in the early 70's.

I had no idea who Green Lantern was, but it had a cool finheaded alien on the cover(Tomar-Re) and I just HAD to get it. Blew my whole weeks allowance on it.;)

[elias_A]

Growing up in germany, comics mean four things: Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Asterix, Lucky Luke.
These four are mega-popular. Superheroes could be found when I was young (and still can), but were not so common.

My elder brother had some Asterix and Lucky Luke issues, so I started looking at comics even before I could properly read. When I was old enough to do that, I bought the remaining Asterix issues, even though I had already read them borrowed from a friend (there existed only 25 issues of Asterix yet, and even today it's not much more, but they are printed again and again and again and you can really buy them in every supermarket).
When I was 8-12 years old I spent most of my allowance, as probably most other boys did, buying the popular anthologies of italian Disney comics with Donald and Mickey: Every two or three months a new paperback of 250 pages was published, not counting the shorter stories in weekly magazines for really young kids.

I gave up comics when I got older. The Burton movies and the animated series made me interested in Batman, but skipping through the comics at that time didn't make me want to read them - by chance that was the time of Knightfall with Azbat, and I was bewildered why they didn't publish a Batman comic with someone in a Batman costume in it.
What later gave me motivation to buy my first superhero comic was when I discovered that Paul Dini had written an origin story for Harley Quinn. I loved it, and that started a process which makes me today ride 25 kilometers by train almost every thursday to get to an comic shop which sells original american comic issues...

[Reverend Smooth]

From the anglo market? First thing ever? Elfquest, the bigass black and white issues. My brother'd been collecting, and I noticed them when talking to him in his room one day.

When he stopped, I picked up where he left off.

French market? I'd been reading asterix, lucky luke, tintin, marsupilami, etc, for years.

[Calamas]

In the early summer of ’77 I found I had some extra money in my pocket, and then (14 years old) as now (a day shy of 44), this meant I had to spend it. For some reason I picked comics over candy; and this decision made, I decided to go with characters I had heard of before. Apparently the spinner rack in that particular 7-11 contained no Superman, Batman or Spider-Man titles, because this is what started it all:

http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e219/Calamas/23zFlash252.jpghttp://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e219/Calamas/27zWonderWoman230.jpghttp://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e219/Calamas/14zAdventure452.jpg



The last, an Aparo classic, remains one of my favorite covers to this day.


.

[the4thpip]

My big brother would read comic books to me in bed before I could read. :o

[sk716]

It was a Star Wars comic from a 7-11 spinner rack. No hang on, it was THE Star Wars comic.

http://www.rebelscum.com/comics/mvsw001jul.jpg

[David Bedlam]

*sniff*

Y'all good long deep historys with comics, and I don't!

I started with the first X-Men movie on DvD. Then looking to see what was going on with the X-Men on the internet. It was there that I saw this series called Generation X, and I liked the concept. So I started digging there.

And discovered that I had just been canceled. :(

Which would have been the end, but then I noticed that some of the cast would be reappearing in Uncanny X-Men. So I brought a copy:

http://www.uncannyxmen.net/covers/uncanny/uncanny401.jpg

The rest is history.

[The Beast Of Yucca Flats]

It may've been pretty much a slow & rocky start. I remember reading some Calvin & Hobbes collections and Tintin albums my Mom used to get me at around 5 or 6, but I'm not sure if they count or not. For the super/Big Two-stuff, it had to be the Batman: A Death In The Family TPB-- when I was about a year or two older (it was at a retreat me & my family went to for the summer, and it belonged to an older kid). Jump ahead a few years later, I was caught up in B:TAS; and there was an early issue (#4, if I remember right) of Batman Adventures in the kid's room at the church my Mom took her AA Meetings at. Finally, I began regular reading with some issues of Superman during the 'Reign' arc; namely, the fall of Coast City and the one where he 'officially' returned from death (with mullet).

[David Bedlam]

It may've been pretty much a slow & rocky start. I remember reading some Calvin & Hobbes collections and Tintin albums my Mom used to get me at around 5 or 6, but I'm not sure if they count or not.

Hey! I did that too!

I loved C&H! I spent my childhood thinking every American kid was a compleate lunatic. Of course, I grew up and realised that it was everyone in America who was crazy, not just the kids. ;)

[Shisho]

When I was a young'un, my brother returned from the army with a small stack of comics that he bought (I guess to fend off the boredom). Of course, since he was my big brother, I had to stick my nose into everything, so I picked up a few. In the stack was this one (Daredevil #249):

http://www.uncannyxmen.net/db/covers/image.asp?ID=4706&CAT=cover

I don't know for sure if it was the first of the stack that I read, but it was definately the one that made the deepest impression on me. I was hooked on comics ever since. (I've also had a soft spot for Wolverine ever since, and had somewhat of a distaste for Daredevil ever since. First impressions run deep.)

Incidentally, I still have that copy in my treasured comic collection. My brother let me have it. (What a guy! :D )

[Corrina]

The last, an Aparo classic, remains one of my favorite covers to this day.




I had that book--but my collection of Adventure started with Aquaman holding an American Flag, which framed the cover story. First story I read with Aquagirl. I think it's about ten issues before this one.

[Flamebird]

Wow, I was right about the story, but WAAAY off on the issue number.

Here it is:
http://i118.photobucket.com/albums/o103/flamebird_2006/ff028.jpg














Must have been fun, if I can still remember it after all these years. :cool:

[Gaz]

Depending on what you mean, either the Beano, Oor Wullie, a Return of the Jedi adaptation GN, or a random issue of Nightwing. (Almost literally, I think all that happened was Dick foiling a convenience store heist...)

[4thHorseman]

I was at price chopper when I was six, and I saw a stand with comics. The first book that I took interest in was where the Cyborg Superman decimated the Eradicator. Couldn't pick up that issue, but the following week I was able to grab Adventures of Superman 523 where Cyborg and Superboy fought.

Probably my favorite issue I've ever read, and it will always hold a special place in my heart. Couldn't put it down, and re-read that issue god knows how many times.

[Larime]

The Crow.

I'd read X-Men and such as a kid, an issue here or there but far from regularly. But the book that made me a comic book fan and reader for good was The Crow, BEFORE the movie hit.

Then my friend loaned me a Sandman trade and it was all over. I was hooked.

[Matt Doc Martin]

http://www.plexico.net/avengers/covers/avg236.jpg

I was a wee lad, in Manchester, NH and could have bought a scrap of lunch meat for lunch, but picked up a comic instead.

[ElvisGuy]

It was 1977, I was 5 yrs old and was at a garage sale with my parents. I wanted to buy a game but my parents told me I had enough games, and suggested I buy a comic book from a stack of comics instead. I picked Juctice League of America #128 out of the pile and I have been hooked on comics ever since..and its all my parents fault ! :D
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y38/Gnrationfo/2014-16138-1-justice-league-of-am_4.jpg

[Shisho]

The Crow.

I'd read X-Men and such as a kid, an issue here or there but far from regularly. But the book that made me a comic book fan and reader for good was The Crow, BEFORE the movie hit.

Then my friend loaned me a Sandman trade and it was all over. I was hooked.

SUCH a good title. I picked it up in high school when the movie came out and it became an obsession with me. I was so mad when O'Barr continued the series. It felt diluted after that. (Which didn't stop me from having a geek spasm the one time a few years back, as a lowly intern at a comic company, my boss asked me if I wanted to talk to him. I choked. Most uncool.)

[Weetomuncher]

I remember getting a MASK comic based on the TV show and toy line in 1987 when I was 7.

I read that title for about a year and a half before it was absorbed into Eagle which I then went on to read. I'd probably had some other comics before then as I remember an old Transformers comic, Beano and Dandy comics and comic annuals before then but MASK was the first regular series I read.

I read Eagle until 1990 then quit reading comics till 93 when I started reading 2000AD regularly. I dropped off until 97-98 when I read 2000AD again for a fair while and then quit again about 99.

I got into the Birds Of Prey TV show in 2003 and heard about Gail starting on the comic, so I decided to give it a try and got hooked again.

[Rob Allen]

It was September 1963; I was six years old and was starting second grade in Belleville, New Jersey. In the neighborhood candy store/newsstand, my eye was caught by these colorful little magazines that I'd never noticed before. Whichever parent I was with encouraged me to choose one, and I chose Spider-Man #7. The cover of that comic is long gone, but I still have the rest of it. I learned later that both of my parents had been major comics fans in the 1930s and 40s.

[Azrael52]

Though, to be honest, I did have Atari comics and He-Man comics that came with my Atari and He-Man, I consider my first comic to be The Death of Superman TPB. I remembered being 12 or so, and watching an interview with someone from DC on either Leno or Letterman, and thinking wow, that sounds pretty cool. Then, this kid on my bus was hyping it and had a copy. He told me a little about it and showed me Doomsday. After than, my parents and I went on a road trip in our old Station Wagon to my grandparents house in Texas. We stopped for a "potty break," and I saw the TPB on the little magazine rack. I picked it and an issue of Funeral for a Friend up. I started reading, and was instantly hooked. Somewhere along the trip, I picked up some GI Joe and a couple of Batman (around #500). I read the Superman comics sprawled out in the back of the Station Wagon, and I haven't been the same since.

[Phana]

I think it was probably finding some old Archie comics in my aunt's basement when I was about 8 and reading them. The first memorable experience I can give a more precise date to would be my ex-boyfriend handing me Watchmen a little less than three years ago and telling me to read it.

[Night Swordsman]

Special Marvel Edition #16 starring Shang-Chi,written by Steve Englehart and Drawn by Jim Starlin.

He is easily worthy of a revival series.

[Rob Allen]

Special Marvel Edition #16 starring Shang-Chi,written by Steve Englehart and Drawn by Jim Starlin.

He is easily worthy of a revival series.
Agreed, but it can't happen until either of these things happen:

1. Marvel re-acquires the rights to Fu Manchu and other characters created by Sax Rohmer.

2. Shang-Chi's life story is rewritten to omit the Rohmer characters.

I think #2 is more likely; Marvel thinks of themselves as a source of characters for others to license, not as a company that pays to license characters from others. Then the question arises, if they remove Fu Manchu et al. from the story, in what sense is the result still the Shang-Chi character that fans like us want to see again?

[Night Swordsman]

Agreed, but it can't happen until either of these things happen:

1. Marvel re-acquires the rights to Fu Manchu and other characters created by Sax Rohmer.

2. Shang-Chi's life story is rewritten to omit the Rohmer characters.

I think #2 is more likely; Marvel thinks of themselves as a source of characters for others to license, not as a company that pays to license characters from others. Then the question arises, if they remove Fu Manchu et al. from the story, in what sense is the result still the Shang-Chi character that fans like us want to see again?

Actually,Mavel has done BOTH! Sorta! They used Fu Manchu(who was a GREAT villan during the regular series) in Marvel Knights team book awhile back,and used him again in the team up with Black Panther a year or so ago in BP's book,in which he gave a (correct) definition of his name,and chose to discard it for something with more modern(thou to be honest,i had forgotten it...)tones. Jeff Parker did a similar thing with Yellow Claw in the recent Agents of Atlas series.