What was your first?

[Greg Hatcher]

Not necessarily the first comic you ever saw-- but the one that DID it for you, the one that made you say, "Yes. This. I must have more."

I've written about mine a number of times on the blog, so I won't rehash it all, but it was this one. FLASH #178. I was seven years old.



What was yours? What made it the one that was the tipping point for you? Because I'm nosy.

[Kid A]

Young Justice, I think I was 9 or 10 when I discovered it.

[KeenerED]

Hmm...I can't post pictures right now but I'll throw my hat into this discussion. First comics that got me hooked on the medium was Godzilla and Star Wars. My brother got me a subscription to both and I had the first year of them delivered to the mailbox every month wrapped in the brown paper. After some family difficulties my Mom and I moved and I didn't read comics again for awhile. Then one day I went into the store my Mom worked in, and there behind the counter someone had left a copy of the Uncanny X-Men/New Teen Titans one-shot. I read it, and was hooked on the X-Men. After that I had to get the monthly X-Men comic off the spinner rack in the store...and that led to where I am now.

[FaerieGodfather]

Couldn't have been more than three or four, but I remember a comic in which Ben Grimm was away from the rest of the Fantastic Four and was doing his own thing on some planet or another. I taught myself to read with comic books, because my mother would buy them, but she wouldn't read them to me.

[lostphrack]

The earliest one I remember reading was the CoIE where Supergirl died. The one I remember owning and going back to time and time again, was Avengers Annual #16. That thing got surprisingly dark at times and it stuck with me for a while. I was pretty happy when it was included in the old Contest of the Champions TPB. It's still a fairly enjoyable read even after all these years.

[Mormel]

Not a single one, as much as it is a couple of collected editions. When I was little, about 7 years old or so, my mother bought me three collected editions of the Dutch translation of Transformers, spanning issue 44 up to issue 61. It blew my mind, and I was fascinated by the idea that there were so many more stories to discover before and after. But it wasn't until I was 18 that I managed to complete the whole 80-issue run of the US Marvel Transformers comic. :P

In the meantime, I introduced myself to other, 'proper' Marvel titles, and I've never looked back since.

[Neil Kapit]

Several:

First comic strip: Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, Age 6

First comic book: Uncanny X-Men 299 by Scott Lobdell and Brandon Peterson, Age 8 (shortly after seeing the cartoon)

First mature readers comic book: Preacher: Gone to Texas by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Age 15

First manga: Astro Boy vol. 1 by Osamu Tezuka, Age 16

First webcomic: Ctrl Alt Delete (God help me) by Tim Buckley, Age 17

[Muad'Dib]

I had been reading comics as an elementary school kid for quite a while, but the book that somehow I kept coming back to and pushed me to really pursue them as a place for stories above tv was Fantastic Four #315 with Master Pandemonium. Beats me really why that one held me for so long. it also became the first comic that started my "collection" as everything before it either got thrown out by the parents or destroyed by the younger siblings.

[Star-Lord]

Batman Black and White #2 was the first I owned.

[eye of all]

X-Men #1 by Jim Lee & Chris Claremont is the first comic I remember loving. Sadly I no longer care for the creators or the franchise, but I will always have a bit of a soft spot them.

[Dr Will Hatch]

Action_Comics_463.jpg

The first comic book I ever owned. I thought it was awesome(And in hindsight, it's still a pretty good story by Cary Bates), but it didn't really make me crave for MOAR. That was several years later after Batman #665 made me into a comic book fan.

[dupersuper]

I'm pretty sure the 1st comic I read was the one that hooked me, as I don't remember ever not reading comics. I have no clue what it was. I remember as a little kid very much enjoying a bunch of DC Digests, Marvel Age issues, the little books that came with Super Powers action figures and, a little later, "The Last Days of The Justice Society".

[Bradley]

I just mentioned this over on the Classics and Collected forum, but mine was Action Comics 595. I'd read comics before then, but they usually wound up thrown away or given to other kids. But that John Byrne cover, with the Silver Banshee proclaiming that she has killed Superman, with his "ghost" flying in behind her-- well, I was hooked. I'm not really qualified to speak about Byrne's other work, but those Superman books were really well-done-- they entertained me when I was a kid, and they can still make me feel nostalgic now, as I'm approaching middle age.

(With the obvious exception of the "Big Barda porn issue" or whatever the hell was going on there. That... was a bad call).

[Scott Taylor]

This was the one. I read the cover off, literally.

Batman_258.jpg

[Dispenser Of Truth]

I'd always been interested in superheroes, but the first comic I really got was this, I think:



It's in the midst of the whole "Sandman is melting because he was bitten by Venom" thing, and it was creepy as hell. There's a bit near the beginning where he accosts some homeless men (he's kept just off panel), tries to grab some ketchup, and it falls through his slushy decaying biomatter that used to be a hand, squirting everywhere in a way clearly meant to resemble blood before the next full-page shot of him melting and screaming. The backup feature shows a (maybe homeless at this particular point while MJ's apparently dead?) Peter scrounging for work, making it to his job interview only for them to reject him because he's overqualified, and forcing him to get a job as a dishwasher just to make ends meet. I was 5 years old, and it scared the living **** out of me, but damn if it didn't apparently scare me in all the right ways. It also had a line in it that pretty well sums up my view of Spidey:

"Fine! Everything that can go wrong does go wrong... ...fine! Children in trouble. drug busts...the Sandman! Fine! Fine! Fine! I'll handle it all! I'll save the day! I'll beat the bad guy! And I will get to my blasted job interview! Because... ...I'm going to have a life!

It also made me think that Venom must be terrifying, and that Mysterio is awesome. I wasn't proven wrong.

There were bits and pieces since then--Superman and Batman Adventures (I got rid of them years later, not realizing I was throwing away McCloud and Millar comics!), a couple trades--but the big two things to get me to dive in and never look back were this:


and this: