Your First Comic Book Impressions

[Tien Long]

Hey all. Just wondering what were your first impressions in comics. Now this could refer to when you first learned about a character, a moment, or a story. What were your first thoughts about something that you didn't know? How did you eventually know?

For instance, I still remember when I was initially learning about Batman. Now, I don't remember the exact moment when I saw the character. I think I caught an image of the 1966 Batman series. But my education in Batman began at my local comic book shop. While there I saw things like this:



Holy crap, is Batman fighting Dracula?! Is he fighting against some zombies? So Batman is like a monster? Woah, this Batman guy is pretty dark!

Then there were images like this:



What?! Robin is dead? Wow, what did Batman do? How was he involved in that?

Pretty soon, I started to ask friends and neighbors about Batman and eventually my image of him began to take shape. I was confused for a long time when I learned that even though he had a cape, Batman couldn't fly. I thought it was pretty cool that he had Batmobiles and Bat Caves. Eventually, I came to own my first Batman comic, Batman #454 which truth be told was a pretty scary ass comic for a 5 year old:



So yeah, there were all these little bits and pieces that taught me about Batman. TV this, comic shops that, talks with friends, all of that became my first education into Batman.

So how about you?

[DebkoX]

Super confused. I didn't know who Batwoman was, had no idea why Batman and the Joker teamed-up [turned out to be Robin] and didn't know for the life of me who Iron Fist, Luke Cage and Jessica J were.

This website was actually a lifesaver and I am convinced that had I not found this website, I would not be reading. It is hard to enter with so much established mythology.

[Tien Long]

Super confused. I didn't know who Batwoman was, had no idea why Batman and the Joker teamed-up [turned out to be Robin] and didn't know for the life of me who Iron Fist, Luke Cage and Jessica J were.

This website was actually a lifesaver and I am convinced that had I not found this website, I would not be reading. It is hard to enter with so much established mythology.

I hear ya, bro. Websites and message boards like this were helpful for me too. For those who remember, Wizard magazine's website once had a message board devoted to superhero showdowns about 20 or so years ago. Basically, it was a version of today's Comic Book Rumbles board. I read about about the superhero showdown in the magazine and came to the message board. My god, that's when I realized just how knowledgable (to the nth degree) some comic book fans were. Feats, examples, evidence of characters like Batman, Captain America, Wolverine, Iron Fist, and Shang-Chi (that's how I first learned how awesome Shang was), all of these things were posted on message boards. That made me realize just how amazing these characters could be.

Speaking of Wizard, well, that was the first time I learned about Watchmen. (Indeed, for someone who at that time didn't have a local comic book store, I found that Wizard was readily available at Barnes and Nobles, Borders, or one of the book stores at my local mall. For me, it was the only way i could read comics.) I can distinctly remember getting an issue that listed some of the all time best moments in comics and there at either number 1 or number 2 was the infamous "35 minutes ago" scene:



Definitely intrigued with this. Nite Owl? Rorschach? Ozymandias? Who were these guys? Superheroes cursing? The bad guy had won? What was going on here? Of course, Wizard would continue to hype Watchmen over and over until I got a copy for myself.

[Tien Long]

For those who remember, there used to be a ton of trading cards for Marvel Comics back in the early 90's. My friends, sisters, and I would go to the local comic book shop and buy packs for a dollar or so. Again, this was one of the first ways that we learned about characters and I distinctly remember learning about Daredevil this way:



Very interested with this character. I remember my friends telling me that this character was special because he was blind. That threw me for a loop.

Additionally, those cards used to feature great moments of characters. That's how I learned that Daredevil's main bad guy was Kingpin:



Or that he fought some person who kinda, sorta looked like him named Bullseye:



The colorful costumes, the action scene caught in a moment, these cards were the best!

[My Two Cents]

What caught my attention was how the characters came to life as I was reading.
How I over time came to know each characters and who they where.
Now, a long time later, I still enjoy reading comics, but the characters are not
real while I am reading any longer ............. but I manage .

[From The Shadows]

I used to do a really good... oh, not that kind of impression.

I don't know if this is what you're looking for but my first real impression? Before I got into comics I only knew of the big guns like Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, Wonder Woman and Hulk etc. through cartoons, tv and film. So when I saw this strange pair on the cover of my big brothers comics I was very intrigued and didn't realized how many super-heroes there actually were and some were pretty bizarre to me. Cloak and Dagger was that pair that introduced me to the vast and strange world of super-hero comics. Which I would later find out weren't all that unusual compared to other comic characters. Especially the ones from those smaller publishers.

[Tien Long]

I used to do a really good... oh, not that kind of impression.

I don't know if this is what you're looking for but my first real impression? Before I got into comics I only knew of the big guns like Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, Wonder Woman and Hulk etc. through cartoons, tv and film. So when I saw this strange pair on the cover of my big brothers comics I was very intrigued and didn't realized how many super-heroes there actually were and some were pretty bizarre to me. Cloak and Dagger was that pair that introduced me to the vast and strange world of super-hero comics. Which I would later find out weren't all that unusual compared to other comic characters. Especially the ones from those smaller publishers.

Cool bro. Yeah, just interested in people's first thoughts on whatever character, story, event, etc.

[Kirby101]

When this came out, everything changed for me. First comic I sought out to read monthly. And within a year I was an active reader and collector.

[Jim Kelly]

When I was a little kid back in the 1960s, I did a lot of thinking about how comic books were made. And there were no resources that could help me find out, so I had a lot of wild theories. I wondered how they made those little dots for the colour and why did the colour have to be made from dots, why not just a flat colour for every colour in the rainbow they wanted to make? And why did there have to be black lines around everything? I had the theory that the black lines needed to be there because they kept the colours in. If you didn't have black lines then the colours would just bleed out on the page.

It wasn't really until 1973, when I got THE AMAZING WORLD OF SUPERMAN (METROPOLIS EDITION), where a lot of my questions were answered about just how comics were made, from concept to final product.

[Tien Long]

I remember first learning about the Avengers as a team. Now, I was a huge fan of Iron Man and had ideas of who Thor and Captain America were (more on them in a future post). I knew about Hawkeye, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, and Vision. But I didn't know they were a part of this team called the Avengers, let alone what the Avengers were. I remember seeing the famous cover of Lee and Kirby's Avengers #1 somewhere, but still unsure of the Avengers. Surprisingly, I distinctly remember hearing about the name in an issue of Spider-Man, specifically this scene from the end of the Maximum Carnage crossover:



Avengers. That's odd. Weren't the X-Men the main superhero team in the Marvel Universe? Pretty soon, I'd learn more about the Avengers through other means. There was a huge section on them in Peter Sanderson's "Marvel Universe" book, which was huge, scholarly coffee table book that talked about all of the aspects of the Marvel Universe:



At the time though, I didn't really read the section on the Avengers, just looked at the pretty pictures of them. Still, they looked cool.

Finally, what really piqued my an Avengers fan was the cover to Avengers #2, by Kurt Busiek and George Perez which ran in Wizard Magazine:



Now, there was a ton of buzz surrounding the Avengers. People were saying this was one of the best titles on the stands. That's when I started to read about the Avengers and just how powerful they were. That's when I started to learn about how they, and not the X-Men, were "Earth's Mightiest Heroes." For some reason, the fandom treated them as the B-team of the Marvel universe when in reality, as Wizard put it, the Avengers could kick the X-Men's asses! That underdog quality really drew me to the Avengers as well. Thus, I'm very, very pleased to see how the Avengers have become such a top property in pop culture.

So again, little bits and pieces here and there eventually led me to become an Avengers fan.

[The Darknight Detective]

I actually got a lot of information from my father about characters and stories from his childhood during the '40s and '50s. I can recall back in the '70s many times discussing comics while we waiting for my mother at a store. The amazing thing was how many important comics he read and knew by heart. If only he had kept them in better condition...