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Earlier this week, I shared an artist-on-artist conversation with comic book legend Mark Waid (Kingdom Come amongst others). You can read it here. That chat inspired this week’s question. Let me explain…
If you love comic books, I expect there’s a seminal experience that defined your love of the medium. That single issue or limited series or stand-alone graphic novel that somehow ended up in your hands and, voila, your life was never the same. For me, this was Batman #404 - #407, otherwise known as Batman: Year One. Written by Frank Miller and illustrated by David Mazzucchelli, it transformed me into an obsessive Batman reader for close to a decade and ultimately led to me briefly opening my own comic book shop back in the early Nineties. I even hoped to become a comic book artist myself and eventually got the opportunity to write my own graphic novels. All because a friend shoved the trade paperback in my hands and told me to read.
So, that’s my question for you this week: What comic book made you fall in love with reading comics (and why)?
Thank you for reading 5AM StoryTalk. This post is public so feel free to share it.
Candidly, GR #71 is not remotely of the same caliber as Batman Year One (a comic so magnificent that I use it to teach my UCLA comics class)...but for an 11-year-old kid, that Ghost Rider comic was magic. I enjoy your Substack a lot -- it's very inspiring!
Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow. Then Alan Moore’s work. I was in my forties before I started reading Graphic novels. I really didn’t like comics in my youth. The art bothered me.
Art comes to us in its own time, I find. Musicians I hated in my teens I rediscovered in my thirties or forties. Fine art, movies, it's all the same for me. I've learned not to fight it.
Carl Barks' Donald Duck newsprint comic strips from BP gas stations in the late 1970s/early 1980s. I never could get all of them and they were recently reprinted by Fantagraphics, which I have been assidiously collecting!
After that, Tintin and Asterix. Then a full-on onslaught as I consumed Marvel & DC. To this day, I have been trying to find the collected edition of Starman & Superman vs Mongul from 1981. It was black and white and complete, but I can only find this in colorized single editions (which I purchased a few years ago).
Yeah, "A Death in the Family" arrived in my life shortly after YEAR ONE. I was on a Batman bender by that point, in for both the light and dark stuff. THEN they killed Robin and my brain melted. First lesson in my life about stakes, really. If Robin could die, anything could happen.
Michael Dolce and I have very similar answers!! I had been given a handful of comics up until this time, but none of them clicked until i bought a copy of TMNT Adventures from Archie. I believe the issue was #13! I begged my grandmother for a subscription and subscribed to TMNT from Archie for a couple of years.
That lit the spark, but what really took it to the next level was TODD MCFARLANE'S Spider-Man #13. I missed out at the beginning of the run, but in this issue Spidey dons his black costume once again to go into the sewers of New York... And that did it. That locked me in as a diehard comics fan. It's 30 something years later and I'm still regularly reading.
That SPIDER-MAN #13 cover still lives in my imagination. It's a mystery as to why, too. What I mean is, it's not extraordinary in its composition at all. It's just a common action shot. Some very detailed webs. That's it. And yet, it's so startling. Maybe it's where it arrived in our lives that really does it. I wonder if "kids" today would even react to it out of context.
Reading all the usual superhero comics in the late 70s and early 80s was all fine and dandy, although a lot of those seemed to be more out of a sense of duty to keep up with the series than anything else, but once I picked up the striking Swamp Thing issue 29, "Love & Death", off the Becker's convenience rack and took it home, things were never the same. It shook me to my core. I didn't know comics could be that like that; abstract, intense, literate; terrifying. It made everything I'd read up until that point seem like little kid stuff, and it was already halfway through a storyline I had no context for, with characters I knew nothing about!
I trekked on the subway to a downtown Toronto comic store with my entire paper route savings the very next day to not only try to find the rest of the storyline, but anything else I could find with Alan Moore's name on the cover. It made me a fan of him, and the possibilities in comics, for life.
And wow, Daredevil: Born Again was right around the corner, and Ronin, and Batman: Year One, Dark Knight Returns Watchmen, V For Vendetta, Love and Rockets...what a time to be a comic fan!
What blows my mind is that I was barely a teenager when the Eighties ended, and yet it's primarily Eighties comics that shaped me in the Nineties. I haven't considered that until just now, in fact. I think maybe that decade's output speaks more to me than any other. I have to go try to work out why that is now. Thanks for jogging my memory. And yes, what a time to be a comics fan!
First comic i ever bought was TMNT #5 (Archie edition). First comic that made me get into Marvel was Spectacular Spider-Man #157. Favorite comic series of all time though is Stray Bullets by David Lapham
The Asterix and Tintin books did it for me. The humor, satire and adventure in those stories are replicated by the similar ones in my currently-written fiction.
It took me awhile to learn how to read comics, because I read a lot of text so I would tear through the pages only reading the speech bubbles and glancing at the imagery. I had to learn how to slow down and let the imagery and compositions guide my pacing, take time with the details.
I'd say Transmetropolitan helped the most because I enjoyed all the punk transhumanist details in the street views and backgrounds, as well as there was enough text to keep me on pages long enough to notice.
Daredevil #268! I was 14 years old…DD takes some vigilante justice out on a mobster who was abusing a dog (and doing many other bad things). The art by JR JR is still breathtaking to me and the stand alone issue tells a complete story. I have a copy framed and hanging in my office. Second place is “Golgo 13 #1: The Impossible Hit”. Sequential storytelling at its finest!
God, I think I remember that DAREDEVIL issue, though it's been a long time. Haven't read GOLGO 13, though. Thanks for sharing! I'm a big JR JR fan. I've known him for about a decade now. Have you seen the artist-on-artist conversation I had with him about his father and his own work? Shared it back in December. That was a treat.
Most of the Golgo 13 stuff was good…most very wordy. But that issue in particular was almost a silent comic. Each panel was a meticulous breakdown of the action. I read it all the time because I enjoy it so much. I will have to check out your JR JR interview. Have always been a fan! Thanks for letting me know. I’m assuming it’s here on Substack somewhere?
Yeah, it's under the Artist-on-Artist Interviews button. But here it is, too. I've chatted with a bunch of comic book giants, if you go wandering that button: Matt Fraction, Ed Brubaker, Christian Ward, Marc Guggenheim, Charles Soule, amongst others. Upcoming are Colleen Doran and Kelly Sue DeConnick. https://colehaddon.substack.com/p/q-and-a-comic-book-legend-john-romita
Bit late but for me it's been Star Wars comics. Without that franchise I don't know how much I would've dipped into the medium. I had some 2003 Clone Wars ones and a Jango Fett novel when I was younger, and was lucky enough to have a dad who also liked collecting so we started getting all the new canon Marvel, IDW and now Dark Horse stuff
MAUS is greuling and wonderful; I first read it for a university class on intergenerational trauma. I'm about to start WATCHMEN, which I've read six or seven times now. Been a while for V FOR VENDETTA, but, God, I think about it all the time.
okay so this is random but I grew up with the hippies and loved the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Mostly for Fat Freddys Cat. I obviously didn’t take them to school. Close second was Archie.
My Dad would bring us Beano, Dandy & Sparky once a week and me and my brothers would battle for our favourites, so I liked comics from before I could even read the words. But falling in love, after flirtations with super heroes, was for issue 1 of Howard the Duck. I even managed to subscribe by (parents) cheque so it came all the way to me in the UK every month. I still have the complete run (& Treasury edition). I fell in love with the cigar chomping wise quacking fowl (not to mention hairless ape Bev). Gerber & Colan created a near perfect comic with satire, puns, slapstick, action, romance and even an occasional muck monster.
It’s kinda dated now but the original run is one of a kind. Comics have took me on quite a journey from the Bash Street Kids in the Beano to Maggie & Hopey in Love & Rockets.
I've got to give credit to Mark Waid's own The Flash (vol. 2) #153. I was getting back into comics after a some time away and picked up a bunch of random issues at my LCS. #153 was in the middle of an ongoing storyline, but it gave me enough to understand The Flash and just grabbed my brain and didn't let go. Every issue is someone's first!
Then New X-Men #114 and the whole "E is for Extinction" arc supercharged my comics love, and the rest is history (and a lot of longboxes).
A book-and-record set given as a Christmas gift turned me on to both comics AND horror. It was a WERWOLF BY NIGHT story, and Young Me was blown away by the action (a beat cop taking shots at a fleeing werewolf!) as well as the teenage angst and family drama. And by some weird twist of fate, one of the first comic books I wrote for Marvel happened to be a WEREWOLF BY NIGHT story (published in their MAX line back in the late aughts).
Duane, when I was 7, I was desperate for the Werewolf By Night Power Records 45 -- but alas I had to settle with The Monster of Frankenstein one, which in hindsight wasn't too shabby with Mike Ploog art!
I love the symmetry of this anecdote, Duane. Also, I love that WEREWOLF BY NIGHT is your gateway drug here. Such an under-appreciated property by most readers over the years, I think. What did you think of the MCU adaptation?
I loved it, mostly because it was very much NOT what I had expected. The thing was lean, funny, old school and managed to surprise me at every turn. (And it featured another under-appreciated Marvel character, MAN-THING.) I want more of these specials. : )
Yes, I'd be much more excited about specials like these than a lot of what I'm getting from Marvel TV. Not that they're not delivering. I just don't have the time and, frankly, don't have the time to care about that much narrative. These little specials are a brilliant way to fix that. I'd prioritize a WEREWOLF BY NIGHT/MAN-THING Halloween special every year, for example.
Years later while visiting a friend in London, he showed me a couple of TPB of Preacher and Sandman. That's when I realized there's so much more to this.
I had that issue once upon a time - in English, though. Those old STAR WARS comics were such a delight as a kid, even if I came to them late and had to pick the line up in pieces.
Do you recommend reading them even now when I'm 43? I only read this one issue due to Israel's lack of comic books at the time, so I only have this vivid memory of the cover and nothing about plot, charcters and world building.
I’m not sure, actually. Nostalgia definitely plays a part in my love for those comics, but I wouldn’t necessarily say they were sophisticated storytelling. If you don’t have that same sense of childhood warmth, they may not translate very well to adulthood.
Well, based on your recommendation I began reading the Indiana Jones comic and so far it's just the right blend of awesome and silly I need at the moment, so I might read the Star Wars green bunny comic after that. Thanks a lot!
I’m glad you’re enjoying them. Awesome and silly are good descriptors. I’m going back four decades now, but I do remember a big quality drop after the first fifteen or twenty issues of Indiana Jones. But I was also twelve or thirteen, so what the heck did I know?
Spider-man is my favorite character and I've been reading Spidey since the late 90s, but I think the comic that changed me from a Spidey fan to a comics fan was Fables by Bill Willingham. After reading that, I went on a Vertigo reading spree and have continued to read a variety of comics since then (I started reading Fables in 2006 or 2007).
FABLES is one of the first books that made me realize I had made a mistake largely stepping away from comic books in the late Nineties. It's so damn good.
Like a huge number of British kids from my generation (pre-mainstream superheroes, pre-manga), it's the 'Asterix' books by Uderzo and Goscinny for me. C'est magnifique!! Though 'Moonshadow' by J.M. DeMatteis and Jon J. Muth danced with my very soul! So much so, I'm scared to ever read it again in case it doesn't make me feel the same.
I've always been envious of the British perspective on comics in the Eighties. It's so very different than the States'. I wonder who I would've become as a writer (and person) had these titles -- and so many others that were on the edge -- been part of my primary storytelling education.
American superhero books were incredibly rare and exotic artefacts. They just appeared at random in the newsagents. You’d never get a complete run of a story, so you never had any idea what was going on when you read them. But the art was incredible and they had adverts for all these mad American sweets you saw the kids eating in Spielberg movies! Before comic shops really became a thing and I was old enough to take the trip into town to visit Forbidden Planet (an ill-lit dungeon of a place back then, full of wondrous treasures), most Brits of my generation got by on Asterix, TinTin and homegrown action or humour comics like 2000ad and Whizzer and Chips, most of which were just bonkers. Stuff like 2000ad and the various monster books we'd read were written by war babies who'd lived through rationing and grown up playing on bomb-sites, hearing stories about the atrocities their dads and uncles had witnessed in Europe. They had little notion of talking down to a child readership, so a lot of the kids media produced here in the 70s/early 80s was just demented! :D
This is such a great walk down someone else's memory lane. If you ever stumble across a deep dive into this subject, I'd love to read more about it. Thanks for sharing!
Ha! Cheers, Cole. I might just do that... British grimdark kid's media from the 70s and 80s is such a specific cultural epoch that there's an entire project devoted to it. Check out the guys from 'Scarred for Life'... https://www.instagram.com/scarredforlifebook/?hl=en-gb This sort of thing totally plugs into hauntology and folk horror, all of which are such an indelible, ineffable part of my childhood that I remember how weirdly intrusive yet communal it felt when people started putting names to these things. :P
Alec, I agree. Moonshadow felt really special at the time, and maybe the first real adult comic I ever read. That, and DeMatteis and Badger's Greenberg The Vampire graphic novel. Watchmen hadn't started yet, and V For Vendetta hadn't made it to North America, so Alan Moore's writing was still very much centered around the superhero genre.
Moonshadow and Greenberg felt like novels. More than anything else, it was books like those that led me to things like Love & Rockets, the work of Charles Burns, Art Spiegelman, which then led to Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine, etc. I owe DeMatteis a lot.
Lots of great Epic books around then. Timespirits was another favourite.
Completely agree! Moonshadow moved me so profoundly, an entire life from birth to death. Such an under-appreciated book. It's that transitional moment, right, when you feel for the first time that you're reading a comic that's actually aimed at older readers. Was Timespirits the one by Epic...?
As a kid, it was largely Star Wars comics! I loved tracing all the designs and costumes, and it helped me continue to live out my obsession with the movies (the prequel trilogy was coming out around that time).
As an adult who re-entered comics: few reading experiences -- in either comics or prose -- compare to reading Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing.
My mom read Asterix books to me before I could read for myself and I was absolutely obsessed with them. Then I didn’t encounter a lot of comics (or wasn’t interested in the ones I did encounter) until I was in my teens. My first boyfriend was super into comics and lent me so many that blew my mind. Sandman was probably the one I loved most, but there were many others. Maus, Watchmen, a couple that I no longer remember the names of but remember loving at the time. I think one was about a superhero who was dead (but not DC’s Deadman).
I think it was the first few issues of The Sandman that jolted me back into reading comics after a long hiatus but it was also Jeff Smith's Bone series that pulled me into a world of pure, unadulterated fantasy that had me both laughing and crying at the same time. Reading it in one go - if you can - gives you a chance to nuzzle into the Bone universe, you won't regret it!
I love this question! I read several comics as a kid but the one that hooked me for life was GHOST RIDER #71. (You can read more about it here if you want: https://buttondown.email/bcunningham71/archive/don-perlin-an-appreciation/)
Thanks, Brian. I'll add it to my explore "pile", which I have to keep to read things not immediately pressing.
Candidly, GR #71 is not remotely of the same caliber as Batman Year One (a comic so magnificent that I use it to teach my UCLA comics class)...but for an 11-year-old kid, that Ghost Rider comic was magic. I enjoy your Substack a lot -- it's very inspiring!
Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow. Then Alan Moore’s work. I was in my forties before I started reading Graphic novels. I really didn’t like comics in my youth. The art bothered me.
Art comes to us in its own time, I find. Musicians I hated in my teens I rediscovered in my thirties or forties. Fine art, movies, it's all the same for me. I've learned not to fight it.
Carl Barks' Donald Duck newsprint comic strips from BP gas stations in the late 1970s/early 1980s. I never could get all of them and they were recently reprinted by Fantagraphics, which I have been assidiously collecting!
After that, Tintin and Asterix. Then a full-on onslaught as I consumed Marvel & DC. To this day, I have been trying to find the collected edition of Starman & Superman vs Mongul from 1981. It was black and white and complete, but I can only find this in colorized single editions (which I purchased a few years ago).
I love this as a secret origin of someone's comics love affair. Thank you for sharing!
I grew up reading comics so it's hard to pin it down to a single issue. Spider-Man was my guy.
That said, the first comic that ever took my breath away was A Death in the Family.
Yeah, "A Death in the Family" arrived in my life shortly after YEAR ONE. I was on a Batman bender by that point, in for both the light and dark stuff. THEN they killed Robin and my brain melted. First lesson in my life about stakes, really. If Robin could die, anything could happen.
Michael Dolce and I have very similar answers!! I had been given a handful of comics up until this time, but none of them clicked until i bought a copy of TMNT Adventures from Archie. I believe the issue was #13! I begged my grandmother for a subscription and subscribed to TMNT from Archie for a couple of years.
That lit the spark, but what really took it to the next level was TODD MCFARLANE'S Spider-Man #13. I missed out at the beginning of the run, but in this issue Spidey dons his black costume once again to go into the sewers of New York... And that did it. That locked me in as a diehard comics fan. It's 30 something years later and I'm still regularly reading.
That SPIDER-MAN #13 cover still lives in my imagination. It's a mystery as to why, too. What I mean is, it's not extraordinary in its composition at all. It's just a common action shot. Some very detailed webs. That's it. And yet, it's so startling. Maybe it's where it arrived in our lives that really does it. I wonder if "kids" today would even react to it out of context.
Reading all the usual superhero comics in the late 70s and early 80s was all fine and dandy, although a lot of those seemed to be more out of a sense of duty to keep up with the series than anything else, but once I picked up the striking Swamp Thing issue 29, "Love & Death", off the Becker's convenience rack and took it home, things were never the same. It shook me to my core. I didn't know comics could be that like that; abstract, intense, literate; terrifying. It made everything I'd read up until that point seem like little kid stuff, and it was already halfway through a storyline I had no context for, with characters I knew nothing about!
I trekked on the subway to a downtown Toronto comic store with my entire paper route savings the very next day to not only try to find the rest of the storyline, but anything else I could find with Alan Moore's name on the cover. It made me a fan of him, and the possibilities in comics, for life.
And wow, Daredevil: Born Again was right around the corner, and Ronin, and Batman: Year One, Dark Knight Returns Watchmen, V For Vendetta, Love and Rockets...what a time to be a comic fan!
What blows my mind is that I was barely a teenager when the Eighties ended, and yet it's primarily Eighties comics that shaped me in the Nineties. I haven't considered that until just now, in fact. I think maybe that decade's output speaks more to me than any other. I have to go try to work out why that is now. Thanks for jogging my memory. And yes, what a time to be a comics fan!
First comic i ever bought was TMNT #5 (Archie edition). First comic that made me get into Marvel was Spectacular Spider-Man #157. Favorite comic series of all time though is Stray Bullets by David Lapham
that being said, this question is like asking you which kid is your favorite lol
I appreciate the "which kid is your favorite" line here!
The Asterix and Tintin books did it for me. The humor, satire and adventure in those stories are replicated by the similar ones in my currently-written fiction.
Second ASTERIX reference in these comments!
It took me awhile to learn how to read comics, because I read a lot of text so I would tear through the pages only reading the speech bubbles and glancing at the imagery. I had to learn how to slow down and let the imagery and compositions guide my pacing, take time with the details.
I'd say Transmetropolitan helped the most because I enjoyed all the punk transhumanist details in the street views and backgrounds, as well as there was enough text to keep me on pages long enough to notice.
I've never read TRANSMETROPOLITAN despite meaning to over and over. Darick Robertson is a new acquaintance, so I should finally fix that!
That's great, Darick Robertson's art in that series is literally breathtaking.
It’s definitely worth your time.
Daredevil #268! I was 14 years old…DD takes some vigilante justice out on a mobster who was abusing a dog (and doing many other bad things). The art by JR JR is still breathtaking to me and the stand alone issue tells a complete story. I have a copy framed and hanging in my office. Second place is “Golgo 13 #1: The Impossible Hit”. Sequential storytelling at its finest!
God, I think I remember that DAREDEVIL issue, though it's been a long time. Haven't read GOLGO 13, though. Thanks for sharing! I'm a big JR JR fan. I've known him for about a decade now. Have you seen the artist-on-artist conversation I had with him about his father and his own work? Shared it back in December. That was a treat.
Most of the Golgo 13 stuff was good…most very wordy. But that issue in particular was almost a silent comic. Each panel was a meticulous breakdown of the action. I read it all the time because I enjoy it so much. I will have to check out your JR JR interview. Have always been a fan! Thanks for letting me know. I’m assuming it’s here on Substack somewhere?
Yeah, it's under the Artist-on-Artist Interviews button. But here it is, too. I've chatted with a bunch of comic book giants, if you go wandering that button: Matt Fraction, Ed Brubaker, Christian Ward, Marc Guggenheim, Charles Soule, amongst others. Upcoming are Colleen Doran and Kelly Sue DeConnick. https://colehaddon.substack.com/p/q-and-a-comic-book-legend-john-romita
Nice! Can’t wait to dive in!
Let me know what you think of Golgo 13 if you can find it!
Maus! Then, Persepolis.
Both brilliant books!
All the British writers turned me on to comics
Concrete
Brian Vaughan
Basically vertigo n image comics
I mean, how do you go wrong with Vertigo in the Nineties?
Bit late but for me it's been Star Wars comics. Without that franchise I don't know how much I would've dipped into the medium. I had some 2003 Clone Wars ones and a Jango Fett novel when I was younger, and was lucky enough to have a dad who also liked collecting so we started getting all the new canon Marvel, IDW and now Dark Horse stuff
I've been lucky enough to make friends with several of the writers of these comics. They're doing some amazing work.
They certainly are!
Maus, a Survivor’s Tale was where it began. Watchmen was where it continued, followed by V for Vendetta. I’ve just finished and highly enjoyed Bodies.
MAUS is greuling and wonderful; I first read it for a university class on intergenerational trauma. I'm about to start WATCHMEN, which I've read six or seven times now. Been a while for V FOR VENDETTA, but, God, I think about it all the time.
Yeah, V is so close to reality as to sometimes make me genuinely scared.
Superman #233, “The Amazing NEW Adventures of…” Iconic Neal Adams Cover.
I'm not so good that I know that issue by number alone - but I know that cover. Iconic indeed!
okay so this is random but I grew up with the hippies and loved the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Mostly for Fat Freddys Cat. I obviously didn’t take them to school. Close second was Archie.
I...have no idea what the FABULOUS FURRY FREAK BROTHERS is. [Runs off to check the internet]
Get ready - it’s quite a ride!
My Dad would bring us Beano, Dandy & Sparky once a week and me and my brothers would battle for our favourites, so I liked comics from before I could even read the words. But falling in love, after flirtations with super heroes, was for issue 1 of Howard the Duck. I even managed to subscribe by (parents) cheque so it came all the way to me in the UK every month. I still have the complete run (& Treasury edition). I fell in love with the cigar chomping wise quacking fowl (not to mention hairless ape Bev). Gerber & Colan created a near perfect comic with satire, puns, slapstick, action, romance and even an occasional muck monster.
I have to say, I've never read HOWARD THE DUCK, but your story makes me wish I had. Might have to try to find a TPB here in Australia now...
It’s kinda dated now but the original run is one of a kind. Comics have took me on quite a journey from the Bash Street Kids in the Beano to Maggie & Hopey in Love & Rockets.
I've got to give credit to Mark Waid's own The Flash (vol. 2) #153. I was getting back into comics after a some time away and picked up a bunch of random issues at my LCS. #153 was in the middle of an ongoing storyline, but it gave me enough to understand The Flash and just grabbed my brain and didn't let go. Every issue is someone's first!
Then New X-Men #114 and the whole "E is for Extinction" arc supercharged my comics love, and the rest is history (and a lot of longboxes).
Great stuff (Morrison!) - thanks for sharing!
A book-and-record set given as a Christmas gift turned me on to both comics AND horror. It was a WERWOLF BY NIGHT story, and Young Me was blown away by the action (a beat cop taking shots at a fleeing werewolf!) as well as the teenage angst and family drama. And by some weird twist of fate, one of the first comic books I wrote for Marvel happened to be a WEREWOLF BY NIGHT story (published in their MAX line back in the late aughts).
Duane, when I was 7, I was desperate for the Werewolf By Night Power Records 45 -- but alas I had to settle with The Monster of Frankenstein one, which in hindsight wasn't too shabby with Mike Ploog art!
Oh man! Now I'm jealous of your Frankenstein 45! : ) (And Mike Ploog is outstanding. I love all of his work.)
I love the symmetry of this anecdote, Duane. Also, I love that WEREWOLF BY NIGHT is your gateway drug here. Such an under-appreciated property by most readers over the years, I think. What did you think of the MCU adaptation?
I loved it, mostly because it was very much NOT what I had expected. The thing was lean, funny, old school and managed to surprise me at every turn. (And it featured another under-appreciated Marvel character, MAN-THING.) I want more of these specials. : )
Yes, I'd be much more excited about specials like these than a lot of what I'm getting from Marvel TV. Not that they're not delivering. I just don't have the time and, frankly, don't have the time to care about that much narrative. These little specials are a brilliant way to fix that. I'd prioritize a WEREWOLF BY NIGHT/MAN-THING Halloween special every year, for example.
When I saw this cover as kid, I knew I was hooked for life!
https://i0.wp.com/www.no-666.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/star-wars-comics-1.gif?ssl=1
Years later while visiting a friend in London, he showed me a couple of TPB of Preacher and Sandman. That's when I realized there's so much more to this.
I had that issue once upon a time - in English, though. Those old STAR WARS comics were such a delight as a kid, even if I came to them late and had to pick the line up in pieces.
I agree. Those and Marvels’ Further Adventures of Indiana Jones.
Never even heard of it! I'll look into it, thanks a lot!
Do you recommend reading them even now when I'm 43? I only read this one issue due to Israel's lack of comic books at the time, so I only have this vivid memory of the cover and nothing about plot, charcters and world building.
I’m not sure, actually. Nostalgia definitely plays a part in my love for those comics, but I wouldn’t necessarily say they were sophisticated storytelling. If you don’t have that same sense of childhood warmth, they may not translate very well to adulthood.
Well, based on your recommendation I began reading the Indiana Jones comic and so far it's just the right blend of awesome and silly I need at the moment, so I might read the Star Wars green bunny comic after that. Thanks a lot!
I’m glad you’re enjoying them. Awesome and silly are good descriptors. I’m going back four decades now, but I do remember a big quality drop after the first fifteen or twenty issues of Indiana Jones. But I was also twelve or thirteen, so what the heck did I know?
Spider-man is my favorite character and I've been reading Spidey since the late 90s, but I think the comic that changed me from a Spidey fan to a comics fan was Fables by Bill Willingham. After reading that, I went on a Vertigo reading spree and have continued to read a variety of comics since then (I started reading Fables in 2006 or 2007).
FABLES is one of the first books that made me realize I had made a mistake largely stepping away from comic books in the late Nineties. It's so damn good.
Like a huge number of British kids from my generation (pre-mainstream superheroes, pre-manga), it's the 'Asterix' books by Uderzo and Goscinny for me. C'est magnifique!! Though 'Moonshadow' by J.M. DeMatteis and Jon J. Muth danced with my very soul! So much so, I'm scared to ever read it again in case it doesn't make me feel the same.
I've always been envious of the British perspective on comics in the Eighties. It's so very different than the States'. I wonder who I would've become as a writer (and person) had these titles -- and so many others that were on the edge -- been part of my primary storytelling education.
American superhero books were incredibly rare and exotic artefacts. They just appeared at random in the newsagents. You’d never get a complete run of a story, so you never had any idea what was going on when you read them. But the art was incredible and they had adverts for all these mad American sweets you saw the kids eating in Spielberg movies! Before comic shops really became a thing and I was old enough to take the trip into town to visit Forbidden Planet (an ill-lit dungeon of a place back then, full of wondrous treasures), most Brits of my generation got by on Asterix, TinTin and homegrown action or humour comics like 2000ad and Whizzer and Chips, most of which were just bonkers. Stuff like 2000ad and the various monster books we'd read were written by war babies who'd lived through rationing and grown up playing on bomb-sites, hearing stories about the atrocities their dads and uncles had witnessed in Europe. They had little notion of talking down to a child readership, so a lot of the kids media produced here in the 70s/early 80s was just demented! :D
This is such a great walk down someone else's memory lane. If you ever stumble across a deep dive into this subject, I'd love to read more about it. Thanks for sharing!
Ha! Cheers, Cole. I might just do that... British grimdark kid's media from the 70s and 80s is such a specific cultural epoch that there's an entire project devoted to it. Check out the guys from 'Scarred for Life'... https://www.instagram.com/scarredforlifebook/?hl=en-gb This sort of thing totally plugs into hauntology and folk horror, all of which are such an indelible, ineffable part of my childhood that I remember how weirdly intrusive yet communal it felt when people started putting names to these things. :P
Will do. Thanks for the tip!
Alec, I agree. Moonshadow felt really special at the time, and maybe the first real adult comic I ever read. That, and DeMatteis and Badger's Greenberg The Vampire graphic novel. Watchmen hadn't started yet, and V For Vendetta hadn't made it to North America, so Alan Moore's writing was still very much centered around the superhero genre.
Moonshadow and Greenberg felt like novels. More than anything else, it was books like those that led me to things like Love & Rockets, the work of Charles Burns, Art Spiegelman, which then led to Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine, etc. I owe DeMatteis a lot.
Lots of great Epic books around then. Timespirits was another favourite.
Completely agree! Moonshadow moved me so profoundly, an entire life from birth to death. Such an under-appreciated book. It's that transitional moment, right, when you feel for the first time that you're reading a comic that's actually aimed at older readers. Was Timespirits the one by Epic...?
Yes, by the late Stephen Perry and Thomas Yeates.
As a kid, it was largely Star Wars comics! I loved tracing all the designs and costumes, and it helped me continue to live out my obsession with the movies (the prequel trilogy was coming out around that time).
As an adult who re-entered comics: few reading experiences -- in either comics or prose -- compare to reading Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing.
My mom read Asterix books to me before I could read for myself and I was absolutely obsessed with them. Then I didn’t encounter a lot of comics (or wasn’t interested in the ones I did encounter) until I was in my teens. My first boyfriend was super into comics and lent me so many that blew my mind. Sandman was probably the one I loved most, but there were many others. Maus, Watchmen, a couple that I no longer remember the names of but remember loving at the time. I think one was about a superhero who was dead (but not DC’s Deadman).
The Sandman followed by Grant Morrison The Hand n Warren Ellis Fell
I think it was the first few issues of The Sandman that jolted me back into reading comics after a long hiatus but it was also Jeff Smith's Bone series that pulled me into a world of pure, unadulterated fantasy that had me both laughing and crying at the same time. Reading it in one go - if you can - gives you a chance to nuzzle into the Bone universe, you won't regret it!