Where do I begin

Over to the right in my blog here, there is a list of blogs that I follow. I recommend all of them, and they really do make up the bulk of what I follow regularly. I have mentioned the I Love Rob Liefeld blog a few times before. Sandy, who writes the blog posted an interesting exercise in the form of a contest of sorts. I encourage anyone who might see this here to go check out his blog and post a comment or at least think about what he is asking and maybe post the answer in your own journal or blog.

His challenge if it can be called that, is to just post the name of the comic(s) that got you hooked on comics. I think it's a worthwhile thing to think about. Is it the first comic you ever owned, or is it a specific special issue that made you reconsider the merit of a medium you had previously only considered casually, but weren't really hooked on.

I know that the first series I collected was the Human Fly from Marvel. I know that the first series that blew my mind totally was the New Teen Titans. It may be the New Teen Titans that cemented it for me, and really showed me something about what comics could be like at their best.

For me, though, I think honestly that the first comic(s) that made an impact on me, and really filled me with joy for comics in general, later fuelling my desire to read and collect those other things I mentioned when I was still pretty young, are the first ones I can recall getting my hands on.

In 1976 my family flew to Adak, Alaska to live where my Dad was stationed. In preparation for the flight, my brother and I were allowed to each get a comics book. Not just any comic, but we each got a $1.00 tabloid sized DC Limited Collector's Edition. These were about the size of an old Rolling Stone magazine, and were 50 some pages long with two stories each. The stories were reprints of much older material, but i didn't realize that until just a few minutes ago, and I never really thought to question it.

The two specific comics were a Superman/Flash footrace DC Limited Collector's Edition C-48, and Superboy/Legion of Superheroes DC Limited Collector's Edition C-49. They were huge. My brother got the Superman one, and I got the Superboy one. That makes me laugh. It seems fitting since he is 6 years older than I am. We read the heck out of those comics, in addition to doing cool things like him showing me how to fold paper airplanes in really awesome ways, etc. I am pretty sure I loved them both to no end, but that I coveted his anyway. I don't recall much from either of the issues. I remember that there are mobsters trying to have an impact on the race, and that the way they deal with the Flash is by pulling a big piece of glass across the road. Flash runs through it at high speed and is knocked out.

Everything about the issue was big to me. Superheroes weren't a new concept, but I certainly wasn't a regular reader of comics at the time. It was pretty amazing stuff to me, regardless of whether the stories were actually any good or not. They fired up that sense in me that comics were something really cool, that would grow in me until it was finally realized when I started really reading and then collecting later on.