My First Comic Book

This year at San Diego Comic-Con, DC Comics' head Dan DiDio did a panel the end of the last day and he asked the audience if they remembered their first comic. Everyone in the room nodded their head yes and then he started going around having different people tell their stories. He also had everyone raise their hands if they'd been reading comics for more than a year, then five years, then ten... You get the picture. It came down to two guys. Both had over 50 years but not quite 55, and there was a year's difference between them. Well, this year marks 20 years for me as my first comic book was cover dated September 1988 (the year before Tim Burton's Batman, mind you). At the grocery store my mom used to take me to, there was a rack of comics at the front of the store, but inside the seating area for the deli and employees taking breaks. Because the area was sectioned off from the check-out aisles and the way the wall was set up, I could sit on the floor and read all the comics and no one (even in the deli) could see me. Sometimes my mom would take over a half hour shopping, leaving me time to read multiple issues cover to cover. When I started working a paper route, I finally bought a comic to take home, and that was Ralph Snart (Vol. 3) #1. I remember proudly showing it to my dad when he came home that night and he just went "hmph." Maybe it looked too different from the Classics Illustrated he read as a kid. Maybe it reminded him of the not-kid-friendly underground comix from the '60s. Whether or not he approved, I thought it was the greatest thing my money could buy and I'm still proud to say that my first "funny book" really was a FUNNY book.

As to my reasons for picking it up rather than just reading it in the store, perhaps I saw it as "art," as far as any child understands that, and that it would require multiple viewings to soak in and digest. Looking at the picture above, you're probably wondering what there is to "soak in." You're thinking: "c'mon, it looks like MAD magazine." And you would be absolutely right. I just researched and learned that Ralph Snart's creator, Marc Hansen, was influenced by Harvey Kurtzman of MAD magazine fame. I can see that a little bit with the oversized nose, which was a selling point on the Ralph Snart cover, but to be honest, I never got into MAD. What sold me was the elaborate logo, all the lines for shading, and the overall design of the character breaking through a page of his own comic (I'm sure there's a technical term for that last one). Recently I ran across an ad in Comic Buyer's Guide magazine for The Original Art of Basil Wolverton which stopped me dead in my tracks and returned me to childhood. There, staring back at me was Ralph Snart, but it wasn't. I have yet to get this book, and not to promote consumerism, but I'm adding it to my Christmas Wish List. Up till now I'd only heard of the name Basil Wolverton, but now seeing his work, he's got to be a subconscious influence on Marc Hansen. There's those grotesque features and a million tiny lines for shading. From what I can tell, it looks like something halfway between Ed Roth's Rat Fink and the '80s B&W comics glut.

To wrap up the story of my first comic book, I continued to collect Ralph Snart for I don't know how many issues, got into superheroes from both DC and Marvel, followed the artists who left "the big two" to form Image, and even ended up owning role-playing games from Palladium's TMNT to the D20 Judge Dredd, but that all started with Mayfair's Swamp Thing (who is still one of my favorite characters). I won't say I stopped collecting because quality went down. It was probably just hormones and extra-curricular activities, plus I did quit that paper route. What got me back into comics was a girlfriend who thought it was cool that I liked comics and a renewed search to find a Marvel Masterworks Spider-Man Vol. 1, which I had always wanted as a kid. I walked into Night Flight Comics in Salt Lake City and found what I was looking for, but I also found a cover I just had to buy to see if the artwork inside matched (it was bagged). That comic mini-series was Judge Dredd Versus Aliens: Incubus, but it starts a new story and ends this post.