I went to my parents' house for my birthday and in typical fashion, my curious kid started opening up dresser drawers and pulling things out. The good news is that he came across a bunch of old comics I had long forgotten. The bad news is that after re-reading them all, I could see why I'd forgotten them, but not entirely. Certain panels and some of the ads brought back memories. I noticed the cover dates all fell in the same six-month period, the first half of 1991. Something you may not know about the cover dates on comics is that they're always at least two months ahead for reasons to do with the post office and newsstand shelving. So when I tell you that the first issues I ever bought (pictured above) of
Flash (2nd series, #48),
Ghost Rider (2nd series, #11), and
Spider-Man (Todd McFarlane, #9) were all cover dated March 1991, that means I actually bought them in January 1991 or even December 1990. The reason this is all so interesting to me is because it connects a lot of dots in my comic book collecting. The winter of 1991 I had just turned 12 and graduated from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts. I was in my last year of elementary school and almost a year away from my first girlfriend.
The Flash TV series must have premiered the fall before in order for me to become interested enough to spend my hard-earned paper route earnings on a
Flash comic. Where would I have got money enough to take a chance on three new comic series? Like I said, these issues probably came out in January, so I would have been using Christmas money. That leads me to remember that I got
Spider-Man (Todd McFarlane, #7-8) from my brother Christmas of 1990 and that's why I would have already been invested enough to continue buying a series costarring Wolverine (starting in #9), who I've never liked very much. As for
Ghost Rider, well, I remembered that my first mail order comic catalog (pictured above) had the character on its cover, and that would have come out sometime the first half of 1991. Seeing as how most of the comics featured in that New England Comics catalog are my favorites to this day, perhaps a cover shot was all the push I needed. As a side note, NEC published
The Tick comic book and when I got back into comics in college, one of the first comic-related DVDs I searched out was the live-action
Tick. Other forgotten comics that I found at my parents were my first issues of
Dr. Strange (cover dated April 1991),
Daredevil (May 1991), and
The Punisher (June 1991). This means that starting the winter of 1991, I must have continually bought more and more new series until Image Comics arrived on the scene a year later (with Rob Liefeld's Youngblood #1, cover dated April 1992) until losing me (around Shadowhawk #4/Shadowhawk II #1, both May 1993).
I went to my parents' house for my birthday and in typical fashion, my curious kid started opening up dresser drawers and pulling things out. The good news is that he came across a bunch of old comics I had long forgotten. The bad news is that after re-reading them all, I could see why I'd forgotten them, but not entirely. Certain panels and some of the ads brought back memories. I noticed the cover dates all fell in the same six-month period, the first half of 1991. Something you may not know about the cover dates on comics is that they're always at least two months ahead for reasons to do with the post office and newsstand shelving. So when I tell you that the first issues I ever bought (pictured above) of Flash (2nd series, #48), Ghost Rider (2nd series, #11), and Spider-Man (Todd McFarlane, #9) were all cover dated March 1991, that means I actually bought them in January 1991 or even December 1990. The reason this is all so interesting to me is because it connects a lot of dots in my comic book collecting. The winter of 1991 I had just turned 12 and graduated from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts. I was in my last year of elementary school and almost a year away from my first girlfriend.
The Flash TV series must have premiered the fall before in order for me to become interested enough to spend my hard-earned paper route earnings on a Flash comic. Where would I have got money enough to take a chance on three new comic series? Like I said, these issues probably came out in January, so I would have been using Christmas money. That leads me to remember that I got Spider-Man (Todd McFarlane, #7-8) from my brother Christmas of 1990 and that's why I would have already been invested enough to continue buying a series costarring Wolverine (starting in #9), who I've never liked very much. As for Ghost Rider, well, I remembered that my first mail order comic catalog (pictured above) had the character on its cover, and that would have come out sometime the first half of 1991. Seeing as how most of the comics featured in that New England Comics catalog are my favorites to this day, perhaps a cover shot was all the push I needed. As a side note, NEC published The Tick comic book and when I got back into comics in college, one of the first comic-related DVDs I searched out was the live-action Tick. Other forgotten comics that I found at my parents were my first issues of Dr. Strange (cover dated April 1991), Daredevil (May 1991), and The Punisher (June 1991). This means that starting the winter of 1991, I must have continually bought more and more new series until Image Comics arrived on the scene a year later (with Rob Liefeld's Youngblood #1, cover dated April 1992) until losing me (around Shadowhawk #4/Shadowhawk II #1, both May 1993).
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