Just Out Of Curiosity
March 5th, 2009 by Esther Inglis-Arkell |How many years have you been reading comics, and what got you into them?
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I started reading comics as a kid back in the 90s, when FOX Kids was airing wall to wall Batman, Spider-Man, and X-Men cartoons. I stopped somewhere around 1996. Then I started again around 2003, compelled by the new age of comics being made into movies. I guess when I subtract the comic-less years inbetween, I’m looking at 8 years or so.
I’ve been reading comics since the mid-90s. I can’t pinpoint the exact year, because I only remember that it all startet with some Spider-man comics my older brother must have left lying around: the story ark with Venom and Styx and Stone, penciled by Erik Larsen.
I haven’t stopped or paused ever since, so you can say I’ve been reading for more ore less 14 years.
I’ve had comics around me as long as I can remember.
I started with UK Spiderman and Superman annuals when I was a kid, then I collected war comics and kids humor comics (Dandy and the Beano).
The first US single issue I bought was an issue of Daredevil that had the first appearance of Bengal when I was about ten (1988 wikipedia reliably informs me). Sadly I bought it on the way to a vacation with some family friends and it got extensively water damaged.
I didn’t start collecting seriously until a couple of years later when not one but two comics shops sprang up in my hometown. After they inevitably went bust, I managed to find some issues in some of the newsagents in town (I remember The Flash circa issue 50 getting his shiny costume and the Grant/Breyfogle Detective comics in particular.)
Not long after that I went to University and my campus was right next to a Forbidden Planet store. From that point I didn’t have a chance.
Since as long as I can remember (early 90s, in other words). I went to the library a lot. They had a lot of comics there. I read them. In some cases this was a bad thing – reading Watchmen and Camelot 3000 at 11 or 12 was a trip. But I think it was a pretty good way to get into things, gave me a good grounding, and the SFPL always had a good comic section.
About six months?
This song is to blame – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odU1bHaYNDQ
To be honest I read some indie books when I was in college (12-13 years ago) but I never did superhero comics til recently.
Off and on for 30+ years. I was an avid reader as a kid in the 70s and 80s, skipped the 90s almost completely, picked them up again for most of this decade, and am currently down to a small handful of floppies while favoring OGNs and TPBs. Prior to 2006, it was predominantly Marvel and DC superheroes, but nowadays my tastes range much farther but my patience and time are much more limited.
3 years starting with Kingdom Come after Blair Butler’s review on G4.
I’ve been reading comics since… 1989/1990? Started out with TMNT comics (Archie and Mirage) and then transitioned into Marvel after reading an issue of What If? that was crazy and made no sense, but was absolutely cool.
I’ve had some periods without them, mostly in college and grad school, but I keep coming back.
6 and a half years.
I stumbled across the old marvel website and read the first three issues of Reiber/Cassaday’s Captain America series for free one day while I was skipping class. Bought the issues online, accidentally discovered a comic book shop in my city, bought whatever looked interesting (Morales/Baker’s Truth). Spiralled out from there.
I’m 27 and I’ve been reading ever since I could remember. My father read his Silver Age comics to me for bedtime stories and I haven’t stopped reading since.
I saw the trailer for the Constantine movie when i saw Blade 3 with some friends, i thought it looked cool and decided to get some of the comics. Which subsequently made me hate the movie when i saw it, but did get my into reading Sandman and Lucifer and from the Vertigo stuff out into reading other stuff.
For about 2 years and a half. I always loved superheroes but mistakenly thought comics were costly. In Québec, it’s mostly Franco-belgian comics and they cost 20$ for something like 48 pages. I also didn’t like these kinda comics for other reasons.
I started when some friends wanted to buy hard-to-find mangas and I showed them a comic shop I had seen long ago, one that specialised in American comics. After we bought a pack of 300 random comics together, I got one with the Silver Surfer in, a character I loved since the animated series, and liked it.
So, I started buying trade paperbacks after seeing how they’re cheap for the content you get. After a while, I couldn’t wait for the next trade paperbacks and got into single issues.
I started reading comics back in the mid 80’s. My uncle had a huge collection at my grandmother’s house and I would spend the weekends soaking those up. I got out of comics for the second half of the 90’s for numerous reasons (spider-clone, etc). A recommendation from Amazon.com for the first Walking Dead trade is what brought me back. Damn you Kirkman !
Some when I was a kid but really I started reading in 2000 when a friend recommended Blade of the Immortal. I started reading Batman a little while later and branched out into more DC comics after learning more about the characters from the JLU cartoon.
this is gonna sound a bit silly but… the cover date on my earliest two comics is Feb 1986 (Uncanny X-Men #202 and Iron Man #203), so that would make it a little over 23 years that i’ve been reading comics. i’ll be 27 this July.
not sure what got me into them exactly. my parents weren’t particularly fond of comics (though they didn’t mind them). and i started asking for them at such a young age that i can’t remember my specific thoughts back then. the best i can say is that i liked the action, the colors, and the fantasy of it… basically, what i assume any little kid would like about superheroes!
I remember my first ever comic book was an Archie comic parodying Robocop. So that’ll make it before the 1990’s. The first Marvel comics I bought for myself was Infinity War, but I moved to DC when Marvel’s X-overs wore out my budget.
On and off since childhood, started with a Thomas The Tank Engine comic for toddlers, moved onto the UK humour comics (and the WCW comic, which was cancelled far too soon)* and then the UK Spider-Man book – the one based on the FOX Kids show, even got a drawing published in that. I read a few of the US reprint mags, but I dropped out as they started to cover the Clone Saga. Didn’t really bother with them, apart from the odd issue on holidays until college, where some Internet friends convinced me to pick up Preacher in trades. Got a few more random issues around then, but only seriously got into collecting when Civil War kicked off, based on some banners I saw on a wrestling forum. And now I’m hooked. Damn them.
* This isn’t a joke, btw, I really did read and love the WCW comic as kid.
I read a little when I was around 10 (1994) and mostly read old comics at the barbershop and then bought some at the newsstand in the mall. I read a little bit of Spider-man, some 2099 and the beginning of Age of Apocalypse, then dropped off.
In 2005 I picked up Sean McKeever’s Gravity miniseries and haven’t looked back. I then jumped on Infinite Crisis not really knowing what was going on, but picked things up thanks to SA’s Batman’s Shameful Secret.
So four years of happy reading.
Chalk another one up to the Fox Kids lineup, early 90s, X-Men and Batman (what strange bedfellows)
It’s odd, for some reason X-Men made me way more interested in actually reading comics than Batman did. Probably because I wanted to read more about these weirdos who I never heard of, compared to Batman who didn’t really seem like he had that much to offer outside of what was going on in the cartoon because of the show’s singular focus
25 years, I suppose (I remember reading them back in 1984, starting with the initial Transformers ‘miniseries’)). My older brother (9 years older) was a fan and collector, and I basically learned to read of early 80s Marvel Comics. I’ve been up to it since. 🙂
It all started when I began collecting X-Men and Marvel trading cards, and read the blurb and the power ratings.
Then, I do believe I got Fatal Attractions. The writing may have proved too much for my poor 10-year-old brain at the time. However, it did help expand my vocabulary eventually.
From there, I bought a lot of late 80’s and 90’s (these were the Hulk/Spidey/Avengers/X-Men 30th anniversary years after all) stuff with my lunch money, and I got hooked.
Close to thirty years now. Because I am old. First comic I can remember picking up was several of the middle issues of Secret Wars from a Kaybee Toys. But before that I think was Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends because I recognized many of the characters including several of the X-Men and Dr. Doom…
I don’t know, really. Sometime when I was a little kid, back in the early ’80s. My brother and I would take our allowances to a 7-11 two blocks away and buy comics off the racks there. He was big into Spider-Man, I was more into Captain America and the Avengers, and we both liked the Fantastic Four.
I drifted away in my early teens, thankfully missing the horrors of the ’90s (no Liefeld flashbacks for me!). Then back in ’01 or ’02 a friend of mine handed me a copy of Alias and told me I would love it.
I did, in fact, love it.
Then it was Daredevil, then a whole slew of other stuff. I’m glad I’m back into comics, but I’m not sorry I was away. Seriously, I missed some bad, bad stuff by going away when I did, and I came back at a great time.
I’ve also been reading comics for as long as I can remember. As a kid I read my dad’s Tin-Tin, Spirou & Gaston Lagaffe comics (I’m dutch BTW), and my granddad always bought the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comics for me. Via the Spider-man & X-Men cartoons on Fox Kids I moved into Marvel comics sometime around 1996/7. I dropped most eventually, though I never bothered to cancel my subscribtion on X-Men and I kept reading some french comics. I got back into american comics two years ago, when I got League of Extraordinary Gentleman for christmas, and discovered my old comic book shop had added an extensive number of TPB’s to their stock (Previously they just had European comics & a rather random collection of American back issues).
Oh, if it matters; I’m 21. So I was still pretty young when I got into superhero stuff. I remember going to a con as a 10 year old and apparently being the only one under 18 at the Junior Press (at the time they translated Marvel comics into dutch) stand.
ROM, Spaceknight
Since I was 4 years old.
Pretty cool learning about when people started reading comics. I started reading Batman comics in 1974. It was a giant size 100 page issue. I think the cover had Robin getting attacked by a tiger. I was 5 years old and loved the Batman TV show. A few years later I got hooked on Spider-Man and other Marvel comics. Spider-Man #160 had the spider-mobile on the cover and as a kid I thought it was the coolest thing. My favorite “era” is Jim shooters run as EIC at Marvel. Great stuff. I actually quit collecting in the late 90’s for awhile. I got burned out on all the crap that was coming out. Crossgen actually got me back in reading with Scion & Sojourn.
The first comics I remember collecting were Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew (which I started 2 months before it was canceled). Also Transformers and the Epic run of Groo the Wanderer. What got me into “mainstream” comics, though, was, oddly enough, the Keebler drug awareness comics with The New Teen Titans. That got me into Titans, which got me more involved with the DC Universe, including a book where the Titans’ very own Wally West got to run solo…
I read comics as a kid because some older kids had Marvel collectable cards and I thought the cards were awesome. As a side note I thought the DC collectable cards were completely lame (Wild Dog, gimme a break).
I dropped out in middle school.
Then in ’02 a friend of mine that I was visiting at college lent me his copies of Earth X and JLA: Earth 2. I thought they were fentastic and jumped back into comics from there.
My grandfather had an interest in comics and gave me his (old and new) when I was a kid, and I bought and read the odd comic or collection from time to time, but only got into buying weekly and expanding my reading in 2005, pretty much around Infinite Crisis time.
This thread looks dead, but I’ll jump in anyway. My parents bought me a random DC pack back in 93, and I read those until they fell apart. I believe I also won the issue of Superman where Toyman kills a child (maybe?) from a Circus Pizza. I then stopped until college, when I…downloaded all of Spawn (sorry). Read it. And quit reading it. I read about Watchmen online, bought it, and haven’t looked back. No singles for me, though. I’ve spend so much money on harcover collections and omnibus editions…
Three years. I had time to kill before I met someone, so I went to the book store and read Marvel’s Civil War. I was HOOKED!
When I was a little kid, my family would go out to dinner at this one seafood restaurant every so often. I was a pretty hyper boy and there was this little comic shop near the place so my Dad bought me some quarter bin stuff to keep me occupied. I remember getting some Marvel GI Joes, random superhero stuff, including an issue of JM DeMatteis’ ’88 Forever People series, which for some reason freaked me out so bad I tore it to pieces. Kids are weird. Oh, and one issue of DC’s Forgotten Realms series, yeah, based on the dungeons and dragons world. I think it’s a very fun and underrated comic, nothing incredible but very, very decent, despite the nerdy stigma attached to it’s source material. However, that’s something for another time. As a kid I thought that comics were something that weren’t worth bothering with, in general.
What really got me into comics hardcore were the Books of Magic, both Neil Gaiman’s mini and the following series, and Peter David’s Captain Marvel, borrowed from the library on a whime, around like 2000. I read them, and believed that comics were worth my time and attention. I followed that up with the standards, like Watchmen and Marvels.
i was originally hooked in the mid-seventies (1976 was my first comic). i stayed faithful to marvel until the 40 cent price increase.
1982 found me back into comics again (thanks to daredevil and wolverine). i stayed for 2-3 years
1993 found me addicted to spiderman and his battles with venom and carnage.
then, my son became a super-hero fan and i was sucked back in in 2007. Now, like a drug, i keep going back to that bronze-era high.