Or, My Life in Comics. These aren’t by any means the best comics I’ve ever read, but some of the most important in terms of what I read now and why I read them at all.
ROM #59 – October 1984
This is the first comic I ever remember buying (or, at least, having bought for me, since I was only 7). Rom and his sidekick, Starlight, shrink down to microscopic size (with help from Ant-Man) in order to fight evil bacteria on an ant. I think. I haven’t read it in a long time, nor do I really plan to; some childhood memories shouldn’t be revisited.
Still, this is the kind of awesome, crazy sci-fi fantasy we don’t see as much in comics today, and it was pretty impressive, particularly to a 7 year-old. I read a few Rom comics after that – though I never read the beginning or end of this particular story. One of the things I really remember about the book was an ad for Jim Starlin’s Dreadstar on the back cover: It looked like the coolest thing ever to a kid who thought Star Wars was the greatest film ever made. I’ve still never read it.
Uncanny #209-210 – September 1986
Kicking off an almost decade-long obsession, these two books came in a pre-sealed package I think I got in a departments store on a family trip to Florida. There was also a pack that included a couple issues of Alpha Flight which were less significant in every possible sense.
#209 is the second part of a fight with super-sentinel Nimrod, who proceeds to beat the crap out of most of the X-Men and the Hellfire Club, until Shadowcat helps Colossus escape being buried alive and deliver a serious smackdown on the robot. There’s also a subplot about Rachel wandering around a weird amusement park after being gutted by Wolverine, which didn’t make much sense considering I hadn’t read the previous issue. Wolverine himself doesn’t do a heck of a lot here – he frightens off a bunch of Hellfire goons. But it was pretty obvious he was cool.
#210 is a pretty stark contrast as the X-Men recover from the fight in one of Claremont’s typical slowdown issues. It spent a lot of time discussing past events and hinting at future ones – it leads into the Mutant Massacre – but was much more mellow and in-depth than any comic I’d read before. I knew this was good stuff, and I wanted to read more.
Sandman special #1 – 1991
For the longest time, I read superhero comics. Lots of them. Mostly X-Men and Marvel books, but I wandered every now and then. Eventually, I heard people talking about the Sandman thing, and even though no one ever seemed to adequately describe what it was about, it sounded cool.
I found myself looking at this issue – complete with a glow-in-the-dark cover by Dave McKean that’s actually kind of cool – and picked it up, and it’s as good a starting point for Sandman as anything else: Since I’ve always liked Greek mythology, the story of Orpheus was an obvious winner, and the sequence in Death’s modern-day apartment was confusing yet enticing. Throw in some nice Bryan Talbot art and a bunch of scary naked women and we had a definite winner. Soon after I started the main series in the middle of Brief Lives, which confused the heck out of me in the best way possible.
Archer & Armstrong #0 – July 1992
Along with Sandman, this is one of the books that opened my eyes to the possibility of doing books about something other than super heroes. Archer & Armstrong may be kind of a superhero book, but not entirely: No costumes (aside from the Unity crossovers), and less fighting evil than bumbling from one story to the next. The basic plot of this issue features Archer being almost murdered by his pervert parents, learning martial arts in the middle east, then starting a fight in a bar with a man he’s told is the devil. I’d never read anything quite like it before – nor since, to be perfectly honest – and I was hooked. The awesome Barry Windsor-Smith artwork was a big plus, too: Distinct and memorable, yet cool.
Johnny the Homicidal Maniac #1 – 199?
Wherein I dip my feet into the world of small publishers. This came out originally in 1995, but the copy I bought was an 8th printing or something, so I probably read it in 98 or 99. I was reading comics only sporadically, having gone off to university and discovered alcohol and women, but stumbled across this in a comic store. It was pretty awesome: Morbid and funny and totally nonsensical. Nowadays I prefer Jhonen Vazquez’ work on Squee or I Feel Sick, but this made a huge impact and led me to Lenore and the rest of Slave Labor’s awesome output.
X-Force #116 – May 2001
It’d been a long time since I’d read comics regularly. The late nineties mostly sucked, and I’d found other things to spend my limited funds on. I’d pick up a book here and there, but nothing regularly. That all changed when I walked into a store to browse one day and saw one of the most unexpected comics ever: Mike Allred drawing X-Force.
Madman doesn’t have a place on this list, but it’s still one of the most enjoyable superhero comics ever; Allred’s got a tremendous sense of fun and adventure, and a great clean and expressive style. X-Force brought back memories of Rob Liefeld and polybagged comics full of totally extreme and generic hyper-vigilantes. So the combination was kind of unholy. Throw in Peter Milligan, a guy I was familiar with (but didn’t revere as I do now), and you had a winner. This was a great, funny take on superheroes, and largely redeemed a company and industry I’d almost written off as marketing hype whores. I didn’t think Marvel was capable of putting out a book with this much originality, but they proved me wrong.
X-Force led to New X-Men, which led to coming back to the store regularly to buy more and more books. And that’s where we are now: Spending too much money on comic books.
Damn you, Rom. It’s all your fault.