Origin of a Comics Fan

The plan is that this blog will be rolling out in some kind of a reliable way…regardless of the fact that it’s been weeks since the first post. Don’t worry though.

So what can be expected from the words on this page? Probably pretty much anything having something to do with comics. But it should be known that I’m not really a collector of the traditional “floppies” as they have come to be (somewhat derogatorily) called. The bookshelf for which this site has been named is one that’s in my bedroom, gradually collapsing from the weight of hundreds of comics trade paperbacks and hardcovers. That’s the kind of thing you’ll be reading about here.

Usually.

Today is going to be something different. This is about the origin. How this all got started.

Does this book have any significance to you?

I’m going with “Probably not.”

But this is in fact the very first comic I ever owned.

It was a big, thick comic with a shiny cover and the X-Men marching towards us all like they’re about to kill us. And I loved it. Loved it so much that the first page fell right out.

The story, well, wasn’t that great. But what did that matter to a five year old who was just learning to read? The pictures were great!

Pictures like this:

Maybe the one thing I can credit this issue for with certainty is that it made me a lifelong admirer of the style of John Romita Jr. 

Without a doubt, when I think of the X-Men, I think of them in this incarnation from the early 90’s. Anyone is welcome to inform me that my taste is horrible and I won’t even try to deny it. I was a child of the early 90’s and I can say that the version of the X-Men with Wolverine in the yellow-and-blue, Cyclops with the floppy hair hanging out from the spandex, Bishop (need I say more?), Storm in a white full-body suit, and a metal-winged Archangel are just cool, cool, cool.

The X-Men were pretty much like this in the cartoon I was addicted to from the age of 4. So go ahead and say that the X-Men were all muddled at this point and that I need to reread the Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne issues again. It won’t help!

Anyway…

A tease of things to come: after neglecting the old “to read” pile for far too long, I cranked through a few books recently and it can be expected that I’ll be saying a few words about them some time soon.

They are:

iZombie: Dead To This World

Doctor Who: Tesseract

Hellblazer: India

Batman & Robin: Batman vs. Robin

Angelus Volume One

TTFN…CJL