My intention was to start the blog with a brief history of how I came to be a comic geek, and what I like about comics, all that jazz, but laziness and distraction got in the way. Anywho, better a couple days late than never, and it's time for a trip down memory lane. Granted, it's quite a short trip. Especially considering that most comics bloggers have been fans since childhood, I'm quite the newcomer to the party, though I'm no less obsessive than those who preceded me.
I don't know what kept me from being a comics fan when I was young.
It certainly wasn't from lack of interest... I adored the batman cartoon, and also watched the x-men and spider man cartoons regularly. I also have a confession to make. I loved the
Batman and Robin movie. Ack! now the internets shall shun me! But I refuse to be too ashamed of it, as Chris O'Donnell is super-hott, and therefore my mad crush on him can be responsible for my lack of good movie sense.
It also wasn't that I didn't have access to comics; my brother collected the Donald Duck comics, and got them from the same rack at our grocery store as held all the other normal comics.
For whatever reason, it wasn't until the second X-men movie that I actually bought my first real comic book. And thusly I almost stopped being a fan before I ever was one. Behold, my first, completely uninformed purchase of a single issue comic magazine!
New X-men 143.
Upon reading this comic I found myself confused and not at all intruigued by the series. There were only two characters i could at all recognize, and many others I had no idea who they were. (Later I would find out that no one knew who they were, they were just no-name fill in people, and no one really understood Phantomex anyway) Also, I had no idea what the plot was or what was going on. Need I make a list of where I went wrong? Well, the first bit is barely visible in the bottom right corner of the magazine there - I had picked up number two in a four issue arc. Of course I was confused... wait... scratch that, because upon going back later with a general idea of what was going on in the series, number one in that arc made little more sense to me. (That would be the issue with cyclops and wolverine in a hellfire bar being drunken fools.)
Anyway, even upon later re-reading, this comic is absolute crap, and so it is lucky for me that I also picked up two graphic novels at the same time. I picked up
Authority: Transfer of Power upon the recommendation of an online friend, and on a whim i grabbed
Essential X-Men Vol. 1, which is what I would say made me the comic fiend that I am today.
I'll be sure to do a review type thing of authority at a later date, so let me wax poetic about Essential X-Men for a while here. Vol. 1 covers the Uncanny series from the advent of the All-New All-Different team to the first Shadow King story. It's crammed with the very best of the X-Men stories, including the beginning of the Phoenix saga, the only good Savage Land story ever told, The Shi'ar, back when they were cool, a special guest appearance from Misty Knight and the Heroes for Hire, and the most ass-kickin' of opponents:
Moses Magnum! So awesome, so very awesome. The stories are perfect examples of what made Claremont
the X-Men writer, and the art is just solid all the way through -- look here for the definitive versions of Storm and Nightcrawler as drawn by the late, great, Dave Cockrum. Is so pretty! It does, however, remind me of the one drawback of the essential series, which is that the reprints are in black and white (which lead to my total confusion on the subject of telling Jean Grey and Lorna Dane apart.) I've heard tons of people rip on the Essentials for that, but honestly, I would never have picked it up with the costly price tag that a full-color edition would have cost, and you get a whole lot of story with all the issues they can cram into each of the essential books.
So there's my very start into the world of comics... thrilling, ain't it? Ahhhh, memories...
