Over at 2 Guys Buying Comics, Chris has designated this “First Comic Week.” I’ve been digging through the archives of various comic book covers to find. Mike’s Amazing World of DC Comics is great for going through a month-by-month view of comic covers, and the ever reliable Grand Comics Database for more details and images. I simply looked in the time frame (1970-1972ish) and found the first comic cover that I jogged my memory.
The first comic I recall reading was the Batman #238, one of the DC Super Spectaculars. Nothing beats 100 pages of fun for 50 cents. As mentioned above, I don’t remember much of the details of the stories, but the cover sticks in my mind: I was always a Robin fan, so usually gravitated towards comics with him on the cover. This particular issue also had Legion of Super Heroes, Plastic Man and Doom Patrol stories in it (sort of a strange mix these days for a Batman comic).
The Super Spectaculars were the perfect comic at the time: you could get stories from half-a-dozen different genres all in one package. This allowed me to get a real taste for a number of different characters: Sargon, Dr. Fate, Red Tornado. Many of the issues also mixed older and newer stories, so you’d get a Dick Sprang Batman story now and again. Good, good times. Later in the 70s, I’d also get the Superman and Batman Family comics (the Robin/Batgirl team-ups were terrific) and the Dollar Comics.
A few months after Batman #238, my brother started collecting Kamandi, by the great Jack Kirby. From then on, I was completely hooked on comics.
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Responses to “First Comic Week”
That was an awesome comic. Agreed, there was something odd about having a Legion of Super-Heroes story in a Batman-titled book…but somehow the Doom Patrol and Sargon the Sorceror seemed like a good fit. Nelson Bridwell had a huge effect on a whole generation of fans through his approach to choosing reprints for those Super-Spectaculars. You got a real variety of stories and therefore were pretty much guaranteed of finding something you really liked in the mix…meanwhile you were also getting an education in comics history and seeing stuff that you’d never be exposed to otherwise. Not to knock the Archives series or the new Showcase books…but to even pick up one of those, you have to already know the characters or have some reason to think you’d like them. Bridwell was the guy who saw how to get new readers hooked; we need someone like that today!
Anyway, thanks to you, I just did my own entry on the same theme…
April 10th, 2006 at 6:40 pm |
Man, now THAT was how to do an anthology/reprint comic! I picked up a couple of these in quarter bins awhile back, and you’re exactly right — the sheer variety of creators and characters meant that you were bound to like SOMETHING in there.
April 11th, 2006 at 5:46 pm |