Shelfbound

This week’s edition of Off Panel examines the origins of our love affair with comic books and how that relationship has changed as we’ve gotten older.

Dixon: What was the first comic you bought for yourself?

The New Warriors # 1, July 1990

Smitty: I like the connotations of the question: not “your first comic,” but “the first comic you bought for yourself,” which implies some sort of active decision-making in my adolescent mind and not, y’know, continuing to buy G.I. Joe ’cause my dad starting getting them for me.  (Which I did.)

So I think the answer is New Warriors #1, by Fabian Nicieza and Mark Bagley.  It was the first thing that I bought (off the spinner rack at a B. Dalton, if I remember correctly) that wasn’t a toy tie-in or Spider-man comic that I was like, “Wow, I have *got* to read the second issue of this.”  I had read many comics before, but New Warriors was the first comic that I bought from issue one and felt a kind of investment in.  What about you?

D: I asked that because I was given several comics before I became an active collector.  I don’t know that I can even remember the first one I bought myself, but I know for sure the first one I sought out and had to have was Uncanny X-men #210.  It’s the one where the cast is looking all bad-ass and saying “Make our day!”  This era of the X-men was so grim and there seemed so much at stake that I had to follow it from month to month.   Shortly after that Excalibur launched and I just immersed myself into the X-men universe.  Did you immediately become a once-a-week shopper?

S: I wasn’t once a week at that point, but by the time a year passed, I definitely was, buying all sorts of Marvel especially–New Warriors led to Guardians of the Galaxy, and then I dipped into Uncanny X-men.  After that there really wasn’t any turning back.  What made comics a “habit” and not just “something you read from time to time” for you?

Uncanny X-men #210, October 1986

D: This was some time before you and I started making trips to The Great Escape together.  I went through a phase where I would get a gift certificate for every birthday and Christmas and it was always an agonizing decision over which back issue to buy.  Every once in a while I would treat myself to an X-men related collection.  That’s how I first came across God Loves, Man Kills and the Captain Britain collection.  God Loves, Man Kills seemed very grown up to me- Wolverine uses for real cuss words!- and Captain Britain just seemed off.  I loved it but it was weird and alien.  This is probably due to the writing being very British under Jamie Delano’s tenure and my teenage brain hadn’t really been exposed to that before.

So when did we start making the weekly trip together?  When did that become a tradition?  I remember it involved Weezer’s blue album a lot.

S: Oh Weezer’s blue album.  I remember getting on the highway on a sunny day, cranking the volume, and playing air guitar on the way to the comic shop.  Which, in case anyone was doubtful, definitely makes us huge dorks.

When did the trips start?  Jeez, we were teenagers (and driving, obviously), so that had to have been 1994 or 1995.  Probably shortly before I gave up on New Warriors after Nicieza left!  I too remember that thrill of the gift certificate, and the terror of having too many choices.  When you’re really discovering your love of this medium, it seems like just about anything will do (and for a while, that’s probably true).

We’ve been focusing on Marvel a lot here, and since I know both of our tastes have changed some since the early/mid-90s, I’m wondering what got you really interested in the DC side of things.

D: Man, DC.  I think the  first DC books I got were through the Science Fiction Book Club (all the Piers Anthony you could ever want!)  I got Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and The Dark Knight Returns.  Those were seriously the first three stories published by DC that I read.  This is why I’ve never really been into their superhero universe in the same way I was with Marvel.  Most of the series that I read were published under the Vertigo imprint.  I started Sandman and never actually bought a single issue- I bought every collection through the Book Club.  Seriously!  So from there it was a natural leap into Preacher, The Invisibles, then Transmetropolitan.  Starman was also a favorite around this time; it was a super-hero book set in the DC Universe but it was certainly more adult-oriented.  Then Morrison’s JLA blew everything away for me.  I don’t know if superhero comics have ever gotten quite as good for me since then.

Starman #0, October 1994

S: Wow, you really jumped in the deep end for DC.  But come to think of it, I think I did too.  I remember picking up random Superman and Batman comics as a kid, and I’m pretty sure I might have started putting together a run of the Grant/Breyfogle Batman (a heinously overlooked creative team).  But I don’t remember much DC before Vertigo, and that’s right around the time I would have read the pre-Vertigo “mature readers” titles like Watchmen and V for Vendetta.  Zero Hour, despite the fact that it was not very good, was my gateway to the DCU, and is the reason I picked up Starman beginning with #0.  It was then that I really started getting into the more mature, more writing-focused DC and Vertigo books.  I remember you convincing me to hang on to Invisibles for one more month, and thank goodness, because that series really kicked into gear with #9.  (Now, as a smarter adult, I recognize the brilliance of “Arcadia,” but at the time, I was more into Dane saying “fuck” a lot.)

D: As those creator owned and creator driven series ended I drifted away from monthly collecting.  Part of it was due to money problems, which also led me to sell the bulk of my collection (keeping only my graphic novels.)  When I got back into reading comics regularly my buying habits had changed.

S: You know, we could (and probably will) devote a whole week to Morrison’s JLA; I kind of agree with you that it is the apex of DC superhero storytelling. Indeed, that, Starman, and Invisibles all ended around the same time, and I abandoned monthly comics for over a year . . . there just didn’t seem to be much point after that.  I got back in thanks to an ex, and my pocketbook has been crying ever since.

So as we embark on this project, is there anything coming up that you’re dreading reading and being disappointed in?

The Invisibles #1, September 1994

D: There’s not a whole lot that I’m cringing about revisiting.  The big reason for this is that so much of what’s on deck are items that I haven’t read yet!  Which speaks to the way I’ve bought comics since getting back into the game- I mostly hit bargain bins and used book stores looking for deals.  From a financial standpoint it allows me to take a chance on longer books in the way that I used to with single issues.  There are many books on my shelves that I bought cheap because I knew I’d want to read them some day.  Dropsie Avenue by Will Eisner, which I’m just finishing up now, is a great example.  Anytime I see some bargain Eisner I grab it and invariably don’t look at it for at least a year.  I’ve really gotten away from the collector mentality, which means that longer runs have suffered for it.  I only have the first seven volumes of Y the Last Man, a comic I adore.  Hell I’m missing the last volume of Morrison’s Seven Soldiers of Victory!  It’s not because I don’t care or don’t want to finish reading these stories; it’s just that my mind is so divorced from the concept of buying something on its release date.

I still buy superhero stuff but it tends to be mostly creator driven.  Like the time recently where I inexplicably bought almost all of the Chris Claremont Essential X-men collections…!  Now they sit on a shelf simultaneously mocking and calling to me.  I’ve been working on the Simonson Thor run as well; this involves less guilt.  I tried some recent Mike Carey X-men collections and I’ll give anything by Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker a look.  But in a way I’m almost as hesitant as a new reader with super-hero stuff- where do I start?  Will I have to buy twenty things to understand it?  That’s probably why I follow creators more than characters.

S: I’ve kind of got a foot in both worlds, I guess–I do buy a few monthlies, though they tend to change around a lot.  I’m currently following the Superman books, Young Liars, Doktor Sleepless, a couple others.  But I definitely go where my heart follows, rather than blindly buying characters, and I tend (well, except for the Superman stuff, which I buy out of an inordinate love of all things Superman) to only buy monthlies owned by their creators.  As a Morrison fan, I know I’m going to buy all his DC stuff, but I’m happy to wait for the collection.

Like you, I tend to search the bargain bins for most of my books and rarely get around to reading them consistently.  Little did I know that kind of behavior would end up being perfect for the project at hand!  I don’t have anything that I’m cringing to re-read (or read for the first time), but that’s more a product of having divested myself of stuff I don’t like after moving so much.  And you do occasionally get burned by the bargain bin–I expect I’ll feel that on my first reading of something here.  And then everyone will know it!

D: I suppose for me the bottom line is that as I got older I stopped collecting and started reading, and I’ve never come close to running out of new books to read.

Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication,because youth is sweet and they are growing.

-Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics