I wrote a report in high school for peer editing which I called "My first comic book" (or somesuch)... I believe the intent of the assignment as we were given was to detail our earliest memory. If my first memory were really of a comic book then my lifelong obsession would be easily understood, but, no that was kind of a cheat. Even the essay itself was a bit of a lie, since I detailed the story of "my first comic book" as the cherished memory of acquiring my tabloid-sized Superman vs. Muhammad Ali. I'm almost certain that it wasn't my first comic book, and amidst all my tens of thousands of comic books, it's probably not my first comic book memory, but it is one I do remember quite vividly.
I remember the dingy store in Victoriaville in Thunder Bay which had a counter with cigarettes and smoking-related things everywhere, candy and chocolate bars and lots of lottery paraphernalia. At the end of the counter ran a long and tall, multi-tiered wooden magazine rack where many of the comics were stored. Beyond that, precariously stocked shelves of toys, mostly the cheap Japanese import stuff, but sometimes things I actually wanted. There was a stand-up wire magazine rack which had a few of these oversized comics as well as things like Life magazine, probably Rolling Stone and other such tabloid-format thing. The publishing date of "Superman vs. Muhammad Ali" is somewhere around 1978, so obviously I didn't get this when it was released, as I was two at the time and most likely wasn't aware who Superman was yet. I'm betting it was around 1980 or 81, putting me around 5 years old, and that seems about right. I can't imagine this comic sitting on the shelf for four years, but if it sat there for two, then why not four?So, my memory of comics, fuzzy as it is, begins there for all purposes. There's probably a memory of an Archie comic bought at a grocery store or a Flash Gordon comic at the General Store in WaWa or a Mighty Crusaders acquired in the Texaco in Schreiber that predates that memory, but yes, I was really young. I also remember that that dank store was where I caught my first glimpse of pornography... a four (or five or six-year-old me) picking up a Playboy which was mistakenly left on the bottom shelf next to the comics and Teen Beat magazines, and I drank it in (somewhat fascinated, I remember, but not entirely sure what I was looking at) for a few minutes until my mother came along and yanked it from my hands and politely told me that I shouldn't be looking at it.
Comics and me go way back. Way, way back. I loved comics immensely as a child. I routinely got a comic as a "treat" for going to the store with my folks and behaving, or as a pacifier when we were on a road trip, no matter how short. I gravitated towards them so strongly that whenever we would pass a magazine stand, I'd have to stop and look.
I didn't fully understand the serialized nature of comic books until I left adolescence for my pre-teen years. My collection of books during childhood was mostly odds and ends, random comics picked up at random times. I remember having an issue Marvel's adaptation of the Dark Crystal, although I never did see the movie (until my early-20's). I had random issues of Batman and Detective (including one part of a multi-parter which had a character called "the Squid" as well as Killer Croc), and my favourite, a DC Comics Presents where Superman teams up with the Joker! It didn't matter to me that I didn't have the next issue, or the previous one. My imagination would run wild figuring out what happened before, and after.
Since comics were mainly a newsstand product (as opposed to a direct market product these days), the books that didn't sell off the stand were returnable. I'm not sure if there were distribution agents that handled the books between the publishers and the retailer, but it was in the early 80's that I discovered the 3-pack at the local Zellers. The three pack was exactly that, 3 comics for probably $1 sealed (sometimes) in a plastic bag. I remember always using my fingers to try and separate the books under the clear plastic to see what the "sandwich book" was, not that it really mattered. I'd wind up with a couple issues of Wonder Woman or ROM or part of some mini series I'd never heard of, or an 8-year-old issue of Kong the Untamed. The three packs weren't just at name department stores, I also remember this strange store in mid-town Thunder Bay that had a little bit of everything, almost all of it looking like it was broken, used, or remnants. They had bins and bins of these three-pack bags, and the great thing about them was, they weren't sealed. You could rummage through the bins for hours and assemble the perfect group of 3-packs. I remember getting some Jusice League of America books this way (including the awesome 2-part JLA/JSA crossover "Crisis In The Thunderbolt Dimension").
By the mid-1980's I had quite a few books, but having a firm grasp on reading I had some favourite titles. DC Comics Presents (each issue was Superman teaming up with another DC hero) topped the list, but I was also fond of Star Comics, which created books out of my favourite toys and Saturday morning cartoons (like Masters of the Universe, Madballs, Muppet Babies and Spider-Ham), the Thing/Marvel Two-In-One, and pretty much any DC superhero title I could get my hands on. I was, likely thanks to DC Comics Presents and the amazing Super Powers toyline, a fast and firm DC Comics fan. When Who's Who started to appear on the stands, I had to have them all (and via some selective sorting in a department store basement in Terrace Bay and that dank mid-town store I mentioned earlier, I had most of them). I absorbed the knowledge of characters, even quizzing myself on them from time to time. Such a rich, complex history it had.. Golden Age and Silver Age and the modern age, and it was just at that time it was all changing, thanks to the Crisis On Infinite Earths.
I got on the ground floor of the new DC Universe. We had just moved from one side of the city, clear across to the other, and not too far away from a small shopping mall with a bookstore with a spinner rack where I could go every month and buy the latest issues of Superman, Adventures of Superman, Action Comics, Justice League, and a sampling of other DC Comics wares. It was only then that my 11-year-old self could understand and capitalize upon the monthly publishing nature, but I was hooked.
It was really the Giffen-era Justice League that got me so invested in comics. I had to have every issue, and since I started picking up the book as of issue #5, I had to find back issues. The concept of a place where back-issues existed, aside from lucking out and finding them in a 3-pack, was foreign to me. That's where the musty, smoky used book store on May Street, a favourite, rarely visited and somewhat forbidden destination came in. When I was little, my parents took me there once (likely after seeing the display of comics in the window and imploring them to go in), but weren't very thrilled with the atmosphere (again, lots of cigarette smoke, but also a whole section of porn on the other side of the comics wall, which you had to pass along the way). I always asked to go back, but it wasn't a somewhere they wanted me to be. Years later, we were rarely on that side of town, so it was almost out-of-sight, out-of-mind. But, eventually I did go back and I loved being there every time. So many comics! And I was finding books I'd never seen before... the direct market... holy crow.A couple years later, about 1990, another back-issue shop opened up in the aforementioned Victoriaville... it didn't last very long, and I think I only visited it twice, but it was enough to find most of the back issues I wanted (nay, needed!) and to understand that some books increased in value when they got older. I learned about bagging and boarding as well, but wasn't in full appreciation of it yet.
It was during grade 9 art class in 1990, where I was trying to teach myself how to draw like Rob Liefeld (having witnessed his rise to fame on the New Mutants via a comic book news magazine), that I met some like minded comic book aficionados for the first time. Oh sure, during grade school I had friends who like comics... Ryan next door had a nice collection of GI Joe books and Mark had that great Return of the Jedi adaptation, and everyone liked Mad Magazine, and me and Jeffrey always were trying to be the first with the new Masters of the Universe book, and cousin Adam had those Batman books (published by Whitman and not DC for some reason) and Dazzler... but by the time I hit high school, I was solitary in my adoration.
But no longer. Subdued geek debates about the merits of the up-and-coming "hot" artists like Liefeld, Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane and the like were part of our regular class routine. We would talk about the comics we have read and those we haven't and whether we manage to make it over to the dank May Street used book store recently or not, and what we discovered there.
The ads for Mile High or other comic book stores that ran throughout most of the 1980's were finally put in perspective, and always tempting to separate me from what little money I had. I remember seeing ads with the Tick or Dark Horse's Predator book and having no idea what was going on there, having never seen them on the stands. As far as I was concerned, there weren't many publishers aside from DC, Marvel, and (at the time) Eclipse. But the more I made it over to the May Street used book store, the more I began to understand how much was out there and how much value there could be.
Then, in 1991, came X-Men #1 and a collector was born. I had ordered through one of the shops advertising in the comic books 3 copies of each of the five covers for X-Men #1... I sent off a cheque and waited. I coincidentally happened to be at the May Street shop the day of the book's release, and bought two copies of each cover then and there, since I was a little disappointed that my mail-order copies hadn't arrived (I didn't understand yet that comic shops had a lot of lead-time over the fans on ordering their books). Weeks later I was the proud owner of over 20 copies of what is still one of the most printed comic books of the modern age. I still own those books, btw, but I'm no longer proud. But X-Men #1 wasn't the worst of it... that same day I bought those unnecessary issues of the book, I also bought the first issue of Wizard Magazine, and honestly my world changed.
end part 1