Comments on: Reflections on my first comic book

By: Greg

Greg — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 03:39:06 +0000

This was about the time I started collecting, and yes, it was a bad place to start with the 90’s wasteland waiting to strike. But in all honesty, this is what my first experience with comics was, too. It was all Jim Lee covers and antiheroes with too many pouches on too many belts. I remember my mom letting me buy this pack of comics at Sam’s Club that had several X-Men books in it including the 4 cover fold-out X-Men vol 2 #1. That would be the book that follows this X-factor, story-wise. Unfortunately, the mid 90’s arrived and comics started losing my interest to video games and anime. What a horrible time. I’m glad to have come back to comics after over a decade and building up my collection.
It happened when I was moving about 3 years ago. I found a box with those first X-Men comics in it and they were in really bad shape. I thought of how much I loved comics and how many I had lost over the years. They were just gone. No clue what happened to them. I found about 25 comics from that X-Men series, and decided to start collecting again. There was alot of catching up to do, but about 220 back-issues later, I’m all caught up with no gaps. Not to mention a whole closet fully of books I’d missed out on.
Comics, I love you.
That comment sorta jumped the shark.

By: Randy

Randy — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:34:53 +0000

I suspect I might have had the same opinion about the X-Men animated series if I had read the stories in the comics first. Instead, I went to the comics looking to read the stories that I’d seen on the cartoon, and was pleasantly surprised (especially comparing the AoA episode with the actual story — that’s one that really stuck out in my mind).

By: comicsgirl

comicsgirl — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 20:28:01 +0000

In reply to Randy.

I’m in the minority in not really liking the ’90s X-Men cartoon. I always found it disappointing when compared to the comics.
But I know for plenty of people, that was what made them become interested in comics so I can see how it would’ve possibly been my introduction, had the timing been slightly different.

I was somewhat a victim of the speculative “this will be worth something someday!” comics boom of the ’90s, but ultimately, I just liked reading them. I did the bags-and-boards thing for a while but eventually became too cheap and lazy to bother with it too much. I don’t buy a lot of individual issues anymore but when I do, they usually just end up in piles.

So people in the future: You’ll have me to thank when your comics from now are worth something.

By: Randy

Randy — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 19:40:59 +0000

My habit introduction mirrors yours in a way. I had comics when I was a wee laddie, but moved past it to take on card collecting, beer can collecting, and stamp collecting. All those habits eventually fell to the wayside with college (and lack of funds/personal space), but I got interested in comics again with the 90s X-Men animated series — I am told I am in good company on that front. After reading a bunch of series borrowed from a vendor at work who knew an office-mate and I were interested in the topic (Age of Apocalypse, DC vs. Marvel, Thanos Quest and Infinity Gauntlet), my (female!) intern who collected and knew I was into them brought in a stack of things her father had picked up at a garage sale that she didn’t want. Sadly, I knew this was the beginning of the end as the compulsion to put these quality issues like the Devil Dinosaur 1-shot and random issues of Generation X into bags and boards was overwhelming. Once in the comic store, I decided to pick up the newly relaunched Heroes Return issues of Avengers #1, the just-launched Marvel Knights Inhumans and Daredevil, and just shy of the whole run of the original Moon Knight series out of the $.25 bin. Short boxes followed shortly thereafter. And then long boxes. Many, many long boxes…