At thirteen I was also introduced to John Norman's Gor series, which affected me greatly, but that's another matter.

P.S. My first comic? Spidey Super Stories. Take that, Greg's theory!

This may make some people cringe. As hokey as they were the things that got me back into superheros and comics when I was a kid were Batman Knightfall, the post Chris Claremont X-Men and Image Comics.

I got into Knightfall based on the really cool moody Kelley Jones covers and I heard this was the Batman equivalent to Death of Superman (which interested me until I saw the art). Plus I was on a Batman kick since Batman Returns and the cartoon. I was watching the X-Men cartoon so I was picking up that up occasionally. And then there was Image.

A friend of mine was really into Image so I would read his stuff. And to be honest I got sucked into the glossiness of Image comics. The slick paper, the computer coloring and highly stylized art hooked me. Not to mention the faux maturity of it. Superheros cursed and drew blood. Stuff that wasn't happening in most the DC and Marvel books I was reading. It was pretty cool when I was twelve and their was a forbidden fruit aspect about it. These were books I didn't want my parents to find lying around.

And the best part it was all new. I felt like this could be the start of something big and my generation could have their own set of superheros instead of ones that inherited from a couple decades ago. So yeah I use to get excited about some of these generic new teams that Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri and Rob Liefeld would come up with. They weren't terribly original but they felt like mine.

Now I realize most of this stuff is shit. I've since sold off most of these books. Youngblood never became the Fantastic Four. But it did appeal to my younger self and led me to much better books. I was also willing to skip the big two (I had no loyalty to either when I started buying comics) and discover books like Hellboy. Heck it help me discover classics like the Watchmen and Dark Knight. And when I started getting bored with superheros I was moving towards books like Sandman and Preacher and later indie books like Hate, Optic Nerve and Eightball.

I had to look for that wow moment when I was so enthralled by the story that I was emotionally invested in the hero's struggle. For me (and boy am I showing my age) it was two issues (32-33, I think) of Amazing Spider-Man. Spider-Man is desperate to say Aunt May but he is trapped under an enormous collapse of machinery with no room to get out or get leverage. He struggles and strains and fails and tries again until I had that euphoric moment when by sheer will power he frees himself. Needless to say, battered, bruised and half out of his head he goes on to save the day and Aunt May. I think from that point on I was sold on the heroic concept and never looked back.

On a side note, there was a time when Roy Thomas in writing the Avengers would reference works like the Lord of the Rings and Moorcock's Elric stories in the letters columns. Then sometime later lo and behold in two issues of Conan - Elric himself appears. It gave comics a literary legitimacy to me at that age that enabled me to brush off the notion that they were kids stuff for years to come.

this was back when comics were 75 cents and spinner racks in every grocery store. so it was easy to earn enought money during the week to get a comic or maybe even two. now with 3 bucks an issue, or $2.25 for the kid books, it's too expensive for a kid to pick up a book because a cover or character looks cool. that's why every comic shop should have a quarter or fifty cent bin. i've noticed those and back issue boxes in general disappearing.

yet another great post greg! it always causes the best comments.

The Avengers Annual had the Grandmaster interjecting on the East v. West Avengers softball game (which, conveniently, ALWAYS got interrupted). He reanimated the Avengers' dead foes, and a few dead former allies, and split them into random teams against random teams of Avengers. Each mini-story usually ended with at least one hero dying. After the first round of fights, there were noticeably fewer Avengers, and they had to fight their newly-dead friends in addition to everyone they fought in the first round! At the end, Hawkeye convinces Grandmaster to play a game of chance, and uses his carnival background to trick him into losing, thus returning all the heroes to life (and back to their softball game).

Uncanny X-Men 211 is similar in that it features heroes getting beaten down, and sometimes losing. What is different is that the story doesn't "clean up". This is serious Mutant Massacre stuff. I recently spoke to someone who was more mature at the time this story happened, and he was appalled at the wholesale slaughter of the X-Men team. I, on the other hand, was merely intrigued, wondering (after other readings a few years down the road) how the team recovered, because I knew that they had.

Both books came out when I was seven, but I'm pretty sure I didn't get them "new". If I recall, they came from Sears mail-order in a bulk package as a Christmas present (or my mom used a Sears box to package them). I read both books until they disintegrated, because they were so fascinating. Even when I knew what was going to happen, I had to revisit the story and enjoy it all over again. I had to dissect each panel, each piece of combat, where the characters were standing relative to each other, so my mind could construct it as a three-dimensional event, like a play in my mind. The Avengers book made me excited to see more character interaction; the X-Men book made me want to see the Marauders get what was coming to them.

I was eleven and had read a few comics here and there. Of course, I knew all the big superheroes from cartoons and toys, the ones that would have transcended the format. I was actually more into collecting baseball cards at the time, and a friend gave me some of the Marvel trading cards. Combine all that together, and I figured I'd give comics a more serious try. I picked out those two issues (for whatever reason, I can't recall) had no clue what was going on, and was hooked.

I loved the sense of mythology and the promise of backstory, issues and issues of it. It was like the Edith Hamilton book about Greek mythology I had read over and over just had new material added to it. And it just exploded from there.

But that didn't mean I still couldn't enjoy the hell out of a Little Archie story. When I actually became a collector in the sense of following a series the two books I originally got every month were Amazing Spider-Man (during the Stern/Romita Jr. era) and Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew.

You see it's actually possible to like more than one kind of thing at the same time. I used to read Spider-Man and Spider-Ham. Teen Titans and Captain Carrot. Airboy and Archie. X-Men and Uncle Scrooge. And I enjoyed them all. Couldn't it be possible to like Goodwin and Simonson's Manhunter AND Shazam by Mike Kunkel (pretending for a moment that they were contemporary to one another). And even if the new Shazam book is never anyone's "the one" does every book have to be "the one"? I grant you that it's an entire week until the rest of your point is made so I might be totally misreading where you are going.

Anyway... I apologize for any rambling I may have done and/or terrible usage of punctuation and grammar. I am so very tired right now.

The first superhero comic to leave any kind of impression was All-Star Comics #69 by Levitz and Staton.