Hmmm..this is a tricky one. My mum was buying me Spider-Man and Batman comics when I was still too young to read them myself, but that was so long ago that I can't really be certain of which issues I had. The earliest Marvel, DC, and non-Big Two comics that I can definitely remember owning were these...


Star Wars #18 (June 1978 -- I was 5 years old)




The Super-Heroes Monthly #2 (October 1980 - I was 8 years old)




Commando #1457 (mid-1980 - I was 7 years old)

I had that Super Heroes Monthy, not sure if I had #1, and some Star Wars Weekly not too long after that one. There was a British sweets/paper shop here for years and you could often find multiple copies of a title as if they didn't sell right away they stayed until they did because it was probably not worth postage to send them all the way back! So I bought a small stack of various titles at one go. Got lucky with #1-4 of Marvel's Doctor Who Weekly with the rub-on transfers still attached to the cover.

It's really hard for me to know what my first comics of companies were because my older brother had comics and they got all mixed in and handed down and traded to other kids, plus often the covers didn't last long. But... I did finally figure out I picked Adventure Comics #410 off the spinner rack... I don't think I was four and couldn't read, but had this comic around without a cover for years. It's what had the early John Forte Legion where the girls revolt! Just realizing this now, thought that must've been in a 100pg. Giant, but it was in this...



I remember more vividly picking out some of the 20cent ones after that of Adventure and Supergirl, and also of Shazam and Plop, and a 100page giant with Air Wave, a Murphy Anderson short Hawkman, and Super Chief, but probably my brother got the 100pager. He also had a Neal Adams Deadman I found really weird and impossible to understand.

My first Marvel is even harder to know. There was a Creatures On the Loose with what I know now must've been a Gil Kane story. Also Jungle Action #1 all reprints. I know I didn't pick those out either. There was also a Kirby Fantastic Four I now know is #77 and which made as much sense as Deadman to me.

Other companies would be Scamp, Gold Key, 15 or 20 cent, and also would go for Chip N' Dale and Donald Duck a little later. I do remember picking out Dennis The Menace and Sad Sack sometimes too. Never liked the Harvey comics outside of Sad Sack.

So the first comic I picked out for myself would've been Scamp, the second or third ever probably the Supergirl above, but I know we had a Schaffenberger issue or two of Adventure which I also would've seen before #410. No idea which ones from looking at covers online, I probably never saw them with a cover.

First DC..



First Marvel...


First...other.  This is a little harder.  But probably...

Most of DC's covers at the time were by the Great Ernie Chua.  

I'm not 100% sure that I didn't acquire that Herbie issue later. If so, then this would be my first non-Big Two issue:




This comic is so bad that I avoided Charlton until I recognized a Ditko cover about eight years later. The American Comic Book Chronicles book on the early 60s devoted several pages to describing all the ways this issue sucked.

My mother would buy us kids comics to keep us busy and I usually chose Harvey Comics (Wendy, Casper, Spooky) or Donald Duck or Woody Woodpecker comics, but once the Batman TV show hit the airwaves, I had to have a Batman comic! This was my first DC 



My first Marvel--well, it's a tie. Got these two at the exact same time, same store (again, mother was still paying for my comics, but I picked 'em out!). I was a fan of the daily Marvel Superheroes cartoons TV show and had seen ads for the forthcoming Saturday morning FF cartoons so I was very excited to finally own some Marvel comics!



Non-DC/non-Marvel:
As mentioned above, I'd been reading Harvey and Gold Key comics before DC and Marvel. I wish I could remember exactly which Harveys I had back then, but I do know I had this giant-sized Woody Woodpecker comic one summer while we were on vacation.  Woody was another of my TV cartoon favorites back then, so I was very excited when I (courtesy of my mother) bought this comic at a little boardwalk stand. I read this issue over and over again that summer.