shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,451
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Post by shaxper on Sept 30, 2019 20:04:20 GMT -5
We experience comics for the first time in two different ways. Sometimes (if you were lucky enough) you were right there as a book was coming out, month after month, and you were reading along. Other times, you acquired the run after the fact and "binge read" through the series at whatever pace your heart desired.
Growing up in the late 1980s, long after the best years of comicdom had passed (in my own humble opinion), most of my comic book reading has been of the latter type, and I have some extremely dear memories of running through some classic runs for the first time.
So I'm curious -- which runs did you enjoy running through the most? Which ones elicit specific memories for you? I'm not necessarily interested in your favorite runs, but rather the ones where you savor the experience and the enjoyment as much as (or even more than) you enjoyed the comics themselves.
A few of mine:
Walking an entire bookbag full of Jack Kirby's KAMANDI to my local coffee shop, grabbing the couch in the corner, and just blazing through those issues for hours on end, subjected to weird new Kirby world after weird new Kirby world.
Keeping a drawer full of '80s/'90s Gladstone and Disney comics in my nightstand and reading them every chance that I could. So many fun memories from the books themselves, but even more from looking into that drawer and feeling excited for all the adventures yet to be experienced.
Reading the first Corto Maltese collection for the first time while at a sleep study and driving to a Dunkin Donuts at 4am when the study was over so that I could finish the run before heading home to a sleeping house.
Making my way through dozens of Life with Archie issues I've acquired over the past year RIGHT NOW, and spending each day looking forward to getting home to my favorite reading chair so that I can enjoy a few more installments.
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Post by berkley on Sept 30, 2019 20:52:58 GMT -5
Even the most recent of these examples was many years ago but the few that come immediately to mind:
in the late 70s managing to cobble together the missing back issues to the Englehart Dr. Strange run and the Gerber Fear and Man-Thing, and thus being able to read them both from start to finish, whereas previously I had read only bits and pieces.
in the early to mid 80s, DC releasing the baxter reprints of the New Gods (just that series, not the other 4th World books), so I could read the entire Kirby run from start to finish
also, around the same time or a little earlier, DC reprinting the Wein/Wrightson Swamp-Thing, so i could read that run in its entirety for the first time
in the mid-90s, repeatedly reading Love and Rockets from start to finish in the collected volumes
in the 2000s, reading Tomb of Dracula and MoKF in full - a friend of mine wanted to borrow my back-issues of those comics, so I figured I'd take the opportunity to re-read them myself first, to have them fresh in my mind in case he wanted to talk about them.
also in the 2000s, reading some of the Vertigo stuff I'd missed when it first came out: e.g. Morrison's Invisibles, Ennis's Preacher, Ellis's Planetary.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 30, 2019 21:42:36 GMT -5
Most you know that I have a dear friend that ran a Comic Book Store for more than 30 years and sold his business not so long ago and I worked his store from time to time to get free comics from him. That's one of the perks that I got from him.
Anyway, back when I was a kid; I worked at a Mom and Pop store and got Lee and Kirby Fantastic Four and read the first 150-200 stories there and then 20-25 years later did the same thing with my dear friend at the store that I regularly attended and felt like a kid all over again at the Mom and Pop store way back then. At the same time at the same Mom and Pop store ... my memories of reading the early Justice League of America stories headlined by Gardner Fox and Company and I read them over and over again and must have read the entire DC Archives line of 10 editions over and over again and still do.
Avengers, Spider-Man, Defenders, The Brave and the Bold, Batman, and Captain America all had the same treatment too. My dear friend had all of these issues at his home and I've spent many hours at his home reading practically all the issues listed in italics in fond memories of enjoying them from time to time.
Fast Forward to Modern Days ... I started reading the 127 issues run of Grant Morrison's JLA and got all of them brought at his store and must have read all of them so many times that I lost count of. These were my best moments in this days of age of reading them. And those Batman 66 meets the Green Hornet, Batman 66 meets Wonder Woman 77 and so forth too. I do read them from time to time and those are my guilty pleasures now.
My dear friend and I have over 100 DC Archives and Marvel Masterworks ... and I have a goal of reading every single one of them in a year or two and on pace.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Sept 30, 2019 22:47:42 GMT -5
The first two runs of Comics I read were the Wolfman/Perez Titans and Iron Man from Armor Wars to Armor Wars II.... I had just started buying comics (going to the story every wednesday) and I would buy a couple back issues every week, depending on how much was new... I'd get 2 or 3 of one of the other every week.. the store had them for like $1 - $1.50 each... as if they'd been in the box since they were new. There were a couple weeks that I looked forward to those more than the new stuff.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2019 2:03:44 GMT -5
A few of mine from type 1, runs read as the came out...1 from childhood, the only longish run I managed before I had my own job and others mostly from high school in the early to mid-80s when I first had the resources to get comics regularly...
-Shooter's Avengers from 156-176 (I missed 177 onwards and a couple of issues in the run due to the vagaries of newsstand distribution and allowance availability), reading this run is what made me a comic fan so the experience of it holds a special place in my memories
then the stuff that reshaped my perceptions of what comics could be as I experienced them issue by issue as they came out...
-Watchmen #1-12-watching the series as it unfolded waiting for each new issue to arrive
-Batman: The Dark Knight Returns 1-4; had to hunt around and wait for a 2nd print of #1, but read 2-4 as they came out-the second print hit about the time #2 came out, but waiting madly for each issue to hit and spending hours at the local shop talking about it with regulars
-Roots of the Swamp Thing #1-5 (Baxter reprints of Swamp Thing 1-10 by Wein/Wrightson) getting a double dose each month still wasn't enough and the wait for new issues seemed interminable
-the latter part of Simonson's Thor (I came in at issue #344 and read to the end of Simonson's run monthly, picked up 337-343 as back issues just before 350 came out to catch up), I remember rushing home to dive into the new issue each time one appeared in my subscription folder and reading and rereading each issue multiple times to savor every second of it
-the launch of the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League, it launched late in my senior of high school and was my favorite title for its first few years (well into my sophomore year at university). I read it voraciously wrote in fan letters just about every month (never got any printed at DC, did have a couple at Marvel though), bought every piece of merch I could (posters, postcards, buttons, etc.) affiliated with the series, and even did my first serious attempt trying my hand at writing and drawing comics doing a story featuring the team in a project I did for my psychology class my senior year of high school-it was an open project to do a presentation of "you" so I presented my love of comics as part of myself by doing an 8 page comic where I woke up in the morning and was nearly electrocuted trying to turn off my alarm clock to sleep in instead of going to school, and the shock transformed me into "Mike Headrush" (based not so loosely on Max Headroom) who decided to take over the world and reshape in his image (and fill the world with stuff he liked fulfilling the parameters of the project assignment), and the Giffen/Dematteis League showed up to stop my super-villain gambit (I later tried to do a handful of sample pages and scripts I had hoped to submit to DC at the time featuring that incarnation of the League, but I was never secure enough in their quality to actually submit them-and they were a bit Starlin influenced as well featuring a sequence with Dr. Fate being crucified on an ankh on the Rock of Eternity...). So yeah, this run had a profound impact on my as I experienced it as it came out, and I have fond memories of that experience.
and a few from my later comic reading years...
-The Authority by Ellis & Hitch-just being blown away by the spectacle of each issue and seeing what would happen in widescreen, also leading to several chats in the shops with fellow fans mostly of the the can you believe they did that types...
-same with the early issues of Planetary before the delays set in, each issue a wonderment of discovery and a celebration of the pulp roots of comics, wondering what Warren and Cassady would bring to the table next...
and a few favorite experiences of the binge type reads...
-based on the last two, finally tracking down and diving into Ellis' Stormwatch to fill in the backstory to the Authority after the fact
-though I had to settle for the Milestone edition for 110, 111 and 114, first reading through the Doc Strange run in Strange Tales by Ditko and Lee after cobbling together a run of 115-168. The excitement of discovering new wonderments on every page of the Ditko run, the tension of the flight from Mordo, encountering Dormammu for the first time, meeting Clea, the first hints of Eternity and finally discovering Eternity, so much to discover and marvel at each issue, and as much as I like revisiting this run, nothing compares to the experience of reading it the first time when everything was new and unexpected
-finally putting together a run of Epic Illustrated #1-9 after having experienced Starlin's Dreadstar beginning in the second year of that series and having gone back and gotten the GN and first 14 issues. I got the Epic issues completed just before Dreadstar switched over to First and reading Metamorphosis Odyssey as a binge was a heady experience. It was not what I expected at all, and blew me away at the time (I was still in high school but entering my senior year) (this had some influence on the Justice League sample pages I tried too)
-and also from my high school years-my first read through of the full run of Avengers-it was the first series I seriously collected and by the time I graduated I had every issue except 1 and 4, but I used Son of Origins for #1 and the reprint of #4 in Avengers Annual 3 to fill in those when I dove in to reading the run. I read from #1-about 240 (where I had started picking up issues regularly again once I had a job and my own money to do so) over the course August-Dec '86. I had always been an Avengers fan since I had started with comics as a kid, so this was a fulfillment of my first comic dream-reading every Avengers story ever, and probably remains one of the longest binge read runs I ever did.
-M
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Post by brutalis on Oct 1, 2019 7:57:51 GMT -5
Ahhh the memories. In my teens during high school it was the monthly issues, running from convenience store to convenience store all around the home neighborhood (3 stores) and then at school (5 stores and 4 used bookstores) trying to follow my favorites. It was a Saturday ritual for me sitting outside in the back yard with a cold lemonade spending the late afternoon reading various runs of series. I kept across my beds headstand favorite issues I could pull from and read at any time while hte rest had to "hide" in my single brown grocery bag since my mother limited my purchases. During those 4 years I followed regularly (only missing an issue or two here and there) with a fervor the following based on what the distribution system would place in stores:
Avengers, Fantastic Four, X-Men, Micronauts, ROM, John Carter, Godzilla, Defenders, Iron Man, MOKF. MS Marvel, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Star Wars, Warlord and grabbing whatever issues came along of Legion of Super-Heroes, Detective Comics, Batman, Brave and the Bold along with occasional issues of Superman, Unknown Soldier, Weird War, Thor, Captain America, Powerman and Iron Fist, MTU, MTIO and Justice League.
Just after high school in the summer of 1980 began my collection of the big 3 for me. I have told before that I found a little used book store that was slowly turning into the 1st LCS in Phoenix; Alan's shop which became All About Books and Comics (the longest still running LCS in Arizona) where I would spend days on end helping to sort through his rooms of brown grocery bagged comics. Alan was buying any and every collection from yard sales or sellers he could find in attempting to build his library of back issues to sell. As I sort through bags I was pulling Avengers, Fantastic Four and Captain Mar-Vell cheap reader issue comics ($2-5) that he would hold for me and then I would buy from him each week whatever I could afford. Sometimes it would be runs of issues with 5-6 issues at a time or it would be individual issues spread out over months or years but this is how I built my collective runs from issue 1 starting from the 60's up into the issues I already had from the 70's and filling in issues I missed during the 70's.
These days it is finding collected runs in TPB/Omnibus like Corto Maltese, Valerian, Don Rosa, Carl Barks, Archie comics and older series I never could find regularly: Conan from Marvel, Doom Patrol, Tomb of Dracula, Adam Strange, Kirby and Ditko series along with this year my focus upon old beaten up cheap war and western comic book series from DC, Charlton and Marvel. Just a few issues away from having complete Captain Savage, Combat Kelly, Evanier/Spiegle's Blackhawk, Ringo Kid, Outlaw Kid and Unknown Soldier (issues 200 to 268) in my collection. Earlier this summer finished up full runs of Marvel Tarzanand ROM which I am looking forward to sitting back and reading away upon.
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Post by beccabear67 on Oct 1, 2019 11:13:17 GMT -5
I had the avid don't-want-to-miss-an-issue spinner rack fervor for Star Wars, Rom, Iron Man, X-Men, Ka-Zar and Spider-Woman as they were coming out. Star Wars #24-38, Rom #1-on, Iron Man #130-on, X-Men #131-143, Ka-Zar #1-16, Spider-Woman #25, 34-46... also would have to add Hulk #240-251, Micronauts #19-on, and Avengers #189, 192-201. Battlestar Galactica, Daredevil, New Teen Titans I seemed to miss issues more so they were more individual issues I liked (and sometimes didn't like).
Best reads in runs would have to include the original twenty part Elfquest.
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