Well, I looked it up, and my very first comic was on sale thirty years and six months ago:




Terrible terrible first story for a kid to read. Even as a fan of Moench, this was one of his worst stories in the run, and absolutely one of the least accessible to a child. Fate's funny like that, I guess. It's only in recent years that I've come to realize the first comic I ever read was written by my favorite writer, and that four issues later would be one of my favorite Batman stories of all time -- and yet this issue sucked and sucked hard, turning me off of comics for four more years.

I've written about my first-ever comic that I remember reading before. It was on sale in late August, 1962. Don't know if it was then or early in September when I got it. I recall it as one of those beautiful late summer Sunday mornings when it's not too hot, but school still seems a million days away.

I was just about to start third grade and my aunt knew I loved dinosaurs. I must have seen this, picked it up, identified the stegosaurus and she bought it for me with her usual stack of Sunday papers... at least five, each of whose "funnies" sections I devoured for what seems like hours every week. Back at my grandmother's house, I amazed her by reading the names of the various dinosaurs in the story without a problem. (I'd been reading and rereading my "How and Why" book on dinosaurs for months, I'm sure, so it was nothing to me.)



I loved army men, too, like every other kid my age, and Bob Kanigher must have known that, too when he conceived the "War that Time Forgot" (an inspired name,, an the brilliant SSWS logo made this comic even more enticing). Who wouldn't want to read it?

Many years later, in great part thanks to Mike's Amazing, I figured out which issue of SSWS I recalled and was able to buy it. I still remember the thrill of reading and rereading that book.

I'm also a little bummed out in reading these type of things, since my memory most be incredibly poor compared to many of you.

I don't think comics were all that present in my life until I was 7 or so, and I do have specific memories of other things before that, but I have no idea what my first comics were. My memory just doesn't work that way. Comics have been my primary hobby, and pretty much an obsession for 40 years now, but I don't think I could tell you what my first comic was even if the obsession started 5 years ago, let alone 40 or even 50 years like some of you.

I may have had minimal exposure to comics before this, but my first somewhat solid memories of my beginnings in comics are of newsstand twenty cent DC titles like Plop and Swamp Thing in the 1973 range. Pretty sure that it was with those two books that I started trying to collect each issue. I also bought a lot of the other DC books, mostly Flash, Superman, and House of Mystery and the other DC horror books.

I had one brief moment in 1977 or so where my "best friend" convinced me to trade all my comics (50 books or less probably) to him for some other toys that I was collecting. I'll never forgive Jon Miles for that. I quickly 'repented' and started buying comics again, spreading to Marvel and pretty much every company that's ever made a comic, starting a lifelong steamroller that is nearing 30,000 books now.