I was practically born into comics. My parents had absolutely no interest in comics, so how I got into them is a rather long story.

My mother was (and is) wickedly brilliant. She used to regularly take me to Toys R Us as a reward for good behavior. You'd think that would get expensive, but she had a strategy that never failed. She would tell me I could have any ONE item in the store and then take me to the most expensive aisles first. We'd look at bikes, electronic handheld games (remember the ones BEFORE the advent of Gameboy??) and electric train sets. I'd point to something I wanted, and she'd place it in the cart. Then, when we went down the next aisle, I'd see something else I wanted, and she'd take out the more expensive item and put in the less expensive item I'd just become obsessed over. On and on we'd do this until we ended up in the action figure aisle, looking at the DC Super Powers figures because they were the absolute cheapest toys in the store that looked interesting to me. Every single time, she'd make sure we'd end up in that section, and every single time, I'd go home with a new superhero.

It just followed from there that I started watching the Super Powers Galactic Guardians cartoon, and my mother continued to encourage this interest with the licensed pajamas, the coloring books, the wooden puzzles, everything DC Superheroes. In fact, I recall crying in the shoe store one day because the salesman wouldn't let me try on licensed Wonder Woman sneakers. So when the Adam West Batman show and the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman series would come on reruns, or Superman (1978) or Superman II would be the 8 o'clock movie of the week, I took extra notice. Thus, by the time of my earliest memories, I was already a die hard DC fanatic.

My first DC comic book didn't actually come until at least a year later, when I noticed a comic book spinner rack for the first time and picked out Detective Comics #552, but it was one of those Doug Moench stories where he waxed prosaic with excessive narration and symbolism, leaving a five year old me utterly lost as to what was happening. So, as much as I LOVED DC superheroes, I didn't pick up another comic book until Jason Todd died three years later, and even then it took the 1989 Batman movie to turn me into a regular comic book reader.

Really though, my curse with comic books has always been that I was born at the wrong time. When I was five in 1985, the comics I wanted to read were being written for adolescents, and when I became an adolescent in the early 1990s, comics like Batman were being written for adults, and a lot of the other stuff was just really substance-less hype with cool looking characters posing dramatically on foil covers protected by polybags.

My favorite comics are from the 1970s through the mid 1980s, and it's to my constant regret that I wasn't there to enjoy them when they were new. I have tremendous love--but very little nostalgia--attached to comics because of growing up when I did.