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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jul 25, 2017 14:40:53 GMT -5
Awww...the definitional issues of Indies. I'll leave aside books from Gold Key, Archie and Harvey, because they weren't really Indies and in the early to mid 70s may well have been outselling DC or Marvel. I'll go with CarToons...which still probably shouldn't count because Petersen Publishing was a pretty big player in magazine publishing...just not in comical type magazines. My oldest brother (and maybe my other brother) bought CarToons sporadically in the early to mid 70s. I remember the books and definitely remember "reading" them. So that was my intro to Indies. I definitely remember the below pictured magazine.  |
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Post by MDG on Jul 25, 2017 15:15:31 GMT -5
I'll go with CarToons...which still probably shouldn't count because Petersen Publishing was a pretty big player in magazine publishing... I tend to think of independents as publishers that weren't sold through traditional newsstand distribution and (at least in the early days) were only available by mail, at cons, or comic shops (or, as pointed out, head shops for undergrounds). |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jul 25, 2017 15:32:41 GMT -5
I'll go with CarToons...which still probably shouldn't count because Petersen Publishing was a pretty big player in magazine publishing... I tend to think of independents as publishers that weren't sold through traditional newsstand distribution and (at least in the early days) were only available by mail, at cons, or comic shops (or, as pointed out, head shops for undergrounds). If we use that definition then it would be Starslayer. I was a huge Grell fan and went through serious machinations to get both Starslayer and then Jon Sable when they came out. It was 155 miles to the nearest comic shop until I went to college. It took a lot of dedication to get anything but newstand comics. |
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Jul 25, 2017 16:54:20 GMT -5
Like Paste Pot Paul, I was reading lots of British, non-big two issues as a young kid, such as The Beano, Dandy and Battle Action Weekly. By the time I was 11 or 12, I was also reading the likes of 2000 AD, Commando, Starblazer and and the short-lived horror comic Scream!   But my first American, non-big two comic was issue #25 of Charlton's Ghost Manor, which I found in the school's "rainy day comic box" when I was about 10-years-old. I liked it so much that I...errr...borrowed it. Long term.  It's actually a cracking little comic with a great story by Steve Ditko in it, and I still have it in my collection to this day...  If we're talking strictly "indie", then it'd be Heavy Metal volume 6 #3, which I picked up on a family holiday in Spain in 1982. I was 11 and it was quite an eye-opener, I can tell you!  |
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Post by badwolf on Jul 25, 2017 17:55:24 GMT -5
If you loved that volume half as much as I do, you must check out the reprint they did for First. Thomas and Russell went back to redo significant portions, and it works so much better. Far superior work, IMHO. Do you mean the collected edition that came out recently? I remember following the adaptations to First when they took over, but I don't recall them reprinting the individual issues. |
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jul 25, 2017 19:38:01 GMT -5
If you loved that volume half as much as I do, you must check out the reprint they did for First. Thomas and Russell went back to redo significant portions, and it works so much better. Far superior work, IMHO. Do you mean the collected edition that came out recently? I remember following the adaptations to First when they took over, but I don't recall them reprinting the individual issues. When they moved to First they reprinted the Pacific issues as a GN. |
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bran
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Post by bran on Jul 25, 2017 20:48:06 GMT -5
Personally I never considered Marvel/DC a mainstream, and say Judge Dredd an "indy", or even Crumb for that matter. Variety was part of the fun. But it's a good question - What is a good transitional title, a rabbit-hole, for someone reading strictly Marvel/DC? I would say - Watchmen. Sandman is a good place to start too, and so is Judge Dredd. Humor goes along way in that regard...  that's judge with perps right there (sugar is illegal in Mega-City 1)   |
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Post by hondobrode on Jul 25, 2017 22:09:01 GMT -5
Technically it would have been one of these two. The first I bought off a classmate of mine who sold me his big brother's copy. I would've gotten into trouble I'm sure in junior high if I'd been caught with it. It was covert and had me nervous, but fitting to the source material, was pretty cool. I could feel Doc Wertham's burning vision on me as I turned the pages !  Other than that particular transaction, my first true indie was this :  I'm pretty sure it was maybe a half page ad in the mainstream Marvels at the time that advertised Superhero Merchandise, from whom I had ordered some contraband, and they said, gasp, that there were going to be some titles you couldn't get on the newsstand. Unthinkable ! How could that happen ? What was I going to do ? Something about this drove a cleaver of desperation into my brain. I feverishly paced back and forth from my room to the hallway and back again thinking. What could I do ? I didn't have a job. I didn't have money. Pacific Comics ( ! ) was saying that Jack Kirby, who I barely knew, was doing some Captain Victory thing. I barely knew the New Gods an issue of the Gerry Conway era and only vaguely knew of Kirby's Marvel work, but something about this really struck me. You had to send for it. My parents wouldn't go for that. and $ 1 !! A whole dollar ! I could buy newsstand copies of cool stuff from, gosh, Marvel and DC, and maybe other, for 60 cents. Where would I get the money ? I had no other assets or income, so I decided when Mom gave me $ 14 for my monthly lunch ticket, I would, aha !, buy a 1 day ticket and pocket the other $ 13.30 I think it was and skip lunch. Certain days I had to break down. Some days I even felt guilty having two lunches ! Then how to get the contraband ? If it was sent to the house the Powers That Be would find out. I asked a neighbor girl a few miles away on the bus if I could send them to her house. She said yes ! Of course she could read them too. Years later I found out she had a crush on me. Not sure if that happened then or later, but there's a part of me that still feels a little bad about that. sigh |
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Jul 25, 2017 22:54:46 GMT -5
This is one of the very first ones I bought after actually deciding to buy comics again at age 19 after an almost-a-decade absence. Dunno if it was THE first, but...  |
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Post by LovesGilKane on Jul 26, 2017 0:03:04 GMT -5
going back a ways, as in decades,
1st kingdom by Katz
Warlock 5 by Aircel (until Denis Beauvais left, and it became garbage)
P Craig Russell stuff by Eclipse (I can never stress this enough)
the original 20 issues of Elfquest by WARP graphics (let the flames begin, don't care, I loved the relationships/romances/touching upon anthropology stuff)
Sunrunners by Pacific illustrated by Broderick
E-Man by Staton for Charlton Comics
Elementals 1-5 published by Comico
the second run of Mage illustrated by the Pander brothers for Comico
D'arc Tangent (ha! we'll see how many know what I mean here without resorting to a search engine!)
The Desert Peach (soooooooo funny)
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Post by Randle-El on Jul 26, 2017 0:06:33 GMT -5
Back then, my LCS was about a half hour away from home. It was mainly a used bookstore owned and operated by a lovely woman named Jean. To supplement her sales, she carried mainstream comics and some indy publishers (along with copious boxes and bins of used/old/back issues). Since it was so far and I had no driver's license yet, I had to wait for Mom to go to Durham and thus could stop by the mall where Jean's bookstore was located. On one trip, I found and bought this:  I was looking for and buying up anything I could find related to Robotech. IIRC, in the show's end credits, there's an actual statement of 'Comic adaptions available through Comico'. I'd never heard of Comico. Lo and behold, Jean carried them. From Robotech, I expanded throughout the rest of their quite remarkable line. Though I was aware of several indy publishers, because of my limited ability to travel to Jean's bookstore, I wasn't able to follow any of them consistently. So until I did acquire my driver's license, I bought what I could when I could. This was my experience as well. I was a huge Robotech fan and Comico's adaptations were my first non-Marvel/DC/superhero book that I picked up. I also had a handful of issues of TMNT, not the original B&W version by Mirage, but a color version published by Archie comics that was modeled after the TV show. I was getting out of comics when Image started taking off, but when I got back into comics later as an adult, they were the first non-big-two that I tried. My first Image title was Invincible, followed by The Walking Dead. Currently, the vast majority of my monthly books are Image, Boom, or Aftershock. |
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Post by berkley on Jul 26, 2017 0:40:18 GMT -5
As others have mentioned, most of the Gold Key, Charleton, etc comics that were found on the news-stands or on corner-store spin-racks don't feel like independents to me so I won't count those. Same with the Warren mags or even Heavy Metal. So the first independents I can think of that I got into were Fantagraphics' and other publishers' comics in the 80s: Lloyd Llewellyn, Love & Rockets, Mister X, Stig's Inferno. In the 90s, in addition to the Hernandez brothers and Clowes I followed creators like Peter Bagge, Seth and Julie Doucet.
I'd have to check and see what came out when to pin down which specific issue of which comic was my introduction to the independents. Memory says Stig's Inferno, or maybe the early colour reprint of Jaime Hernandez's Mechanix, but that could well be wrong.
It's worth remarking that my idea of deciding by "feeling" what does or does not qualify as an independent comic probably wouldn't stand up to a strict definition: for example, Alan Moore comics like Watchmen felt like independent work to me at the time, even though it was published by DC.
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Post by LovesGilKane on Jul 26, 2017 1:32:52 GMT -5
As others have mentioned, most of the Gold Key, Charleton, etc comics that were found on the news-stands or on corner-store spin-racks don't feel like independents to me so I won't count those. Same with the Warren mags or even Heavy Metal. So the first independents I can think of that I got into were Fantagraphics' and other publishers' comics in the 80s: Lloyd Llewellyn, Love & Rockets, Mister X, Stig's Inferno. In the 90s, in addition to the Hernandez brothers and Clowes I followed creators like Peter Bagge, Seth and Julie Doucet. I'd have to check and see what came out when to pin down which specific issue of which comic was my introduction to the independents. Memory says Stig's Inferno, or maybe the early colour reprint of Jaime Hernandez's Mechanix, but that could well be wrong. It's worth remarking that my idea of deciding by "feeling" what does or does not qualify as an independent comic probably wouldn't stand up to a strict definition: for example, Alan Moore comics like Watchmen felt like independent work to me at the time, even though it was published by DC. and the fact that most USA readers 1st exposure to V for Vendetta or Miracleman came from non indie publishers. despite them being 'indie' in origin. |
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Post by Paste Pot Paul on Jul 26, 2017 2:59:21 GMT -5
Can I get more "indie"than Captain Sunshine by the great Colin Wilson, who soon after goes on to the likes of Rogue Trooper in 2000AD  |
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Post by EdoBosnar on Jul 26, 2017 4:50:52 GMT -5
My first true indy comic was the rather obscure Ismet:  I actually got the first few issues (there were only 5 in all) from the older sister of the creator, Greg Wadsworth, who used to live down the road and used to ride into school on the same bus. Later that same year (1981), I discovered my first comic book shop in Salem, OR, and starting sampling more indy comics, starting with Pacific (Capt. Victory, Starslayer, etc.). |
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It's actually a cracking little comic with a great story by Steve Ditko in it, and I still have it in my collection to this day...
