Purchased with honestly-won Canadian loonies in October 1984:

Alpha Flight #18-19. Much to my surprise, I really enjoyed the Guardian-less Alpha Flight. He had been my favourite team member (what a great costume design, too!) but Byrne's gamble in getting rid of the most recognizable character and focusing on the other Alphans was paying off. Kill your darlings, eh? The introduction of Shaman's daughter was a good move, too, in terms of soap opera and heroic derring-do; she had a lot of potential. (Trust later writers to utterly waste it, of course).

Amazing Spider-man #260-261. Hobgoblin might have bee a retread of the Green Goblin (who is he?) but this storyline had me hooked. And a Charles Vess cover! Whoo!

Arak #40, where I learned the word "shatranj" and the origin of the word "checkmate". Who said comics aren't edukashunal?

Conan #166 : Genseric was king of the Vandals, Generic was this month's Conan.

Epic #27. I had recently rediscovered Epic, and would follow it till the end (unless the newsstand sold out). Great magazine that died too young.

Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #3. Ninja Kitty skewers Logan. I miss the days such an injury would take weeks to heal. It allowed Logan to get into serious scraps without dying, but also didn't mean any fight is pointless unless the bad guy brings a nuke along. (And even that's not enough anymore, I hear...)

Marvel Age #22. I remember that cover, eve if I only had a vague idea of who Sol Brodsky was at the time. May he rest in peace.

New Mutants #24. Bill Sienkiewicz isn't drawing super-hero comics the way everyone else is drawing superhero comics.

New Mutants Annual #1. This one is drawn by Bob McLeod, and I found the plot more engaging than the esoteric stuff about Cloak & Dagger and Light and hungry evil in the regular mag. It's a space adventure, and it shows just how important and cool Doug Ramsay's power is! Also, is rock star/galactic teleporter Lila Cheney really into Sam, or is she cruelly toying with him? (I think she was honest, but as an ex-ungainly youth, I sure could relate to his doubts!)

New Teen Titans #4. I did buy it, but the Baxter series still felt like "Dark Phoenix, only with the Teen Titans" to me.

Savage Sword of Conan #107-108. No, a guy can't fly just by strapping the wings of an eagle to his arms. Light adventure, worth the 20 minutes, but not really worth hunting down unless you're a completist.

Thor #351. Ragnarok is coming to a boil! Asgard is destroyed once more! (But as big a fan as I had been of Simonson's run when it started, I was beginning to get tired of it).

X-Men #189. It has Selene, a character I really hate, and Rachel dresses like a kinky maid at the Hellfire Club because why not. Also, a mystical jewel starts transforming New York into a replica of Conan's world (as seen next issue).

It's weird thinking about comics from my own childhood as being this ancient (especially at that makes me feel ancient too).

Especially since there was almost no chance in 1984 of coming across anything published 40 years before that.

Arak #41. While our heroes are in the Middle East,why noy rexplore Sumerian/Babylonian mythology? (That's where I learned about Ereshkigal and the men-scorpions so thanks for that. Always a fun subject to bring up at dinner parties). Arak meets a new character who is obviously Sinbad the sailor under a different name, and the sorceress Angelica makes her unnecessary return.

Conan #167. Conan and the newly, unnecessarily resurrected Fafnir are hired to find a magical egg. Hyborian adventure by the numbers, and a comic I bought just for completion's sake. Nice Kaluta cover.

Conan the King #27. Another Kaluta cover, but *this* issue is worth hunting down! It focuses on the wizard who has been acting in the shadows for a few issues (and who is here strongly hinted to be a reincarnated Thoth-Amon, unless writer Alan Zelenetz is setting him up as a red herring). Lovely artwork by Marc Silvestri and Geoff Isherwood, who are truly an amazing team; great synergy between these two guys. The wizard is looking for a magic ring in the country of Stygia, where he slaughters a lot of wizards of the Black Ring but fails to notice that the damn bauble is almost right under his nose! A very, very good issue.

Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #4. After stabbing Wolverine through the heart, Ninja Kitty breaks out of her spell and recruits Yuriko (say, what became of her after the '90s?) to help save the man's life. Logan had taken a while to recover from the wounds inflicted by Shingen in his first limited series, and things being worse today, he requires even longer to get back on his feet. That his healing factor wouldn't be a magical, instantaneous "get better" card was much more interesting in those days than how it was later described, with Logan becoming indestructible. The Milgrom art is... what you'd expect, and unfortunately the Claremontisms that would later become so grating to this reader's nerves were starting to show up.

Kull the Conqueror #8. I forget he details of this issue, but it has the excellent Alan Zelenetz at the helm, John Buscema at the drawing table and a cover by Michael Golden. I really consider this short-lived and little heralded series as a highlight of the era, as were titles like Semper Fi. Not expensive and very much worth getting.

Secret Wars #11. A generally humdrum series, but Doctor Doom having the chutzpah to steal the Beyonder's power in issue #10 had simply been awesome. And I like the way the newly empowered Doom didn't start by getting even with Reed Richards, but almost behaved like a normal adult. That being said, and although it would have been pretty much impossible to do otherwise, I regret that Doom stayed so short-sighted after gaining the Beyonder's power. Why does he tarry on Battleworld? Why doesn't he send all the heroes and villains home by snapping his fingers? Why does he have to "plan" the invasion of Mephisto's realm to free the soul of his mother? He's got the power of the Beyonder, for crying out loud! He can presumably have his mother back (and alive, too) just by wishing it! (Solving world hunger, disease and war would be nice, too). But we need Doom to remain a villain, so instead of him becoming a benevolent oversee, we are treated to a shocker of an ending. (Quite dramatic, I must admit).

Marvel Team-Up #150. I bought it because it had the X-Men and a Barry Windsor-Smith cover, but I don't remember much about it. I think it had artwork by Greg Laroque, who sure had progressed since his OMAC back-ups in The Warlord.

New Mutants #25. I like Sienkiweicz, but what I remember of that storyline featuring Cloak and Dagger is that it was pretty confusing, with a lot of stuff happening just because. Powers going haywire, light and darkness, corruption, body and soul, yadda yadda yadda.

Swamp Thing #33. Mostly a reprint of the first Swamp Thing story in House of Secrets, with a framing sequence featuring Abel and Cain, our beloved hosts from DC's mystery comics. Now unless I'm mistaken (I wasn't much of a DC guy), having anthology book hosts featured in a storyline was a rare thing, especially in someone else's title; furthermore, making the HoS story canonical was also something Unexpected (see what I did there?). The novelty of the thing is lost nowadays, since it feels like every other hero today is a legacy character belonging to the Parliament of Vigilantes or the Green, Blue and Aubergine Lanterns, or is a Crossword Puzzle Elemental. But back then, revealing that Alec Holland was not the first Swamp Thing was quite a big deal!

Star Trek #11. I don't remember much about it; I read DC's Star Trek very infrequently. I don't understand why, because I remember it as a very well-written and drawn series; it fit quite well with the movies and I had loved those. Perhaps I was still upset at the loss of the Enterprise after Star Trek III.

Thor #352. Ragnarok still! But there had been so many Ragnaroks before in the Thor title that the impact was diluted; especially since each time, Asgard had been rebuilt none the worse for wear. (The only Ragnarok that worked for me was the one written by Michael Avon Oeming decades later, at the end of Thor's original run. At least everyone had the decency to die for that particular end of the gods).

Also, and this may be a bit unfair, I felt that the book's payoff after months of building up wasn't very satisfying. Since issue #337 we had seen an awesome shadowy figure forging a mighty sword out of the heart of galaxies, with an anvil going DOOM, and turning out to be none other than Surtur... but then it led to a retread of the Mangog rampage, already seen twice.

X-Men #190. A side trip into fantasy land, as New York is tranformed magically into a Hyborian Age city in which the X-Men and the Avengers act like characters out of Conan's world. Kind of fun, in a purely escapist way.