My Life in Comics

Before I really get into the (hopefully) regular rhythm of psoting on this blog, I thought I'd give a basic rundown of my history with the comic book medium: how I got started, how my tastes evolved, important books in my history, etc. This is the "Getting-to-know-you" post that will hopefully give some sense of where I'm coming from, what I'm in to, and what sort of material you might expect to see covered here. It'll also probably end up longer than I want it to, so be forewarned.

I've always had comics of some sort around. Some of my earliest comics related memories don't involve comics themselves, but having superhero-related things around the house. I had casette tapes with narrated Justice League stories, backed by dramatic music and accompanied by a picture book ("...And there was the Joker! Duhn Duhn Duuuuuhn! Now turn the page. So Batman decided..."). I had Superman pajamas, including velcro cape, and had related Halloween costumes at least two or three times.

Some of the earliest comics I remember owning were Transformers comics, in the mid 80s. I would buy random issues at the Hobby Shop in Abbotsford, where I grew up, along with the latest Transformers toys, of course. Most of my other early comics interests were licensed properties based on toys or TV shows or movies I was interested in, like Alf, Star Trek, and, during my D&D phase, Forgotten Realms.

At some point in 5th or 6th grade, after moving to California, I picked up a copy of an Uncanny X-Men comic. I'm not sure exactly what issue it was, but it was somewhere in the late 270 range. It was towards the end of the "Muir Island Saga" storyline. (I also remember having X-Factor #70, with a cover by Mike Mignola, around the same time).

Everything changed around this point. Soon, I was following all the X-titles from month to month, salivating over Jim Lee's artwork, and buying all the alternate covers I could when the new, adjective-less X-Men series launched soon afterward. I was digging through back issue bins at my local store, the Comic Book Box in Petaluma, trying to fill in gaps in Excalibur Storylines, or find the first appearance of Gambit. I started getting interested in Todd McFarlane and Erik Larsen's work on various Spiderman titles, but never really got into the character like I did the X-Men.

And then, Image comics came along. Being a huge fanboy to most of the artists involved, I started picking up almost everything Image put out. I had all the early Spawn issues, Wildcats, the Savage Dragon, even some Youngblood. I was reading Wizard and collecting trading cards. And at some point I started picking up the Maxx.

Soon enough, the Maxx took a leftward turn from it's already somewhat skewed take on superheroes, and became far more focused on the interior lives of it's characters. The combination of that and Sam Kieth's adventurous, expressionist art blew my mind, and it quickly became one of my favorite titles.

Around this time (about 7th and 8th grade), my best friend Reed and I decided we were going to start a comic company. And we were thinking big. We didn't just want to write one book...we had ambitious plans for entire universes of superheroes, superteams, crossovers, extended storylines, you name it. We were more interested in the any-idea-is-good planning stages that we were in actually learning about the craft of comics, illustration, writing, and storytelling or honing our skills in these areas. We weren't completely bad, but we certainly had no idea what we were doing. We managed to complete a few dozen pages of several of our titles. Looking back on them, the elaborate back-stories and meticulously detailed character relationships we had in our heads never made it to the actual pages, which were instead filled with incomprehensible action sequences and explosions.

Around the time that the Maxx was getting interesting, Spawn did a series of books with guest writers: Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and Dave Sim. These were all names that I'd heard but never actually read, and from reading Wizard's coverage of the crossover, I learned a bit about what they'd done. This led me, ultimately, to a copy of Cerebus #166.

This was a pivotal book in my comics development. I picked it up on chance, because my local comic book store had happened to get a copy in and I knew that it was by that Dave Sim guy, y'know, from Spawn! It was the first self-published book I remember owning. It was one of the few non-Marvel or Image books I'd ever picked up. And it was ultimately a Rosetta Stone to the world of creator-owned, self-publiushed, independent, and art comics.

It was a weird place to start. That issue took place during a very extended storyline, and was a minor climax in the story. I had no idea who any of the characters were, what the setting was, or anything else. And it was written in a very confusing way, since it was meant to evoke the confusion of a city during a crisis. Oh, and the main character was asleep for the entire issue. But something about it intrigued me, and I started picking up Cerebus regularly. Soon it was one a few monthly books, along with the Maxx, that I still followed.

Through the previews in the back of Cerebus, I found out about all sorts of small press and independent comics, like Hepcats, Rare Bit Fiends, and Strangers in Paradise. I never read most of those titles, as most of them were hard to find in my area, and my trips to the comic shop were coming in decreasing intervals. But when I first saw a section of Paul Pope's THB, and Jeff Smith's Bone, I knew I'd found some more worthwhile books to follow.

Sadly, I ended up dropping my comic habit alltogether soon afterwards. I don't remember exactly why. It was a combination of reasons, I think. I didn't have much of an income, as a non-working high school student. There weren't a lot of titles being published regularly that excited me. And I was becoming increasingly interested in music, as a form of entertainment and an artistic outlet. My drawing slowed to a halt at some point, and I just stopped showing up to the comic shop every week. Also, Dave Sim's plunge off the deep end in Cerebus #186 really put me off of his work, although I continued to pick up the title for at least a year afterwards.

Fast forward a few years, to Junior College. I'd picked up a couple of trade paperbacks (like Watchmen, and Dark Knight Returns) in recent years, but never really picked the comic habit back up. I was in a screen-printing class and decided to break out one of my old THB comics to use as inspiration for a class project. I ended up hunting down Paul Pope's website and found out that he had new work out soon, the 100% series, from Vertigo, and more THB. That was what finally pulled me back into the comics shop, and got me hooked all over again.

In the process of collecting Paul Pope's stuff, I rediscovered a lot of Vertigo's output, most notably 100 Bullets and the Vertigo Pop series. My girlfriend at the time was a huge manga fan as well as an aspiring artist, and I was constantly surrounded by all sorts of artistic stimulation, and seeking out new comics to read. Soon, I was amassing piles of new comics and trades.

In that period of time, I discovered stores like Comic Relief in Berkeley, and Comix Experience in San Francisco. I started ordering comics online, to fill in gaps in my colelctions of Bone and other titles. I went to APE for the first time, and discovered Love and Rockets by chance in a used bookstore. I visited Japan and picked up some untranslated manga by Katsuhiro Otomo (of Akira fame), started reading Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine and on and on and on...I started reading the Filth, which led me to Morrison's work on New X-Men, which led me to Milligan and Allred's X-Statix. And when Cerebus ended last year, I picked up the final issue and decided to start reading the parts that I had missed.

I discovered Dirk Deppey's Journalista! blog on the Comics Journal website, and was soon hooked, and discovering new comics blogs by the day. The multitudes of internet comics sites led me to even more discoveries and got me hooked on books like Demo and Scott Pilgrim, and a trip to the Comics Weblog Updates page has become a part of my daily routine.

And that takes us pretty much to the present, where I'm buying way too many comics and reading way too many comics blogs. I'm waiting for my final Cerebus phone book to arrive so I can start a great big re-reading project. And I've also got a copy of THB #2 on the way, which will complete my collection of the original self-published run of that series. I'm following a handful of current comics, and picking up older titles like mad.

So I figured...why not join in the online comics blog party myself? And hence, this blog.

Phew....how's that for an introduction?