I'm a Famous Geek, Eh?

I was just talking my friend A.T. about Alpha Flight, for some reason, and I remembered my little claim to comic came in the early 1980s. Back was I was president (I'm trying hard not to brag) of the Sacramento Marvelite Association, I wrote a letter, on behalf of our group, to Marvel Comics to express our feelings on the first issue of John Byrne's Alpha Flight. Well, turns out they got so many letters that, in issue #4, they just posted the names of some of the people that had written instead of actually showing letters. Unfortunately for the S.M.A., they didn't list our organization's name...they just took mine off the signature. Oops! So, to the displeasure of the others in the group, my name got into a Marvel Comic in 1983, and theirs did not. Sorry guys.

I wonder if John Byrne still remembers me from that? I'll try to bump into him next Comic-Con and ask....

Pirate Corp$ Cover Art

As detailed in the previous post, I just loved Evan Dorkin's "Pirate Corp$". This are the covers to the original Eternity Comics issues, but the book got picked up later by Slave Labor, and the name of the series got changed to "Hectic Planet", and that's when Dorkin's work on this really hit its stride. All of the issues--original and later--are collected in three different Hectic Planet trade paperbacks (and there's one additional one--"The Bummer Trilogy"--that collects three Hectic Planet short stories Dorkin did in Dark Horse Presents), and they're all available for sale at the Slave Labor site. If you're looking for something fun and different--a little space, a little ska, a lot of angst--I highly advise trying them out.

Me and Comics (Part 3 - The College Years)

Okay, so I’d left comics behind for a while and decided to get drunk have fun and get bad grades instead. But high school was over, and I was starting community college (still called “junior college” back then), and there’s no way to be popular at one of those anyway, so my concerns shifted slightly. Not enough to start comics back up, right away, but I did get into role-playing games. I got into this Champions game that this guy K.C. was running. Champions, being a super-hero role-playing game, does tend to attract the comic book fans. K.C. was one, and so were the other players involved. Some of those other players became quick friends of mine, and we started hanging out. One of those guys was Kevin, and Kevin was definitely a comic fan.

So as the weeks and months passed, and I started hanging out more and more at Kevin’s place, he started talking about what I’d been missing in comics. He was mostly a D.C. guy. I’d been out of the comic game for a while, and he was shocked to find out that I had no idea about this “Watchmen” series that was going on. He, with great enthusiasm, explained the whole thing to me—as much as one CAN explain Watchmen to someone. DC was putting out the book, but it wasn’t DC characters. It involved these sort-of original characters—but ones based on the Charlton characters that DC now owned (but were now being used in DC continuity after Crisis, so the actual ones could not be used in Watchmen. He basically gave up trying to explain it and just gave me the existing issues to read. Nine of them were out at the time, nine of the series of twelve. I can’t properly express how stunned I was after reading them. I had grown up on super-hero comics, but I never understood properly what could be done with the medium. Alan Moore, the writer of Watchmen, was not writing a comic book—he was writing a novel. A complex and compelling one, one with themes and symbols and unimaginably (for comics) rich and living characters. It was a complete deconstruction of the super-hero genre, and the chapters (issues) had to be read several times over to get all the detail (and I mean that in a good way). Now completely engrossed and addicted, I was back at the comic store for the next three months, just to get the remaining chapters of Watchman, and the anticipation of the final issue was shared by the whole of the comic community, one of those frozen moments in time that you’ll just never see again, where all of one body of fandom held its collective breath. Once it was complete, it was collected in a trade paperback, as one volume, and it defined what we now know to be the graphic novel. It was studied. It was debated. It was reviewed in Rolling Stone. And to give you an example of its long-lasting appeal and quality? In 2005, Time Magazine put out a list of the top 100 English-language novels from 1923 to present. Watchmen made that list. And to give you an idea of just how complex a thing Watchmen is, they’ve been trying for twenty years to make it into a film, and it’s gone through so many different directors and studios and writers, I’ve lost track—and each new attempt has ended in collapse. But now, FINALLY, it’s in the process of being made, and was handed to “300” director Zack Snyder (and that’s a film made from a Frank Miller graphic novel, in case you didn’t know), and I think we all finally have some hope that it’ll be done KIND of right. There’s no way to capture Watchmen properly in a two-hour film. Can’t be done. I’ve been lobbying all along for an HBO mini-series. But I think Zack will do it as much justice as can be done, so I’m looking forward to it.

While I still wasn’t a regular comic buyer, I had seen evidence of what the industry was becoming, and what it could be, and it was very exciting. Right around that same time, Kevin also introduced me to Frank Miller’s “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns”, another groundbreaking series that came out in individual issues but gained its biggest appeal as a bound graphic novel after the fact. It, too, not only redefined comics and super-heroes, but also dazzled the mainstream press (the same ones that always made us roll our eyes when, every couple of years or so, they’d put out a story with a title like, “Biff, Socko, Pow! Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore!”). Miller jumped the Batman character 20 years into the future, a dark future in a world whose heroes had left them behind. The book was another deconstruction, but not just of super-heroes. Miller set his sights on modern western (American) civilization, culture and politics, and created something so cinematic that it at once begged to be made into a film, but also made you want to stop anyone from every trying, lest they spoil its perfection (very much like Watchmen). Though this series did bring the Batman character and franchise back into popularity and led, I think directly, to the creation of Tim Burton’s Batman film. This series, along with Watchman, launched a whole new era of “realistic” and serious works of comics, leading to the things like DC’s art-minded Vertigo line and to obsessions over new works by Miller and Moore, and also newcomers like Grant Morrison and Peter Milligan. Like me, comics had grown up.

Kevin got me reading other things, too, that I would either bum off him or read right there in his attic bedroom. Denny O’Neil’s “The Question” was one, and it, too, was a work I never could have imagined back in my X-Men and Avengers days. I also checked out “Batman: The Killing Joke”, a famous work of the period written by Alan Moore (art by Brian Bolland) that explored the relationship between Batman and the Joker, and particularly explored the psyche of the Joker in ways no other comic had. It was shockingly dark, a point made obvious by the Joker shooting and permanently paralyzing Barbara Gordon (Batgirl)…and taking nude photos of her bleeding body to taunt her father, the Commissioner, with. That’s one Kevin probably shouldn’t have loaned me, though. I had way too much to drink one night and threw up on it. No worries…I bought him a new one. There’s a good object lesson for you there. Don’t drink (Southern Comfort) and read comics. Most of the good happening with comics seemed to be happening in DC at that time, as Frank Miller continued his rebuilding of the Batman legend with “Batman: Year One” and other works. Marvel, unfortunately, from what I could tell, was on more of a downward spiral, just clinging to their X-Men line (that was already spawning into several more series) and creating sillier and lower-quality works. But, hey, the kids kept buying them, so they didn’t care much about high art at Marvel. Capitalism. What can you do?

I really wasn’t buying much as the 80s bled into the 90s—particularly since Kevin went into the Marines and wasn’t around to loan me things anymore or turn me on to what to buy. There was a time when I tried to jump back into the comic shop, once when I had some extra money to throw around. I decided to try something new, and I bought a bunch of independent comics. This was a pretty new concept at the time. Your choices had pretty much always been Marvel or DC. Now this new upstart company, Dark Horse, was making a go, and a couple of others, too. I ended up buying and really digging their series “The American”. Unfortunately, most of the other indies I bought were forgettable crap, but hey…somebody has to start the process. Those early crap works by struggling wannabes plowed the field for the bigger independent market to come. Though in there, I did discover Grimjack This was a really whacked kind-of-sci fi book created by John Ostrander and Tim Truman, and published by First Comics. REALLY loved this book. I just noticed that it’s made a return in the past couple of years, but past experiences I’ve had with old creators bringing back their famed characters don’t leave me with a lot of hope of lightning striking again. One of my coolest memories of the Grimjack was finding out that a buddy of mine, Ron Edwards, used to run a Champions game in Chicago that included John Ostrander and his wife as players. In one of the Grimjack issues, there’s a map of Cynosure (the main city of the book), and one of the places mentioned is “Rod Eduardo’s Pizza” – a little homage to Ron from John. I thought that was cool.

I mainly found out what was happening with comics, and tried the occasional new thing, when going to the San Diego Comic-Con. This started in 1990 for me and became an annual tradition, one that involved meeting up there was buddies of mine to have a good time. I’d go to panels and check out the company tables and see what big things were going on. And I’d usually buy a handful of things each year to try. One big score was when my pal Aaron got me to pick up “Pirate Corp$”, an indie originally put out by Eternity Comics but later picked up by Slave Labor. This ridiculously original book was the creation of then-young artist Evan Dorkin, who wrote and drew (and later lettered, when he couldn’t afford a letterer anymore) the creator-owned work, which Aaron had described to me a space opera “ska” comic. I had to know. And I fell in love with it!!! This is the same Dorkin who would later be better known for his “Milk & Cheese” comics and his regular (snicker) series called “Dork”, but this was him at the start of his comics career, back when his love of the space genre (and ska music…and hockey…) was evident. It was set in the future and involved a main character that obviously WAS Dorkin on a ship’s crew with a diverse and great collection of alien types. That sentence isn’t doing those characters any justice at all, but I’m going to talk more about the Corp$ in a later blog. Things started off pretty sci-fi-like in the first issues. But what was really fascinating was watching as the book (particularly when it got a name-change to “Hectic Planet”) evolved as his life did. It quickly just became a character book instead of being in any way plot-focused, and started dealing with themes of love (and losing it), loss, lack of dough, the club scene… The sad news is that he just eventually stopped doing it and focused his once-every-couple-of-years publishing on Dork (not that I’m complaining…that’s consistently one of the most wrongly funny things you’ll ever read. Nobody does more painfully dead-on brilliant social commentary than Dorkin), but Slave Labor did collect ‘em all up in trade paperbacks, and I’m happy to own them all. They stood out for me as an example of someone who just had his own creation, his own vision, and just got out there and did it and didn’t care what anyone thought. And the result (even if it didn’t make him loads of dough) was something unique and oddly wonderful. Good for you, Dorkin. And thanks.

But aside from the Comic-Con stuff, comics were really gone for me once more. College was soon over (that means I decided to drop out before graduating, by the way), and I suddenly found myself with a woman in my life. For those of with stories of how comics and women DO mix in your life? Screw you! Uh, I mean, congratulations. For me, didn’t work out that way, and that was fine, because I was pretty sure I’d said good-bye to the funny books. I was still going to Comic-Con every summer, but that was really just to hang out with the guys. But not buying any comics. Soon I had moved to Arizona, hadn’t bought a comic in forever, and didn’t even know where a comic shop was in the Phoenix area.

But comics do tend to sneak back up on you. And sometimes in unexpected ways. Like, with a chance to actually write one of them….

(STAY TUNED!)

Historical Flashback

After discussing this in the last entry, thought I'd track down some art reminding us of what a big moment this was in comics at the time. Here, in "X-Men & Teen Titans" in 1982, the two ultra-popular teams from two different comic companies meet for the first time. Great art by Walt Simonson (with inks by Terry Austin), though I remember being miffed at the time that Perez hadn't done the art for this thing.

This was a cool story and all (written by Claremont, so you can tell whose book was selling better), but I also recall feeling kind of ripped off by them just pretending the X-Men and Titans existed in the same universe (and just hadn't run into each other until now). When you're as big a continuity cop as I was (and am), this just ticks you off and kind of negates the whole story. It wasn't until the JLA/Avengers crossover a couple of decades later that the two companies finally got it right (and that was WAS drawn by Perez). If you're about to remind me about "Marvel vs. DC", I said JLA/Avengers was when they got it RIGHT. Ugh.

Another interesting historical fact. This oversized issue had really crap binding. It was about three times as long as a regular comic, with a thicker cover, but I guess they figured a couple of standard staples would do the trick. It didn't. Your cover would keep coming loose. Being a collector, I think I had to buy it about three times. Finally got one properly stapled and didn't open it (that's what immediately started the cover problem) and sealed it greedily in a mylar comic bag. Hey, those were selling for up to $20 each not long after it came out!

Great geek moments here for me included Wolverine fighting Deathstroke the Terminator, Starfire hearing Colossus speaking Russian and laying a big kiss on him to absorb the language (like she was able to) and Kitty getting miffed about it and referring to her as a "hussy" (hey, Kitty was the one sitting there thinking Gar Logan was cute, so she had no high-ground to get mad at Pete!), and the first post-death return of Phoenix, even though it was an imaginary story. And she was brought back to team up with Darkseid, no less! We would later get the real return of Jean (for a while), but this was a pretty dramatic moment.

Me and Comics (Part 2)

So there I was, a card-carrying (as discussed previously, that’s a literal statement) high school comic book nerd, anxiously grabbing up just about every new thing the Marvel Universe could throw at me. There were some pretty exciting (to us) new things happening during those days, too. Get this—the popular X-Men series was popular enough to create a spinoff series! I know, isn’t it unfathomable? The New Mutants was big news for us…and, little did we know, a major harbinger for things to come. Something else Marvel introduced during the early/mid-80s was another harbinger concept—the massive crossover. We went nuts when Contest of Champions came out in 1983, and not only did we get to see all our favorite Marvel heroes together—but we got to see them fight each other! This was just a mini-series (three issues), but Marvel took the idea and (marketing-minded gurus that they were) took it to an unprecedented level with 1984’s Secret Wars, a 12-issues “maxi-series” that used over 20 popular Marvel heroes and a whole bunch of villains. Speaking of marketing—it turns out the whole Secret Wars came to be because Mattel wanted to put out a Marvel line of toys, and wanted it to tie in with a big publishing event. Even the title was Mattel’s idea. They found out from focus group research that kids responded well to the word “secret” (I’m not making this up), and hence, Secret Wars came to be…to sell toys. But it also sold a lot of comics, and it started what would become an industry standard from then on.

In the midst of my “Marvel zombie” period—obsessed like everyone else in comics with all things X-Men—I found out that a big Marvel/DC crossover was to happen involving the X-Men, one that would team them with DC’s new phenomenon, the New Teen Titans. As I said elsewhere, I really didn’t have much interest in DC. My loyalty was to Marvel, and DC, in my mind, was for kids…you know, unlike Marvel (oh, sweet hindsight irony!). I knew DC characters form cartoons and toys, things of my young days, not my much-more-mature high school comic-reading period. But hearing of this forthcoming crossover issue, I got curious about these Titans everyone was gaga over. I decided to pick one up off the rack and take a look. And what a surprise! The art was done by George Perez, whom I was a huge fan of from his Avengers days. And it was written by Marv Wolfman, who I’d known as an editor at Marvel. Well, no WONDER it was so popular! It was being done by a couple of Marvel guys! With my interest piqued more than ever, and feeling I should get to know these characters so I’d enjoy the team-up story more, I grabbed two or three issues to check the Titans out.

And I was soon grabbing up every back issue I could (luckily for me, I’d come in only a couple of years into the book’s run), and had found one of my favorite comics of all time. Titans was DC’s answer to the X-Men craze, and there were many parallels—the ages of the characters, the focus on characterization, multi-part stories that occasionally went cosmic, and villains with complexity. It was amazing. Along with the X-Men, it was my monthly couldn’t-miss at the comic shop. It was also my beginning intro to the DC universe. In it, I learned of such teams as the Doom Patrol, which until that time I’d never heard of. And it was because of my love for the Titans that I ended up grabbing my REAL gateway to the DCU. It was DC’s answer to Marvel’s Secret Wars (though many argue it had been planned for so long, Marvel had really ended up just beating DC to the punch)—a 12-part series called Crisis on Infinite Earths.

DC took the crossover maxi-series idea to the next level…and beyond. This story set out with a bold concept—it was really designed to “reboot” DC continuity and clean up all the continuity problems the company had created over the years. And not just its own self-contained story, Crisis introduced the idea of the “tie-in”…all the other titles in the DCU, during the year of Crisis, had “Crisis tie-in” stories that made you feel you HAD to buy them or you wouldn’t have the whole story. This would become both a staple of Marvel and DC’s future (pretty much annual) events, and would become a much-maligned practice due to the way it was handled down the road (Secret Wars II was a great example, where “tie-ins” barely paid lip service the story in same cases, making readers feel like they’d been scammed into buying them).

While I didn’t go crazy enough to buy the tie-ins, the series itself was a must-buy for me because it was being done by the Titanic team of Wolfman and Perez (the undeniable golden boys of DC in the first part of the 80s). There were some big differences between this one and Secret Wars. Where Secret Wars involved a lot of characters thrown together in one situation, this epic (understatement) tale involved pretty much EVERY DC character—every corner of the DC Universe, and every era of the company’s comic history. It was a tale that was cosmic, spanning time and multiple realities. It truly was my guidebook to DC. I got to know, even in brief, the whole history of DC and all its characters, and got to see them all done by Perez, so they ALL looked cool and sparked my imagination. And major stuff happened! Major characters actually died! Supergirl went down! They killed the Flash! They ripped their own universe apart and rebuilt it in a new image, letting us newer readers get in on the ground floor. I read each issue multiple times (and I’ve never been much of a re-reader)…I almost had to, as so much was happening in both story and art (it’s unbelievable how much Perez can squeeze onto one page).

Actually, I just remembered my personal timeline on discovering it. I hadn’t actually learned about it until a couple of issues in. I saw it on a rack up on the counter, and I remember asking the guy there, “Hey, is this any good?” I clearly remember him looking at me and blinking. “Any good?” he asked me, both disbelieving and kind of a little pissed-off. “It’s only the best #@$%& comic every MADE.” His sales pitch, such as it was, worked (he almost scared me into buying it). I suddenly had to have it (NOW I remember…that’s when I discovered Wolfram and Perez were doing it). And he was very right. It was the greatest comic story I had ever read. And it officially broke me of my Marvel-only loyalty. Crisis still stands as a milestone in comic history, and it not only raised the bar for storytelling in comics, but also, along with Titans, FINALLY put DC back on the map (after getting their asses pretty much kicked by Marvel for about 20 years).

So I spent much of my high school years loving and devouring comics. But something happened partway into my senior year. I discovered something called a social life. All of a sudden, something happened that could only happen at a small school, I’m sure. I was part of the in-crowd. I was actually kind of in the inner circle, to tell the truth. My evenings and weekends were now filled with parties—and with partying—and comic reading and collecting took a back seat to going to midnight movies, hitting the pool party at the popular girl’s house, and getting into the kinds of trouble that I really should have been avoiding. Hey, I did have a great and memorable time, and it was nice, instead of sitting home reading X-Men adventures, to have people coming up to me in the halls at school to find out the plan for the coming weekend, and what we were going to do. It’s not often someone who was once the president of the Sacramento Marvelite Association gets to become cool. This required a sacrifice (or at least of lack of interest) of my long-time hobby, but it seemed like a fair trade-off for a time. Senior year ended up being a gas, and the world of mutants and titans rolled along without me.

For a time. As I came to find over the years, comics never really left my life completely. There were breaks, but my heroes were always there patiently waiting for my return.

(CONTINUED!)

Me and Comics (Part 1)

I've been reading comics, off and on, for a lot of years. My first memory of comics was probably when I was about six years old, living in San Jose, California, before my folks divorced. I can recall asking my father to read me one. Where it came from, I don't know, as I clearly wasn't buying them then (and he certainly wasn't). I remember it was a Batman one. I was a Batman fan from watching the Adam West Batman series on TV in the afternoons (anyone else old enough to remember watching it as a kid and having no idea it was meant to be camp?). I just remember the tale in the comic had either Batman or Robin getting rather violently knocked out and kidnapped. And then there was an automated motorcycle involved, with a recording, I think, that told either Batman or Robin that they had to get on it and let it take them to wherever it was the mysterious bad guy wanted them to go. I also remember my father getting uncomfortable and stopping and feeling the story was a little too dark and violent for me. I think it might have been some kind of anthology book, because I think he switched over to a Plastic Man story instead.

I don't think it was until about second and/or third grade that I started getting comics again. By this time I was living in Auburn, California. My folks had split, and we were living with what I would come to know as stepfather #1. And we were poor. REAL poor. Not sure where Mom came up with the change for my sister and I to occasionally buy comics, but when I got some of that cash, that's what I wanted. There was a little super-hero stuff in there. I recall some Fantastic Four now and again. And I remember having a couple of issues of the Invaders, that cool WWII comic with Captain America and his patriotic pals (this was the first place I really heard about Nazis, apparently, because I remember reading these and thinking it was pronounced "Nazzy"...as in Cap saying "Get back, "Nazzy" rat!" By the way, wasn't that an Elton John song?). But my interests were more aligned with the happenings at Riverdale High, and the lives of Archie and his pals. With them, but, more importantly, with Richie Rich.

See, being dirt poor and living a pretty stressful childhood, having an outlet to escape to a world where a kid could live in a big mansion with a butler and have a $100,000 a week allowance was exactly what I needed. I grabbed new Richie Rich issues whenever I could, either at the supermarket carousel or at the stand at the pharmacy across the street from the laundromat we used (sometimes I'd get lucky enough to find enough dropped change under the machines to run over and buy one). When reading those, I didn't have to be some poor kid struggling through the Jimmy Carter economy and living off food stamps, and living IN a small trailer (or, for one summer, the back seat of a yellow Ford Galaxy 500 parked next to the trailer). That Poor Little Rich Kid (tm) with his really big head was my way, at least in my daydreams, out of that. And there were a lot of his adventures to choose from. I just did a quick bit of web search and found out that at one point during the 70s (which would have been when I was reading), Richie Rich was starring in 32 different titles every two months. Man, no wonder I never ran out of new ones to buy.

But as time went by (and we got less poor), my fancy turned to super-heroes. During the 5th and 6th grades I'd moved to Sacramento, and my trips to the local 7-11 near our duplex to get comics became hunts for Iron Man, Avengers, Shogun Warriors and Micronauts issues. I was a Marvel boy all the way. Never bought any D.C. And though I met Tim in the 5th grade at the small school I would end up attending until high school graduation, we didn't become friends until the 6th, and when we did, we discovered our shared love of comics. And many of the same comics, too. He was an even bigger fan of Iron Man than I was, and he introduced me to other comics like Moon Knight.

During this time I made an unimaginable discovery. That is, my sister did. One day she came back from a trip to our local mall, Birdcage Walk, with my mother, and she came in the door and told me she'd found a store--a whole store--that sold nothing but comics. I was stunned, and, frankly, didn't really believe her. How could such a thing be possible outside my nerdy imagination? Comics were things shoved in a corner in a spinning rack. You couldn't have a whole STORE that sold just comics. It just didn't match up with reality as I knew it.

But soon, I made the trip myself and found out that she hadn't been cruelly pulling my leg. I found Comics & Comix, my first comic book store. Approaching the store told the truth--in its display window were lines of comics, big cardboard stand-ups of super-heroes, and even super-hero tee shirts. I walked (in a daze) inside. If the place still existed today, and if I were to go back there, I'm sure I'd think it was quite small. But to me, then, it was huge. And there were aisles (if you call "aisles" just segmented rows of long racks) of comics. New comics, old comics. Comics I'd never heard of. And there were people in there shopping. Not just kids. Teenagers. Adults. All buying comic books! What alternate universe had I fallen into?!

I'll always remember that first day there, and what I bought--Iron Man #138, and Avengers #200. I specifically remember the Avengers issue because I had gotten #199 on the 7-11 rack, and then it skipped right to #201 next time I went back. I hadn't gotten to read #200, and it turns out it was because it was an oversized issue that apparently was too much trouble to have in the rack. And in looking around, I found that this place sold BACK ISSUES. Up until then, I thought that if you missed an issue at the store, it was gone forever. Not long after that I scraped together a whole $1.50 and bought Shogun Warriors #1. I remember the price so well because the geniuses at Comics & Comix made their pricing simple by opening the comic up and writing the back issue price, in pencil, on the first page, upper-right-hand corner. Guess this was right before the collectible craze really kicked in, as not too long after, anyone who knew anything about comics knew you could be shot for doing such a thing to a back issue.

I definitely became a regular at Comics & Comix from then on. And they had this great new idea, too, called the "comic saver". You could actually tell them which comics you wanted each month, and they'd pull them for you and keep them behind the counter until you came to get them. That way, if you couldn't talk your mom into driving you there again for a while, your precious Captain America & The Falcon issues wouldn't sell out on you. And all my stuff was Marvel throughout junior high and into high school. That DC stuff? No interest. Marvel was COOL. And it got much, much cooler when, after discovering them in a Rom: Spaceknight crossover story, I decided to check out these interesting-looking X-Men. I turns out I jumped in right about the time when everyone else did. I fell in love with Marvel's mutants, just as John Byrne left the book and Dave Cockrum returned, and Chris Claremont's writing drew me and so many thousands of others in. It was the beginning of the age of the X. This was a time when, on Wednesday mornings (the day new comics arrived), people would literally be lined up outside waiting for the store to open, just to get that latest X-Men issue the day it came out. This was also back when there was only ONE X-Men book (imagine such a thing!), but that was not to last for long.

My collection started to grow. As did Tim's. And we also found other friends in school into comics as well. We even formed something, our freshman year (shoot me now) called the Sacramento Marvelite Association. We each had cards (yes, I was a card-carrying loser...) with a drawing (by Tim) of our favorite Marvel character (Hawkeye, from the Avengers, was on mine) and our name. We collected dues from the whopping six of us involved. And we used that to buy ourselves an Overstreet Comic Buyers Guide, the big book that came out at regular intervals (this being an age way before the internet) that told you how much your comics were worth. So we all had our collections, and knew how much each of our books was worth. But more importantly, we had a hobby in common, and a small group of friends with which to share our feelings about our favorite comic characters and their tales. Our favorite MARVEL characters, of course. I still recall when Marvel released the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, a 12-issue series (and I think #13 was added as the "Book of the Dead", if I'm remembering right) that, in alphabetical order, gave us comic fans bio write-ups of every single hero and villain in the Marvel Universe. We knew that thing inside and out by the end. We were Marvel scholars. No longer having to debate such matters, we now KNEW who the strongest character in the Marvel Universe was (as the M.U. write-ups told you, among many other things, how much each character could lift). And knowing so much about Marvel, we of course wanted to keep up with everything going on in Marvel, so we managed to buy just about everything new that the company put out. Most every series, every mini-series (no matter how bad), every one-shot. "Make Mine Marvel"? You bet your ASS.

But as I said, my very first comic book memory involved a D.C. comic. And history does have a way of coming back around on you. D.C.'s second chance at me was coming, and coming soon. And all because of a guy named George Perez.

(TO BE CONTINUED, TRUE BELIEVER!)