Wednesday, February 9, 2011

My first comic! Part 1.

Everyone has some comic that they fondly remember from childhood. That comic that had something magical about it that you couldn't stop thinking about. The one that was so compelling that you actually learned to read so that you could understand what they were saying in the pictures. The one that you would dream about years later and never know if it was a real comic or just something that you dreamed up.




I have a few of these. There was the time I was 3 years old in my neighbors cellar and saw that Ghost Rider; There was that book in the library that had reprints of Golden age Batman, Wonder Woman and the Sub-mariner comics; There was the Starwars 3 pack that I bought from a hobby shop; But today I'm going to go a little bit forward in time to when I was at the dawn of puberty and I was just starting to assert my independence. I had a little change in my pocket and started to think about how to spend it.

I remember finding some new shop in the center of town that had all kinds of gifts and other strange things. Among the stuff was a box of comics. I have a vague memory of a New Teen Titans that I almost bought. Instead I went for this comic of superheroes. I don't remember what I liked about it. I think mostly I was attracted to all these strange and interesting colorfully clad characters.
X-Men annual #4, 1980.
 By Claremont, Bob McCloud, and John Romita Jr.!

This is a take-off of Dante's Inferno where the X-Men go to the spiraling depths of hell to save someone. I don't have this comic and I am writing from memory, but remember really liking Nightcrawler from this issue. All the characters were pretty cool to my young mind like Collosus's steel-like skin; Storms cool white eyes; but my favorite was definitely Nightcrawler! I just loved his black skin and hair, white eyes and 3 fingered hands and feet. My 11 year old self even made 3 fingered gloves to mimic his!
I really didn't understand a lot of what was going on in this issue. Who was that girl? Why was he so happy? But my little kid brain didn't really care. It wanted to see more of these cool super heroes!



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