Saturday mornings as a kid some of my fondest memories include watching Challenge of the Superfriends each week – I was captivated by those and other cartoons including Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, Batman and Robin and others… but the first comic book I ever remember reading was … well probably Archie, my mom loved those… and then Casper, Wendy, Richie Rich… good stuff that I liked as a kid… The first one with real super heroes was a beat up copy of an X-Men book and they were visiting Kazar in the savage land… not even sure what issue that was but I was very interested.
It wasn’t until I was a teen and had a little pocket change that I was able to buy my own comic books and I found some at a little store in Whitehall, WI… back then they were maybe 75 cents a piece and I bought up all the ones I thought I would like. It was right in the middle of Crisis On Infinite Earths in 1985 and I was very lost… there were heroes in these books I’d never heard of before like Blue Beetle, Vigilante, Harbinger, and more… who were these people and what was going on. In Whitehall it was difficult to get back issues and I struggled to figure out what was happening. In the middle of that series Supergirl sacrificed herself to save Superman in a heroic gesture… Superman’s grief in that moment and pages after are what initially drew me to love the guy… Marv Wolfman and George Perez captured a feeling that I had inside me in that book, they transported me from Earth-Prime (that’s the Earth we all live on) to Earth-2 and the antimatter universe.. I was drawn in and loved it… (more…)
