Previous Post Topic shamelessly stolen from Michael Paciocco's thread on my own message board. My first comic was probably some Archie or Superman bullshit, since I remember my folks getting those for me at the local Dean's Thrift Mart in Otis Orchards, Washington. Superman was always in mid-storyline when I saw it, so since we obviously didn't go grocery shopping at Dean's every single week, nor did they always have the same titles in stock, I wound up getting ahold of a lot of incomplete storylines, going WTF to myself, and caring more about Archie than about Superman (not that I cared that much about Archie, but he was at least easier to follow). I have fond memories of other people's comics, though. My best friend in grade school, Ryan Ross, was spoiled as hell, so he had complete runs of the Transformers and Batman comics (and even the V tie-in comics - yes, V, with Marc Singer!). I remember reading the Batman issue that debuted Black Mask, whose origin story unnerved the shit out of me as a little boy, in ways that I kind of liked. My aunts, Beverly and Melissa, were in their teens when I was in grade school, so I raided their comics stacks a few times. They had the origin story of Ghost Rider, which I found chilling as a kid, and a run of Dark Shadows comics, with Angelique the witch and Quentin the werewolf. One comic that my aunts had, which particularly unsettled me, was an issue of Superman with a cover story about "The Satanic Son of Superman!" I didn't get the whole concept of "imaginary stories" back then (or at least, how they were different from "real stories" about purely fictional characters), so I actually thought that Superman-as-widower, with a dead witch for a wife and an evil son, was in continuity (not that I knew what "continuity" was back then, but you get what I'm saying). The first comics of my own that I distinctly remember, though, are my Ambush Bug comics, set right in the immediate wake of Crisis On Infinite Earths (which I knew nothing about at the time, so all those in-jokes just flew right over my head), and Swamp Thing #37. I loved Ambush Bug for being metafictionally aware of his own status as a comic book character, long before I knew what "metafiction" even was, and I loved Swamp Thing #37 so much that it was the first comic book I remembered the ISSUE NUMBER of. I loved seeing the Swamp Thing's perspective, as a plant, and I loved the diverse cast of characters that was introduced, and I loved the huge, looming, mysterious threat that was alluded to, and I loved loved LOVED the blonde-haired British ASSHOLE with the cigarettes and the trenchcoat. I even remembered the guy's NAME - John CONSTANTINE - and years later, after I'd quit comics in grade school (because of the goddamn "love triangle" in Superman, which seemed even stupider to me than the love triangle in Archie), but before I started collecting comics in college, I was in the university bookstore, and I saw the cover of a comic that read John Constantine: Hellblazer, and I thought, "Nah, it can't be the same guy ... can it?" But it was, and he was having his last showdown with Papa Midnite, and as much as Garth Ennis' work has declined over the years, I can thank him (and Alan Moore, by extension) for getting me back into comics in college. Oh, and Michael Paciocco has asked the question again, over on his blog this time. Go forth and answer him.

I really don't remember what my first comic was, because I've been reading them since before I knew what words were, but these four are burned into my brain as some of the earliest-- they were, at least, my first taste of their respective characters, that much I do know.