The First Comic Story

I don't think I've posted this tale before, but if I have, feel free to just skip it this time around.

Believe it or not, there was a time in my life when not only was I not reading comics, but I actually had no idea they existed. And I'm not just talking about that nine month period of gestation, either! Read on for the story of how the biggest life-altering event in my young life played out.

When I was five, my mother re-married and I went from being part of a small family (mother, brother and baby Matthew makes three) to belonging to a Brady Bunch-like crew of six, including two new step-brothers who were close to my brother's age, which is to say much older than me. I don't know what it's like for others in that situation, but for me being the baby of the family meant lots of crappy stuff - being the only kid who couldn't do a lot of things the others could - the most important of which was I never got any say in the most important family topic of them all: what we'd watch on TV!

Kids today probably can't conceive of such an environment, but TVs were fairly expensive in those days, which meant that even a family of six like mine would generally only own one. And so the pecking order for who got to control the little knob on the front of it - imagine a life without remote controls.. you can't, can you? - had a few variations, depending on who was around, but the one constant was: little Matthew never got to choose! And thus my Saturday mornings were the highlight of the week, where TV watching was concerned, because I'd usually be up before any of the teenage brothers, and could plop down in front of cartoons for a good hour or more before some neanderthal pseudo-sibling would come stumbling into the living room and switch the object of all my attention over to the ridiculous world of wrestling (which was the other thing shown on Saturday mornings besides cartoons). I always hated this turn-of-events - and wrestling, for that matter - but that and a dime, as they used to say, would've gotten me a cup of coffee!

By the time I was about seven years old, I was pretty damned sick of that Saturday routine. That becomes important very shortly.

Around that time, my mother decided to entrust me with an errand that most parents, today, would never give to a seven year old. But this was a different time (in some ways, a saner time, if you ask me). She gave me a dollar and sent me to the variety store that was a couple blocks away to pick up milk and bread, or something like that. She sweetened the deal by telling me that I could spend twenty-five cents out of the change on whatever I wanted. Visions of licorice and chocolate bars and who knows what else danced before my eyes, as I made the trip from our house to Miles' Variety. When I got there, and after I'd put the project deliverables up on the counter, I went searching for whatever bonus I could find. For reasons I'll never understand, instead of just grabbing some candy, I toured the entire floor, looking. Vicki can attest to the fact that these days, as shoppers go, I make a good sprinter: get in, get the item(s), get the Hell out. And yet there I was, looking.

And so I came to the spinning rack that held the cartoons. Or, at least, they looked like cartoons, with two notable exceptions. First, they weren't moving; and second, they weren't going anywhere! By which I mean, they looked very much like they wouldn't disappear whenever a brother of mine walked into the room. No more transforming into swimsuit-clad clods throwing each other all over the place - OK, so maybe the two genres aren't that different, viewed from a certain angle, but this is my story, so give it a rest! I can't describe the appeal this notion of cartoons-on-demand held for seven year old little me!

I wish I had a clearer memory of that day - something like what Hinckley described here would've been super-swell - so that I could recall what titles and issues were there before my unbelieving eyes. Eventually, though, I settled on a particularly colourful little number called Captain America Annual # 1. By the date of the comic - Jan 1971 - I'd put this somewhere in late 1970 (the date on the cover is the last month that the issue should possibly be left on sale, so it's usually a couple months in the future). I'd be about seven and a half, in case anyone besides me cares.

If I were to say that that first comic got read quite a few times, I might just be understating it by a little. It was, after all, the cartoon that I could 'watch' anytime I liked, freeing me from the tyranny of the older brothers and the idiot box. So you might say it was Love At First Sight, and you wouldn't be wrong. I'd include the cover here, but bloody Blogger's having trouble uploading images once again. Maybe tomorrow I'll add it, if I can.

I've never remembered what the second comic was, or what the event was that brought it into my life. I'd hazard a guess that my mother saw how much enjoyment I was getting out of that Cap Annual as I read the cover off it, and bought me another one. Maybe an Avengers, as it would've featured Captain America, and I have a pretty early association with that title. Regardless, by then the damage was done, and the beginning of a life-long relationship was underway. I've quit comics a couple times in my life, once because I thought I'd outgrown them and once because I couldn't afford to keep buying them, but it never took. In fact, the longest any comic-free period in my life ever lasted was something like a couple months.

When I think about the course my life's taken, I have to believe that the only other event in my life that had the kind of long-reaching impact that buying that first comic did, was meeting Vicki. I literally can't imagine what my life would've been like had I not met Vicki, nor if I'd never bought that first comic. Whether you think that's sweet or pathetic, it is what it is.

Follow-up blog, including the cover, can be found here.