On a pleasant fall day in 1985 my dad and I were in the Hills Department Store in Bloomington, Indiana, and as we walked past the spinner rack this book's cover caught my eye. At twelve years old, I was a devoted fan of Archie comics who sometimes read the occasional Richie Rich or Walt Disney comic. My acquisition of these types of books was both random and sporadic, but that didn't matter because each issue was self-contained, some might even say repetitive. Archie could never choose between Betty or Veronica (though he did seem to prefer Veronica most days), Richie wasn't ever able to reform his obnoxious cousin Reggie, and Donald Duck always lost his temper with Huey, Dewey, and Louie. So it didn't matter if I read issue 501 of Archie Giant Series Magazine before issue 472, or Ri¢hie Ri¢h Gems 33 before Ri¢hie Ri¢h Vaults of Mystery 29, because they had no chronological (to say nothing of a causal) relationship to one another. As such, I didn't consider myself a collector of comics so much as a reader of comics.
Nor did I have much interest in becoming a collector. I had one friend in grade school who was a confirmed superhero comics junkie. I distinctly remember picking out a half dozen or so comic books to give to him at his ninth birthday party, and wondering if I chose the right ones. To me, comics starring the Justice League of America (or, as I knew them at the time, the Super Friends), the Fantastic Four, or any of the other superteams were completely foreign objects that held no appeal to me. My friend John was excited about the choices I'd made for him, but when he tried to explain what was so great about the Green Lantern, the Flash, et al., I tuned him out. I couldn't help it. Oddly enough, I think I considered these books to be too mature for me, too "grown up"--filled with artwork that wasn't cartoony enough and stories that were too serious. Archie and his perennial girlfriend dilemma was more my speed than the Avengers' latest battle with the Hulk. And what held true at nine years old held true when I was twelve, or so I'd thought.
But G.I. Joe turned out to be my gateway drug. While I was reading Archie comics and spurning superhero comics, my younger brother and I were nonetheless thoroughly engrossed in playing with our Star Wars and G.I. Joe action figures, staging epic battles in the basement, acting out exactly the types of dramatic, violent scenes that took place in the books published by Marvel and DC. So when I saw that copy of G.I. Joe 42 on the Hills spinner rack, with Storm Shadow about to hack some mystery character to bits, I picked it up and started flipping through it.1 My dad, who had read comics for a while when he was a kid (mostly Classics Illustrated, all but six of which my grandmother condemned to the trash can), quickly gauged my interest and asked me if I wanted him to buy it for me. The answer was yes, and so my days of comic book collecting began in earnest--courtesy of my father, who provided me with the chance to turn a passing interest into the beginning of a new hobby.2
As I mentioned above, this was a whole new type of comic book to me. G.I. Joe 42 began in media res, and the story it was in the middle of telling didn't wrap up at the end of the issue either. But it was fascinating. I read it repeatedly when we returned home, gleaning something new each time. I recognized most of the characters, but their relationships were new to me--different as they were from the relationships my brother and I had forged for them in action figure form (fellow Joe fans will recall that the G.I. Joe cartoon had only just begun airing on TV that fall). This was a type of comic book, then, that I would have to seek out each month if I wanted to truly understand what was going on. Thus began my slow gravitation to the Marvel universe.
At first I stuck exclusively with G.I. Joe, convinced I still wasn't interested in superheroes. But I did start to branch out. I bought the final issue of Marvel's Star Wars comic a few months later, and began browsing other nonsuperhero titles. Later still, I'd succumb to Spider-Man and the rest of the Marvel universe, becoming a full-fledged Marvel zombie. But that moment lay several months into the future. Back on that day in 1985, I was merely a kid whose eyes were opening to a wider world of comics. All thanks to my dad.
Pointless Footnotes
1 If I were feeling poetic I might say that the mystery character on the cover represented me, about to be whacked with this new desire to collect comics.
2 Earlier, my dad had also passed along his love of Mad Magazine to me, but Mad pretty much fit in with Archie and the rest of the comics I read--chronology wasn't a factor, and thus I could pick up copies of Mad as sporadically as any of the other kids' comics I read. I didn't "collect" Mad anymore than I "collected" Archie.
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