Four-color monastics (1)
There was a time when you learned about new comics by word of mouth. Not by advertisements, or being hand-sold books because they just littered up the newsstands or spinner racks and the clerks didn’t know anything about them, or by the internet.
I know. You’re wondering how we got along. I assure you, we got along just fine.
Comics, by which I mean largely superhero comics, since this was the dawn of the 80s, and both Marvel and DC had tossed their eggs into the basket crammed full of leotards and domino masks (soon to be replaced by black vinyl cut at arresting angles), were a hermetic order. Sure, anyone could pick up a comic at any time and get into the storyline that was unfolding in the sawdust-yellow pages (thank you, Jim Shooter, for getting me hooked on monthly Marvel books). Remember, these were the days of “Every comic is someone’s first comic and we gotta get them up to speed on the whys and wherefores.” Yeah, it makes for clumsy reading in trades of the material from that time, but back then, it was like, electra-glide smooth entry into the polychrome universe.
And if you were lucky enough to find guys who knew the lay of the land, then you could get steered to the good stuff. And let’s not kid ourselves, in the 80s, it was almost always guys: I met one, singular, solitary female comics reader, before I went to college. I didn’t exactly go out of my way to avoid the distaff gender, either. There just weren’t many female comics readers out there (though I’m assured that nearly every woman I meet in the field now read either UNCANNY X-MEN or AMETHYST back in the day). But there were guys out there who’d been reading comics long before I regularly started (I was late in the game, not starting until I was 12 or 13). They knew their stuff.
At least when it came to Marvel books. For some reason, none of ‘em, to the last dude, were current DC fans. Some of them might have been into the reprints of stuff like SWAMP THING or the Kirby books or even the horror books from the 70s, but none of them were down with Superman or Batman. X-Men, though? You got it. John Byrne? He’s the guy, man. Claremont wrote it, or even Starlin or Gerber? Hit me. What’s more, these four-color monks always urged me to dig back a bit and to dig the crazy seventies books. So when you found a Ditko reprint, you weren’t urged to make fun of the chunky, sinuous inkiness. Instead, this was to be enjoyed like bleu cheese. Sure, it tastes kinda funky at first, but once you get the taste for it, you’re not going to want to give it up.
Of course, I was passingly familiar with Ditko’s work, and that of Kirby (though I always though his faces and hands were a little wrong) and a few others, thanks to ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS, which was kind of a Rosetta stone in this crowd, the ur-texts of our chosen comics contained within. So when I found reprints of Ditko Spider-Man stories, I jumped in with both feet.
But you know, the first comic book that I picked up on my own volition, aside from that titanic ORIGINS book, was a copy of THE MICRONAUTS. And why would I choose that when there was so much other choice out there? Well, one, Michael Golden covers (I actually came in on Pat Broderick’s run), which didn’t so much as ask for your attention as they did cross the room and smack you around some. So yeah, the covers were good, but more importantly, I knew the toys.
The. Toys. Toys sold me my first comic book.
Well, I guess that might be an exaggeration. I’m thinking that I probably put down my own money for the giant treasury edition of the STAR WARS adaptation. Which I probably plastered with stickers from my ever-growing STAR WARS card collection at the time. I had no sense for collector value, even then, see?
I just find it funny looking back at this and realizing that I was led into comics by things that were not specifically comics. Whether it was the trade collection of ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS (bought for me at a young age because I’d seen a FANTASTIC FOUR origin story reprinted somewhere), or a movie tie-in or a toy tie-in.
But from there it was easy to hit up another toy tie-in, ROM, in this case. And who did ROM fight in issue 16-17? I’ll give you a hint, their first initial is X. Yep. That’s right. I got sucked into X-MEN by a damn toy comic.
And man, it was all downhill from there. At any rate, to get back to my monastic brethren, one of the stories that they told me I had to track down, at all costs, was this little thing called “Days of Future Past,” which is what I meant to write about before I got all sidetracked. Perhaps next time.
But seriously, toy-tie ins can move the world.