I remember around the time I was five, my father would sometimes bring home huge stacks of comics he got at an auction or flea market.

The first I remember was a ton of the late 70s DC horror anthology comics. The Witching Hour, House of Mystery... I could barely read them but the lurid art remains seared into my mind.

The one I remember most had a story about a robber who shoots an old store clerk and tries to run from the cops. He climbs a water tower and hides there. By the time the cost is clear, water has been drained from the tower so he can't reach the top to pull himself out. He treads water, paws desperately at the wooden sides and eventually drowns. The other story in there was about a plague of killer ants. Some plantation owner wouldn't unchain the workers in his field and they were killed by the swarm of ants. The plantation owner is trying to run to safety, but he gets caught in a trap and the swarm of ants are coming towards him. In the last panel, he looks back at the approaching ants, and somehow his dead slaves have become the ants. There are these small ant bodies but with human heads. This was the most disgusting picture I had ever seen, never forgot it.

I also remember my dad bringing home a big stack of Sgt Rock comics which were just as horrifying. I remember one story where the Sgt Rock and his platoon come across a bunch of kids and give them candy bars and then the enemy opens fire and guns all the kids down. There was one panel of a child's bloody, dying hand clutching a candy bar.

At my grandmother's house, there was a collection of Dennis the Menace comics I read over and over, Dennis and Mr. Wilson on vacation in Hawaii.

Before actual comic-books, I had these:


^Still got 'em. Although the cover's missing for Hulk

Hulk #323 was actually the first very comic I remember owning. Got it at a Circle K, I believe.

Batman 442 was my first comic. I had grown up watching re-runs of the Adam West series, and then one day while at the grocery store with my mom that cover just happened to catch my eye. Robin is featured prominently on the cover, and I loved Burt Ward's Robin. So I begged my mom to get it, and she did, and that was the beginning of my comic obsession.

Reading that comic was amazing to my 10 year old self. It was so different from the Adam West series, and I loved it. It amazed me how Dick had grown up and become Nightwing, and there was a second Robin who had been killed by Joker. That was definitely very different from Cesar Romero's Joker.

I have that Silver Surfer one. I also had these (they're still around somewhere):



I also had a number of these digests. Bar None Ranch I bought years later in a superior Gladstone (I think) reproduction but I still have fond memories of these.

The first ones I remember were a four-pack of ROTJ comics that my mom bought me when I was sick.

My earliet memories are House of secrets, House of Mystery, Witching Hour, and some Archie titles. The first specific issues that I can remember reading are Marvel Star Wars 14-16.

I think I was around 5 when I bought my first comic book but as soon as I walked out of the store my mom grabbed it and threw it away. I can remember it had some kind of giant on it with small superheroes in it's hand. I'm 45 now and every now & then my mom brings it up because she wants to make sure I don't hold a grudge over it.

My memory is pretty fuzzy in all areas of my life, but my strongest early comic book memories are DC titles from the very early 1970s. I'd bike down to the local 7-11 and for my dollar allowance be able to pick up five books similar to these:

Probably a bunch of Archie digests, if you count those.
But the first ones I bought for the purpose of collecting were X-Men books in the mid 1980s.

That's funny. My first comics were all Spider-Man comics in the mid-1970s. I never seriously collected them though. Flash forward to January 1990. I was a college student waiting for my girlfriend to get out of work. I had stopped at a convenience store (U-Totem?) and picked up a soda and Batman 442 to keep me company. I didn't realize that Richard Grayson wasn't Robin anymore and was surprised by the story all together. I went to a comic book store the next day to pick up the first four parts of Lonely Place of Dying and have been hooked since.

The first comic I read was probably a Donald Duck comic that I was given while taking a bus ride to Mexico when I was about 6. The first real comic I bought and read was Spider-man 241 when I was about 12. It took a beating but I still have it. Now I have about 20K comics, have quit a couple of times, the lastest was about a year ago since it's really damn expensive now! I still go to the conventions here in Chicago though, mainly to buy art and meet the artists.

There are pictures of me back in 1972 reading a bunch of comics including the picture below:




Most of the time, I'd have either a Disney or Archie comic in my hand.

As I got older and started to comprehend what I was looking at, it was traditional books like Fantastic Four, Defenders, Justice League of America, etc. I still have the tattered remains of some of the books I had back then. If I see them cheap at a convention, I'll pick up a better copy to replace them.



There are times I'll be thumbing through a bin and come across a cover that literally JOLTS the memory of a book that I had forgotten I use to own. That happened recently with Defenders #37.




I'd say I roughly became a comic book reader in late 1974/early 1975. I probably became an actual collector in the late 70s after I started reading Star Wars and the Micronauts. I would graduate from picking up my comics at the liquor store to finding an actual comic store in 1979 (The Comic Vendor). My God - That was magic! A store that only sold comic books! I was in heaven. Before that, it was picking up random comics or haunting 7-11s to keep a continuous run. Once the Comic Vendor became a monthly trip, I would pick up All-Star Squadron, Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew and Adventure Comics with Dial "H" For Hero.

It was all down hill after that.

Fall of 1965. I was seven. Was with my dad at a drugstore and noticed the spinner rack of comics. "Wow. What are these." Was fascinated by them. Dad let me get four(.50 cents total w/tax).
Fantastic Four 44
Tales To Astonish 73
Journey Into Mystery(Thor) 121
Mystery In Space 102

These threads make me want to find a store with quarter boxes and go crazy.

The first comicbook I read was one I won as part of a scratch off card contest from a 7-11 Super Slurpee contest. The book features Spider-man, Captain America, Hulk, and Spider-Woman fighting The Wizard, Trapster, Rhino, and the Enchantress. The heroes met as their headquarter at a 7-11 store. "The Secret of the Power Crown" was the story. Nice classic art work in the comic. It didn't list the artists name but it looks like Romita or Herb Trimpe.

I always had the hots for the Red Guardian back in the day.

And speaking of the Defenders, I remember starting to read that series during the Avengers-Defenders clash (which I now have in TPB form in at least three different volumes), and on what was probably my first trip to a real comic store my friend grabbed Avengers #118, showed it to me, and simply said "118" and added it to his stack. Jealous! Though he did let me read it.



I also remember subscribing to The Brave and the Bold and Marvel Team-Up back when they arrived in a brown mailer FOLDED IN HALF! Later they changed to mailing them flat. These were some of the early ones I remember:

Seeing those covers are great, and I had no idea Batman and Sgt Rock got together. I have to find that comic now!

My mom was a comic collector, so I don't really remember what my first comics were. I'm pretty sure I started with the Gold Key stuff, mainly Solar and Disney and Tom and Jerry and stuff like that. I also loved Richie Rich, Casper, and Hot Stuff, before I bit the superhero bug and it all went downhill from there. I remember having all of these old comics, unsorted and unbagged, in stacks outside in paper grocery bags, and going through and reading and re-reading Teen Titans and Uncanny X-men and all sorts of stuff. Then whenever we'd go to the grocery store I'd ask for and sometimes get one of the reprint digests... that's how I read a lot of silver age stories. Now Archie is the only one still there in the grocery check out aisle because of some kind of sweet, grandfathered deal.

They were in at least a couple Brave and the Bold shots, and it was always a bit of a stretch since it had to be in present day, not WWII. This one was really meta, about Jim Aparo et al. appearing in the comic as they were writing it:

The earliest comic that I can remember is one of the old Transformers comics. It had a mostly yellow cover.

Marvel stuff. Very early 90's stuff. Got into The Punisher War Zone then the regular series, War Journal, etc. Then I discovered Jim Lee and followed his X-Men run and that segued into the image guys putting out their books. Spawn, Pitt, Wetworks, WILDCATS, etc. Never cared for Shadowhawk, Youngblood, or Savage Dragon (Savage Dragon got good years later, though). I had also gotten into certain trading cards like the Marvel Masterpieces from Joe Jusko, etc.

The very first comic book I can remember reading was a Looney Toons thing when I was a kid. The only thing I remember about it was that it opened with a Road Runner story, which showed several Road Runners, which sort of blew my mind that there were more than one of them.

The first comic book I remember owning was Marvel Godzilla #23. I bought that somewhere because I was a huge Godzilla fan at the time. It also would have been my first exposure to the Marvel universe characters, though I didn't know who they were at the time.

the first comic I ever read was a cover-less trade my grandfather bought at goodwill in he early 80s for $.10...the Phoenix Saga. I was 7 or 8 at the time and it blew my mind.

My absolute first comic that I read? I believe it was a late 1970s Legion of Superheroes issue that the cover had been torn off. I don't know the exact issue but remember a few panels of Superboy flying through space. This would have been as a wee child, when I only knew of the characters through Superfriends. I clearly remember not being very interested in it, this was a wordy story with a lot of panels. The colors also seemed fairly dull on the pages.

It was given to me by my great-Aunt's husband, whom owned a corner store and sold comics through it. Back then in newsstand sales, publishers would only demand the cover back as proof for unsold copies. So tons of issues with ripped off covers circulated as reading copies.

The one I remember with more clarity is Power Records #27 (Batman: Stacked Cards). For people that don't know what these were, you got an LP with various sound effects meant to be played as you read the provided book. It was from a company called Power Records and their strange format forever made Neal Adams' Batman my favorite version. The art really popped in their included booklets. I have no idea why my family even had them. I think my father might have picked them up on clearance or at some rummage sale.



The first issue I consciously bought (well, had my grandmother buy after going to the dentist) was X-Men 195:


I have no idea how I roped her into buying this comic with that cover. I had no idea who anyone on the cover was but Wolverine looked cool.

A Fantastic Four issue. Cover was all in red & had them in a rocket. Conviently, it retold their origin in the issue so I know how they got their powers.