I’ll take internet meme for $100, Alex.

The questions:
1) What was the first comic you remember reading?
2) What was the first comic that made you realize that you might be in this for the long haul?
3) If you had to make a snap decision to take one comic or one comic run to a desert island, what would it be? Don’t think too hard!

Thanks to Johnny Bacardi, I’ve been pegged with the latest meme that’s going around the net basically trying to figure out where people’s love of comics come from so here are mine.

1) The first comic I remember actually owning and reading is The Avengers #144, the first appearance of Patsy Walker as Hellcat. I’m pretty sure that I had some comics from before this but I can’t remember anything about them. This issue by Steve Englehart and George Perez featured time travel, alternate worlds, a ton of heroes that I recognized and many that I didn’t. It also showed me what continuity was since it tied the Beast’s story into Patsy Walker’s. I still have this cover-less copy around and need to find a mint copy of it for my collection.

2) X-Men #137 was the first book ever that hit me on any kind of emotional level. I had only just discovered the X-Men with issue #131 but I had already loved the characters by this point. I don’t remember ever really encountering death in a comic before this but the fate of Jean Grey seemed so final back then. Chris Claremont and John Byrne may also be the first creators I really knew by name. Shortly after this issue came out, I remember discovering comic shops and spending probably way too much on back issues of X-Men, trying to learn who these characters were and what their story was. This is the comic and the run that spurned on my collector mentality. After this issue (and the subsequent history lesson in #138) led to many hours spent trolling through long boxes and inhaling the musty scent of newsprint. These were the books that made comics more than a diversion.

3) There are a number of titles that, no matter what, I find myself returning to again and again. But if I had to have a desert island book, it would have to be Matt Wagner’s Mage: The Hero Discovered, the first volume of Kevin Matchstick books. I discovered this comic towards the end of its original run and #14, the last Grendel chapter, may have been my first issue. As another title that was harvested from comic shop long boxes, Wagner’s tale of growing up, and learning what one is and isn’t responsible for hit the teenage me, not as a brick, but maybe more as a metaphorical map to adult hood. And these books looked nothing like what I had really seen in comics before, from the Wagner/Sam Keith collaboration on art to Wagner’s use of airbrushed markers to originally color the book. Sam Keith really doesn’t get enough credit for inking the second half of these 15 issues, defining and refining Wagner’s style.

So, the last part is that I’ve got to pass this along to 5 people? Let’s try Bruce, Derek, David, Matt and Ty.