There's a meme going round inviting people to share the four comic book covers that are most important to them, that helped fire their enthusiasm for comics and turned them from casual readers into collectors.
Here are mine:
FANTASTIC FOUR #17 - I've spoken about this title many times before on
HeroPress. While I never read the original American edition (
pictured above), my earliest memory of reading a superhero comic book story was a British reprint of this adventure (
which kickstarted my lifelong love affair with The Fantastic Four).
This is the comic that truly showed me the infinite possibilities of superhero comics.
I have earlier memories of seeing American comic book covers, in an old spinner rack in a newsagents in a little seaside town where we used to holiday when I was a kid, but I can't remember if I actually picked any of them up. There was a
Shazam/
Marvel Family title, an issue of
The Flash (
I think he was fighting The Top on the cover) and a copy of
Black Magic #1
BLACK MAGIC #1 - Now, I know for certain I didn't read this when I first saw it. In fact I only managed to find out what the comic was, and obtain a copy,
a couple of years ago. But that front page burned itself into my - rather freaked out at the time - youthful mind, proving (
if nothing else) the enduring power of the comic book image.
NEW TEEN TITANS #1 - I didn't become a
bona fide comic book collector until, in my teenage years, I was visiting a book exchange in Tunbridge Wells and came across a stack of the Wolfman/Perez era
New Teen Titans comics going for a song.
I picked them up, took them home, devoured them and wanted more, more, more. I was hooked. Garfield Logan aka Beast-Boy was my favourite character and, like him, I fell in love with the duplicitous Tara Markov (aka Terra) when she joined the team. Her death in
Tales of the Teen Titans Annual #3 from 1984, remains the only comic that has ever made me cry.
ZOT! #1 - No one seems to talk about
Zot! these days. Heck, I don't even talk about Zot! these days. But for my money it remains the single best run of any comic book I have read. As with many things I have no idea how I started reading it, I think it was at a time of my life where it seemed as though I was buying almost everything that came out every month. But
Zot! always stood out from the rest.
It was intelligent, dramatic, gorgeously illustrated and highly original, managing to combine a lightness of style with dark moments.
Several years ago, Rachel bought me a collected edition of the entire run of
Zot!, signed by the comic's creator Scott McCloud. That's how great a wife she is!
I suspect that my "desert island book" - if I was only allowed a single volume on that hypothetical island - would be that that volume of
Zot!
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