Day 01 - Your first comic book.
IT'S A TIE: Amazing Spider-Man #207 & Crisis on Infinite Earths #12
The first two comic books I ever bought vary greatly on their scale of importance. Amazing Spider-Man #207 is practically a 'filler' issue where Spidey fights an angry stage magician named Mesmero while Crisis on Infinite Earths #12 was obliterating and re-writing the very fabric of the DC Universe after almost 50 years of history and literally involved every character to ever appear in a DC published comic book!
Despite their obvious differences, and also due to them, I loved each one to death.
Amazing Spider-Man #207...was just a simple story of Peter Parker screwing up his love life while trying to do the right thing. The climax of the story was a theatre filled with gasoline, hypnotized victims on the stage while Spider-Man was forced to juggle flammable juggling balls while balancing on stilts (if he dropped the balls, it would ignite the gas and kill everyone except Mesmero who was wearing an inflammable suit). Spidey's simple solution? Throw the balls UP and smash them on the ceiling, jump off the stilts and punch the bad guy in the face. Done and done. I still have this issue and will never part with it and, officially, I do count this as my 'first comic' if only in respect that I no longer have my copy of...
Crisis on Infinite Earths #12!...how do I explain this book to a non-comic reader? It was the final issue of a 12-part story that literally took the entire DC Universe line of heroes, villains, alternate timelines, mirrored Earths, reverse dimensions, dopplegangers, origins, continuity...you name it!...it took them and basically started from scratch. But not SO from scratch that it was "Day One", so to speak. Batman, Superman and all them had still been around for, say, 5 years doing their thing but the history of what "actually" happened in that time was relatively different. They kept much of the same plot details with the main characters (Krypton, the Wayne's deaths, etc) but took multiple characters who lived all those decades in alternate Earths and put everyone on the same timeline.
Make sense? No? Try being a comic book fan!
Imagine if you took the original Star Wars Trilogy (aka - "Star Wars" to most people) and completely re-did the whole thing. Let's say Luke and Leia met just as they did but it never turns out that they're related at all and there's a totally different history for Leia. Now let's say Alderaan had PLENTY of weapons and instead of simply being blown up, there was a huge space fight (where it likely got blown up afterwards anyway).
Basically, "Crisis" took the idea of "What If..." and made it "This is How it is Now..."
Anyway, this was a HUGE book at the time and it was probably the worst possible choice I could have made at the age of 12 to jump head first into the biggest story to EVER hit comic books in their entire history. But it included everyone (even multiples of many!) and the heroes were dying left right and center and the ones who weren't dying were shitting their pants they were so scared! I had never seen anything like it. The Anti-Monitor became my bogey-man, the scariest villain ever, he wiped out entire universes! The next time I saw him was in an issue of The Flash about a DECADE later, he was a surprise on the last page and I literally yelled "Holy shit! The Anti-Monitor!".
The difference between these two books really put comics into perspective for me right off the bat and I'm very glad I had them both to view as guidelines. I understood immediately if I wanted a simple story that there were plenty of options and if I wanted something universe-spanning to blow my mind that there was that, too!
- Jeff
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