MY COMIC BOOK ORIGINS

Since I have decided to write about my passion for comics, I thought I would start by explaining how my passion started. My first exposure to comics were in the form of a stack of comics that my mother bought for me at a Flea Market. It is a fairly typical story. Even though I still have those old comics, it would be years later when I actually started buying comics.

My older sister in college(I was 13, at the time) had befriended a guy named Mike McAvennie, who was very big into comics . One day Mike gave me three comics. It was a West Coast Avengers, a Star Trek Comic and a third one I can't remember. Mike was a really cool guy who would later work for DC Comics as an Assistant Editor. I have lost touch with him, which is a shame.

That was it. That was the moment when I became a comics fan with those three comics Mike McAvennie gave me. My mother suggested we go to a comic book store if I was going to be serious about this. That week I entered my first comic book store named Mike's Comic Hunt. The comic that I remembered was the latest issue of the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, which was up to number 7. I then went to the back issue section looking for numbers 1 through 6 and the good news is that this store had packed the first six issues together and that pack was cheaper then if I got each separate back issue. Of course if that happened today it would be very likely I wouldn't be able to find a first printing of that issue months later at a reasonable price.

Needless to say it was a really good time to get into comics. Okay I am going to call this Part 1 and later on I will contiue discussing the evolution of my comic collecting and the various comic book stores I have visited over the years.