As a kid and early teen, my mum would drive us the two hours to the city for the second hand card fairs and they were always one of the best days on the calender. It started out with trading cards and that gave me an appreciation for art no matter how small or mass produced the medium. Pretty soon the trading card hype peaked and petered out but I still had a hankering for the art that I once got from trading cards.
In stepped the comic book!
Sure, having a mum that was into trading card (she was collecting them as well, there was a self serving motive to her motivations of persuading us to start a collection too,) we had comics in the house and i had read them in passing but they hadn't grabbed me yet. So, as the desks of trading card sellers shrank and the space was taken over by boxes of comics, well naturally I was attracted to the $1 comics boxes for a) a bargain and b) something to browse after I had finished looking at the cards. One auspicious day I found this comic;
I'll admit, I judged a book by its cover, but what a cover. I had never been a traditional superhero comic book reader because they had never appealed to be with the big steroidy muscle men always doing the right thing and beating up the bad guy. But this was different, no brightly coloured cover with a suited man doing what suited men do. No this was the "hero" vulnerable in the distance being visited or haunted by a ghostly visage. As a teenage, I thought i could relate to this sort of "superhero" and she was a she and in purple (my favorite colour.
And I have never looked back, with my stacks of random comics I have collected over the years, literally judging comic books by their covers and buy with that instinct and feeling I had back then.
Now I am going back to my comic book roots with Catwoman Vol 1 of the new #52.
I look forward to reliving the feelings of old.
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