What Are The Comics That Changed YOUR Life? Options

[G-Man]

Hi everyone.

Want to thank everyone who may have taken the time to read the first Life In Four Colors column and I hope you enjoyed it (despite the two typos that snuck past me.... )

I thought it would really be cool and interesting if you could share a couple of stories concerning some of your favorite all time comics. How many of you out there remember the first comic you read? Why do you remember it?

I know I would like to see some of those responses and I'm sure Chuck would as well.

Not very long ago I interveiwed several different comic shop owners in my area, all in the same day. and asked that question....all for a series of interviews I was doing for another website. They all had some pretty great books and interesting stories, but none as good as Bill Thade's reply to the question. For those of you who don't know who Bill is he owns a comic book store in Dayton Ohio called Fearless Readers and he's the primary financial backer for the annual Gem City Comic Con also in the Dayton area (April of every year.)

Bill has literally HUNDREDS of great comic stories....and he told me this great story about a rainy day in the fifth grade when he read a friend's copy of Amazing Spider-Man #122 and #123 as well as Uncanny X-Men #94 !!! WOW!!! What a great couple of books to start out reading comics with! He also had a really awesome story about when he bought a copy of Incredible Hulk # 181 at the once legendary but now long closed Dayton comic book store, The Bookie Parlor.

The next time you're in the Dayton area, stop in and see Bill....at Fearless Readers Comics 1613 Huffman Ave.
Great Guy. Great Store.

In the mean time....let's hear some stories about some Great Comics !!!

Watch for Life In Four Colors #2 Friday, June 20th. It's gonna be called "Bring On The Bad Guys." I know what you think it's about.....let's see if you're right.

[HdE]

How could I miss this thread?!

There's been a few books that I read in my lifetime that had a big impact on me. probably the biggest was Katsuhiro Otomo's 'Akira' - which, in my opinion, is the single greatest story ever told in comics.

I remember discovering it when I was about 15 - more than half my lifetime ago! I started reading it, and I got sucked right into the world and characters Otomo had created. There's an awful lot of hidden depth to that story - lots of stuff that's subtly implied, but definitely there, and the characters all seem to have this amazing ability on the page to let you know what's going on between them without even READING the damn thing.

It took me several years to finally get around to buying the final volumes, and I remember reaching the end, about 30 pages from the finale, and just bawling my eyes out. I've never encountered such a raw, emotional torrent of storytelling in comics since.


Fast forward to the week of my 30th birthday. I'd just come out of a horrendous relationship, and I was pretty much doing whatever I could to get through the mess of it with my brain cells still intact. One day, I decided I'd go and get myself a coupel of books to read, seeing as I hadn't read anything at all in a few years.

Now this may sound strange. I was browsing the wsci-fi aisle in my local book shop, looking at the William Gibson and Philip K. Dick stuff, and somebody had put a book back on the shelf in the wrong place. It was a black-and-white digest version of Simon Furman's 'Transformers: Infestation' for IDW Publishing. Out of nothing more than curiosity, I picked it up, flipped through it, and after just a few seconds made a decision that I was going to buy that thing! It had the most amazing artwork, and looked absolutely stunning in greyscale. By the end of the evening, I'd read the book, been AMAZED at the sophistication of it (I mean, it was base don a 1980s toy line, for goodness sake!) and decided I wanted to create stuff like it.

And here I am, in 2011, still alive and well, inking and lettering comic books professionally, with a graphic novel of my own in the works.

That blows my mind.