How to become a superhero comic fan

 It can be a long and surprisingly circuitous process, you know. I haven't always been into superheroes. I can date the time I became a 'real' superhero comic fan quite exactly, in fact, having recently come into possession of some important historical artifacts [by way of having my brother's stuff in my spare room]. They're the brief DC interlude in my Marvel comics fandom, and I really never give them enough credit.

It's the summer of 1990, I'm thirteen going on fourteen, and my comics experience up to this point has consisted mostly of the Beano and similar titles, plus the Transformers comic from Marvel. Transformers had been going since autumn 1984, it had been really fantastic, but by 1990 it was past its peak and declining steadily. I needed another comic to get excited about.

And I came across this one (or maybe one from a month or two earlier) in WHSmith in Boston. Now, I'd read superhero comics here and there before - backup strips in Transformers, occasional other Marvel summer specials and annuals, but nothing regularly. I'm not sure what induced me to buy Superman Monthly - monthly comics still hadn't really caught on in Britain, though I'd been very excited by the short-lived Dragon's Claws from Marvel in 1988/89, and read a few others during Marvel's attempt to sell American-size monthly comics to British readers. That era was well and truly dead by 1990.

Superman, though, was in the larger British comic size, and I think I must have just picked it up in Smiths and liked it. It wasn't just Superman, you see, it also featured the Justice League International, and that was really the selling point...

Millennium is here! This, in fact, was a problem. The death knell for the British tradition of reprinting American superhero comics (which had thrived for the previous couple of decades, although I'd ignored it almost entirely). See, when American comics were self-contained, it was easy to reprint them in Britain like this without causing confusion. But after the success of "Crisis on Infinite Earths", DC and also Marvel had started to do regular 'events' like Millennium, in which lots of different comics would tie into a wider storyline. The publishers of Superman Monthly found themselves with months of side stories to a bigger epic (published in different comics, most of which British readers would never get to see) and had to run lengthy text features explaining what was going on.

I didn't really mind that - the Superman stories (John Byrne's rebooting of Superman) were all right. I didn't really appreciate that it was the first ever total rebooting of the character after fifty years of publication, because I didn't know the history. The Justice League, though, I found really intriguing, even though it was almost always referring to and crossing over with other comics that only existed on the other side of the Atlantic. I particularly liked the story with the Suicide Squad, which ran through late 1990.

This launched a very brief era of my life in which I would have told you that DC's superhero comics were much better than Marvel's, because DC had lots and lots of different superheroes, whereas Marvel only had a small handful of them.

I don't know why I thought that. I'd read Spider-Man comics with guest stars and references to multiple heroes. I'd read the Secret Wars sticker album, back in 1986 - lots of heroes in that, easily as many as in the Justice League and Suicide Squad. But I was just left under the impression that DC was a bigger and better universe than Marvel. Maybe I'd have continued thinking that for years, if I hadn't wandered into the book department at the back of Smiths one day...

This book has been read to pieces over the years, as you can see. Actually, that fateful day in Smiths they had two Official Handbooks of the Marvel Universe - volumes one and four. It was number four that I picked up, read, and was fascinated by. But having spent a long time poring over its contents, I decided to buy volume one, and then come back and get the later volumes at a later date.

The first part of the plan was executed; I never saw another volume on sale anywhere, ever again. Even volume four disappeared from the Smiths shelves by the next time I went in there.

But that was okay - I read this book extensively, and became an expert on all Marvel's characters from A to Circus of Crime! Superman and the Justice League were forgotten, and I was a dedicated Marvel fan for years and years to come!

 As I said, I'd read summer specials and things with Marvel heroes in them before. Way back in 1985* there had been this one, with a second story (reprinted from Marvel Team-Up #145 in America, though I didn't know that at the time) that blew my mind and expanded my perception of what a superhero comic could be. It was written by Tony Isabella, drawn by Greg LaRocque, and featured the supervillain Blacklash going through a very bad time.

So it was a real delight to see that Blacklash had his own two-page entry in the Official Handbook, documenting that story and others!

*Can I just point out that I have SCOURED the internet today, trying to confirm that this was the summer special of 1985. I've gone through my comic collection to find ads, and eventually been able to definitively rule out any other publication date it might have been. It definitely couldn't have been 1984, despite what the Spider-Fan website says; that was when the reprinted stories were originally published in America. This was a very very important comic for me, and it's outrageous that the internet contains only scattered, vague and inaccurate documentation of it!

Okay, rant over. Let's read all about poor Blacklash.

But the one that really intrigued me, somehow, was Alpha Flight. I'm not sure what it was - the Avengers were in the Handbook too, there are more of them, and I'd heard of them before. But Alpha Flight caught my imagination. They do look very cool in these headshots, don't they?

And so in the summer of 1991, when I explored the world of imported American comics by mail order - I'd seen classified ads for comic shops ever since the mid-eighties, but only now decided to send off for a catalogue from one - it was the latest Alpha Flight that I bought. Starting with #100, I became a regular reader, although to be fair that era wasn't much good. It did prompt me to find back issues in an attempt to find the lineup from the handbook (five or six years out of date by this point), which led to me discovering the glorious Bill Mantlo days of the title. From that point onwards, I was hooked on superhero comics, and dread to think how much money and time I've dedicated to finding and reading them ever since!

And it might have been different if those Official Handbooks hadn't been on sale in Smiths in Boston. Without them, I might have become a DC fan and dismissed Marvel for years! Or I might have given up on superheroes altogether, because let's face it, those Superman and Justice League comics were mediocre at best. Maybe I would have found another hobby to waste my life on...