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farrah
Your First Comic Book
I found my first comic on the bottom shelf of a magazine rack in a five-and-dime. I was seven, and I was bored.
Back then, in the early '80s, my parents had no money for babysitters and they were trying to get a business off the ground. There was a lot of driving to do, so I spent hours bored. I had been bored parked in the car with the windows cracked, I had been bored in the aisles of the warehouses, I had been bored on the floors and under the desks in assistant managers' offices. Now I was bored in a country store, waiting while my mother shopped, another hot couple of hours before we would be home.
The magazine rack was by the door, where a breeze made it a little cooler. I was too short to see what was on the top shelf of the rack, so I squatted down in front of the lower shelf. My legs were folded up and my back was hunched so that I could rest my chin in the little valley formed where my knees pressed together. It fit perfectly. In a supreme act of minimal exertion, I used one finger of one hand to slide the magazines back and forth on the shelf.
There were automotive magazines and outdoor magazines and sports magazines, none of which meant a thing to me. I flicked them around with my finger again, but as I did, a notion tugged at my brain. I started to feel that I had missed something, something I'd maybe glimpsed from the corner of my eye.
I was searching, and it took only a moment to find what I was looking for. It was hidden behind the other magazines because it was a little smaller, and not nearly as thick, but as soon as I saw the cover it was impossible to see anything else.
It was so colorful! And not just colorful, but it had been drawn. Somebody had actually drawn the cover to this magazine! There was color everywhere else on the shelf, but those were photos, and not even interesting photos. A car, a deer in a field, a batter mid-swing: so what? The cover of this new magazine was the wreckage of cars on a ruined street, and people in weird costumes slumped over the wreckage, and one figure in the craziest costume of all striking a triumphant pose right in the middle. It was Fantastic Four #249, and it blew my mind.
I actually already had some comics. Kid stuff given to me by well-meaning adults who wanted me to occupy myself while they had coffee and visited. So under a bunch of stuff in the bottom of a drawer in a desk in my room there a dozen or so books: Richie Rich, Casper, Wendy the Good Little Witch, Goofy & Mickey. Until I discovered the Fantastic Four, I didn't even realize that I didn't like these comics, but now it couldn't be clearer to me: Richie Rich was painfully bad.
I paged through FF #249. When I got to the back cover, I started all over again. I couldn't get over the drawings. There was so much detail! There was actual shading. The colors were not simply applied to the page in fields. A panel of the Fantastic Four was rendered with more attention than entire pages of Casper the Friendly Ghost. As the FF fought the super-powered alien Gladiator, their battle raged throughout New York, destroying the city blocks at a time. The illustration was exquisite. The city looked like a city. The people looked like people.
And the whole comic was a single story. No two-pagers that ended with Goofy delivering a bad pun. It was a story about super-powered family who, despite those powers, were in serious danger from this bizarre Gladiator character. They attacked, they rescued each other in the nick of time, they yelled at each other. It had nothing to do with life as I knew it at the point. It all seemed so... grown-up.
I had experienced allure. I knew I didn't understand what I was looking at, but for the first time I can explicitly recall, this was attractive to me. This comic book was mysterious to me, and I grasped just enough to know that going forward into mystery would be wonderful.
Eventually my mother came to the checkout. I stood, I walked over to her with the comic book in my hand. I was terrified. I was sure first that she wouldn't let me have it, that it would disappear back on the rack. I had no idea where it had come from nor if such a thing could be found anywhere else. It would be gone forever.
Even more than this, I was scared that she'd see what I had, and she'd get the look I'd seen before when I'd come across something I maybe shouldn't have. If the comic seemed like something for an adult to me, no doubt my mother would recognize it immediately. Her face would become very calm. The comic would disappear. The ride home would be an excruciating and one-sided conversation about how things that might be appropriate for big people might not be appropriate for little people. And then she'd tell my father about it when we got home, and I'd get to do the whole thing over again. It had happened a couple of times already, and it was mortifying, something to be avoided at any cost.
Or almost any cost. Because despite that horrifying possibility, I handed the comic up to her. I asked her to buy it. She glanced at it and put it on the counter. It went in a bag with everything else. The bag went outside with us and into the car. I wanted it, but I did not ask for it. I did not mention it again for fear of calling attention to the oversight my mother had committed.
We got home, we put away groceries. I knew exactly where the comic book was the whole time, but I waited for her to find it. She came to it, gave it one more look and then offered it to me. As I accepted it, I put a quizzical look on my face, as though I'd already forgotten it. Because, y'know, a comic book is no big deal.
Fantastic Four #249. My first comic book. I still have it in The Archive.
