Interview C2E2 celebrities on their first favorite comic book

Anyone who reads The A.V. Club should know by now that comic books aren’t just for kids. Plenty of adults read them, and the phenomenon is, in fact, so widespread that it’s inspired about a billion conventions, including this weekend’s C2E2 here in Chicago.

Before C2E2 takes over the behemoth that is McCormick Place, The A.V. Club thought it would be fun to ask some of the artists, writers, and personalities appearing at the convention one simple question: “What was the first comic book you really loved?” 

Garth Ennis
That would be 2000AD, the British weekly anthology I first read when I was seven years old. Today I can look back and recognize the subversion in the writing, the brilliance of the artwork, the black humor, the intense action, the wonderfully lean characterization. Back then, my brain simply boiled over at a future cop who blew people away for traffic offenses, a London thug taking on the Soviet army with a twelve-gauge, a Martian maniac with a living axe, and cowboys getting torn apart by bloodthirsty Tyrannosaurs. This may just be hindsight, but I think at that point, the course of my life was set.

Matt Fraction
Batman # 316. I tried going back and looking at it not long ago, and I really can not, for the life of me, tell you why. I can only conclude it’s not what comics do—or at least what that particular comic did—but how comics did it. I fell in love with the whole medium, regardless of how ridiculous or sublime it can be. Also, batarangs. I wanted a batarang.

Patton Oswalt
I hate to admit this, but it was Dark Knight Returns. I read comics as a kid, but not deeply or regularly. It was all Star Wars and horror films for me. Senior year of high school and then college is when I went deep, and Dark Knight was the doorway.

Gene Ha
The first comic to really inspire me was artist Gene Colan’s run on Daredevil in the 1970s. They were dark, atmospheric tales, and Gene Colan was a master of shadow and anguish. As a grown man, the writing seems silly and overwrought. But there’s power in those drawings that I can feel in my chest, like the bass thud at a rock concert. I still love Gene Colan’s work today.

Jill Thompson
The first comic I loved (and I’m classifying comic as the folded, stapled type of comic and not a newspaper strip) was an issue of Archie Comics from the 1940s. I had gotten a box of old Archie Comics at a moving sale down the block, and that’s what started me down the road I’m currently on.

I actually think it was the first issue. It was really beat up and had the cover torn off, but I remember the splash page was Archie on a bike trying to impress Betty. And this box had a great assortment of Archies from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s!

I love the work from that era! Funny, beautifully drawn—it just grabbed me! I especially loved the sense of fashion!

Mike Costa
I grew up with a dad who collected comics (just born lucky, I guess), so I’d been reading them almost since I could hold one in my hands, but the first comic I ever loved also happened to be one of the first I ever bought with my own money: Silver Surfer #48, written by Jim Starlin with art by Ron Lim. I bought it with my first-ever allowance off the spinner-rack at WaldenBooks. That sense of accomplishment alone might be enough to enshrine it in my memory, but in fact, I still don’t think anyone ever wrote the quasi-archaic language patterns of the Surfer better than Jim Starlin, nor had a better handle on the profound sadness that formed the deep foundation of his self-seriousness.

Issue 48 happened to be a particularly great example of that, as it featured the Surfer confronting his old master, the planet-eating Galactus, about discoveries the Surfer had made that long ago Galactus had, along with giving the Surfer his Power Cosmic, actually tampered with the Surfer’s very soul. As a show of respect, Galactus agrees to undo his work, which suddenly causes the Surfer to experience the incredible grief and guilt of helping his master devour hundreds of worlds, feelings he’d previously been shielded against by Galactus’ original modification.

This was some pretty heady psychodrama for a 10-year-old kid who played with Madballs, but the massive scale, the mixture of the cosmic and the baroque, and my own Catholic upbringing (where guilt is essentially the water in life’s aquarium) all blended together to create a very moving experience for me. I didn’t just enjoy reading the issue, I felt wiser after having read it. And as a writer who is currently best known for a comic in which the central character is both crippled and motivated by the guilt of an unforgivable sin, I still find it astonishing that a deceptively simple and silly comic—essentially about a metal spaceman on a flying surfboard—can accomplish so effortlessly what I break my ass to do in our much more adult-oriented market.

Gail Simone
When I was a kid, comics were kind of hard to come by, so I would read anything I got my hands on until the issue was completely in tatters. But, and this is probably fairly weird for a girl, the issue that first slapped me in the head and made me a fan was an issue of Justice League Of America. It was the first part of a three-part crossover issue. It had a gazillion guest characters, and it just blew my tiny kid’s mind. I wanted to read the rest of the story, but more than that, I wanted to know who all these characters were. They just fascinated me. No single comic had more to do with me being a fan than that issue of Justice League.

Later, I got hooked on a lot of the world’s best comics. But I never would have sought them out if not for me trying to figure out who the weird looking guy with the gas mask was.

Tony Moore
This is going to sound incredibly discrediting to my love for this book, but I can’t for the life of me remember the title. It was an issue of a cheesy old horror book that my uncle left behind at my grandparents’. There’s a strong chance it was one of Eerie Publications’ titles. [Maybe Weird #3?—ed.] Regardless, it was lurid and grisly beyond its need, and was definitely the kind of book that had parents in a tizzy in the ’50s and kids’ little minds aflame, and my seven-year-old mind was blown. The lead story was a revenge story that ended in a guy being tied down to stakes on the beach, and when the tide came in, an army of crabs came and ripped the guy apart. I remember being fixated on this one horrible panel, a close-up of a crab perched on the man’s cheek, plucking his eye from the socket. The eyeball was sagging and deflated as the crab’s pincher ripped it out. It was not the kind of comic book that any responsible parent would want in their kid’s collection, but man, I loved it. I carried it around everywhere, snuck it in my backpack to school, and read it so many times the cover fell off. It was the first specific comic book that I remember falling in love with.