Article: How I Became a Comic Book Consumer, Part 4
Originally published at A Singularity. You can comment here or there.
This is part four of an ongoing series inspired by Faith Erin Hick’s article “How I Became a Comic Book Consumer“. To read the first part, click here. To read the second part, click here. To read the third part, click here.
Last post I noted manga because I felt that manga was my first turning point into getting back into comics regularly. Ultimately though it was probably a combination of several things that made me start collecting comics regularly again and those things were: Ultimate X-Men, and Marvel Civil War, Half-Price Books, X-23, and Runaways.
The Ultimate X-Men was also something I stumbled onto. It was a CD that I somehow came into possession of that had scans of the original comics, the first one hundred or so issues. This was back when trade paperbacks were just starting to be popular. I don’t remember why I started reading but I quickly found out that Ultimate X-Men was a reboot. An entirely new world, filled with my favorite characters that were just a little different but still very familiar and I had the first hundred issues. The issues were compelling, interesting, and fresh. I was reading a comic in the form that I like, serially without possible interruption, on a computer, like an online comic. It was so good that by the time I finished the CD, I wanted more, which is when I found that Marvel had begun collecting comics into graphic novels.
Around the same time I began hearing about the Marvel Civil War. This was a comic event Marvel began involving the majority of the Marvel Universe on Earth where in a super hero group arresting a group of villains accidentally leads to an entire school of children being destroyed. This leads to legislation which requires all heroes to register their identities with the federal government and undergo training, in order to make things safer overall. This causes severe friction in the super hero community, some feeling this is the natural progression of super heroes in society, and others feeling that this tramples on their human rights.
This particular series introduced and re-introduced me to almost the entire Marvel Universe, both old characters who had changed in interesting ways and completely new characters I hadn’t known existed. In particular I had learned that my old mutant buddies I’d read back in grade school had suffered a tremendous loss called M-Day, that Wolverine had a clone daughter named X-23, and that a group of kids called the Runaways existed.
All three of this led me into collecting more and more graphic novels. X-23, the sociopathic assassin daughter of Wolverine created by Craig Kyle, caught my attention immediately, just as Wolverine had when I was a kid. She was effectively a reboot of Wolverine but given an origin story that I found compelling and rather dark. She was cloned and trained from birth to be a perfect weapon. Trained and conditioned to have almost no emotional response, and grew up effectively removed from most human contact. She is even forced to kill her surrogate mother figure by the people who control her, which ultimately leads to her flight and eventual run in with Wolverine and the X-men.
X-23 has run across multiple X-Men titles, which made hunting down her entire story a task. Thanks to online shipping and graphic novels, it was not an impossible task, although some re-sellers on Amazon should really not charge two hundred dollars for a ten dollar book just because they have the only copy. I’m just saying.
At the same time, while I was tracking down X-23 and all her mutant buddies, I got into a comic. A brief cross over in Marvel Civil war with a group of kids known as Runaways caught my attention. The premise sounded amazing. What if you were just a normal teen, living in a world full of super heroes and super villains, and one day you found out that your parents were actually super villains and worse, that they were apart of a secret cabal of super villains that controlled the city you lived in from the shadows? What can you do but run away? The comic follows a group of kids who discover this very secret and in doing so, find themselves trapped in a web of conspiracy with nothing but each other. Some of them develop powers, others steal artifacts of power form their parents, but all of them have to flee. Oh yeah and there is a dinosaur.
Sounds cool huh? The series was written by Brian K. Vaughn, another name that would become a staple in the comics I read today. The series continued for three long volumes and is sadly, currently on hiatus nearest that I can tell.
On a side note, I also have to give some of the blame to Half-Price Books or used bookstores in general that buy used comics. With comics now being collected into graphic novels they can be more easily re-sold. Discovering the huge section of graphic novels in my local Half-Price Books most certainly helped along my search for M-Day content and picking up random titles for comic reading without breaking my wallet.
Next time we’ll talk more about Brian K. Vaughn and wrap up this entire series. The article tag for this series of articles is: Nojh’s Comics History. Use that to track all of the articles in this series. Stay tuned!
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