It's a brave new world from the last to the first
Since it was my idea, I really should make a contribution for the My First week. It isn't going to be too interesting for me to write about the first comics that I read, since they're collections of Peanuts, or Calvin and Hobbes or Asterix or Tintin that I devoured at the time, but don't have any abiding affinity for. My first dips into ongoing DCU and Marvel titles were with Civil War and 52, but I'm going to write about my first ongoing solo book. It's also the book that gave me my favourite character and one that I've actually identified with.
We are, of course, at Ms. Marvel #12
I'd known the character from the animated X-Men show from the 90s. Cartoons like Amazing Spider-man, Incredible Hulk, X-Men, Justice League, JLU and Teen Titans were what gave me most of my entry level knowledge of comics and comic characters (well, that and tie in videogames). In the cartoon, Carol was just another background character that I didn't get much of an inkling about. She was even a baddie, inasmuch as she caused problems for Rogue, who was clearly a goodie.
After that, I didn't see much of, or think much about Ms. Marvel until Civil War and Ultimate Alliance. I liked her three colour costume and when it came to making a team for the game, I went for the pro-reg team. Then she was kickarse and killed everything, so I kept her.
And then, one morning, I was off work (and, after a morning wandering around previews sites and catching snippets of the first few issues of her run), I asked my local comics guy for the most recent Ms. Marvel. It was part 2 of a 2 part story (I didn't read part 1 until it was collected in trade) and pitted Carol against the Doomsday Man, a foe from her original run (Brian Reed was still on the early TNG way of writing Ms. Marvel v.2)
Of course, that wasn't the thing that really drew me to Carol Danvers. I identified with her, in that we were both in a sort of similar life stage. I had just left a small university commuity where I had known lots of people and lots of people knew me, and there were always people who wanted to hang out. She had just been in the House of M as Captain Marvel, the leading homo-sapien superhero, celebrated the world over. I found myself in the Real World with all my mates moved away, Carol was back in her own universe, somewhere in the C-list of heroes and unrecognised by even Stilt-Man. We were both a bit miserable. And she resolved to get better and to be the Best of the Best. So I resolved too to be better. Not the Best of the Best, but Good.
I followed Carol and used her as a source of inspiration as my career wavered, then went back on track. I made friends, and enemies*, through her. I found my own sort of community, and I had an idea about what sort of person I wanted to be. And so, while this is nominally about my first solo book, it's really about my first superhero fandom, or whatever the cool kids are calling it.
*just one.