My Comic Book DNA, Part I: A Childhood Writ in French

To celebrate Geek Week and because I had a lot of fun writing about how I got into role-playing games and how my hobby evolved a couple years ago (all parts linked in this post), I decided to do the same with the comics hobby. How did I get into it? How did my tastes change? Why is it still part of my life? I'm thinking it'll be in three parts, at a rate of one a week. I hope these recollections (hopefully not too corrupted by time) will be entertaining, but I want to hear about your experiences with the comic book hobby too. You can use the comments section, or write on your own space somewhere (be sure to give us a link!). It's always interesting to see how fellow fans got into something you're interested in, compare notes and so forth. So without further ado...

A Family Affair

I must have been four years old or so, though since I could read from a very young age (3 and a half apparently), it's possible it's even sooner, but let's not quibble about a matter of months. I had an uncle who collected Tintin and Asterix and who would let me peruse his collection when we went over (which was rare). My parents may have seen an opportunity there to feed my reading, but the way I see it, comics were an easy gift idea for a boy of my ilk, and family members saw fit to get me one or more books on birthdays, Christmases or simple outings where I'd been good. You should understand these weren't American comic books. These were hardbound European bande dessinées in the original French - Tintin, Asterix, les Schtroumpfs, Lucky Luke, Les 4 As, Achilles Talon, to name the principal ones. My father had collected and read American comics when he was a kid (this would be the 50s and maybe early 60s, and his mother threw them all out of course; he also ordered out for and used Charles Atlas' regimen from the back of all those comics, but that's a whole other story), but I was a French Canadian child, so French (actually Belgian) comics were really the way to go (though I do remember a coverless copy of Micronauts #3 in my house for a while, who knows how it got there).

The beauty of those Euro-comics is that I still have them all sitting on a shelf. Some are pretty dog-eared or taped-up, but they're generally in good condition despite dozens (yes dozens) of moves over the years. My very first was Tintin's Coke en Stock, a story that comes late in the series, has pretty adult themes (slavery) and is full of returning characters I'd of course never met. My first Asterix, Les Lauriers de César, features similarly opaque continuity. I didn't seem to matter to my young self. In any case, I would soon get to enlarge my collection and discover the full story. My parents soon divorced and at the tender and book-hungry age of six, I was shuffled off to live with my mom and siblings in my parents' home province (goodbye Quebec, hello New Brunswick). It's there that my grandmother would swing us by Woolworth's every Sunday after church and get me a Tintin, Asterix or what have you. They were like less than 7$ back then, if you can imagine.

By the time I was eight, we were learning English in school as a second language, and I was supplementing my reading with the English-language comic books my aunt would bring 'round every time she came to town. Whole bundles of Archie and Harvey comics, stacks two feet high of Archie, Richie Rich, Hot Stuff and Casper, as she regenerated her bathroom readers. It was her husband, since disappeared after convincing her he was an alien who would one day return to his home planet (no really, and she had her doubts because her two brothers had done the same to her all her life; turns out he joined a children's theater troupe... close!), who I remember first sitting with me and reading/translating those American funny books. Years later, I would score an English degree. It's all got to start somewhere, kids! Unlike the bandes dessinées, I had to throw those comics out during a move to make room for my growing superhero comics collection (but I'm getting ahead of myself).

Jumbo Superheroes

My first real taste of superheroes was in French. A Quebec publisher called Éditions Héritage would pump out black and white translated versions of Marvel and DC Comics with just the most awful lettering, usually two issues to a comic. L'Étonnant Spider-Man, Capitaine America, stuff like that. I still have a few. But the ones I most cherished were big trades that collected 6 to 8 issues of random stuff. Labeled "ComicOrama en français JUMBO des Super-Héros", any single trade might include the Flash right next to Thor, and then the Phantom, with House of Mystery-type inventory stories in between them. Only the covers were reproduced in color, and I remember ripping them out and sticking them to my wall. I wish I still had these Jumbos, but they would hardly be intact, would they. I have vivid memories of the stories they contained: Mirror Master's giant hand reaches for the Flash! Thor vs. aliens that control time and turn people into ash or the never-born. The Fantastic Four vs. Salem's Seven!

And yet, it wouldn't be until I was 12 (or 1983) that I would purchase, read, and go bananas for my first full-color, English-language, superhero comic. Shall we stop there and keep it a surprise?

In Part II: Buying Comics... IN SPACE! (I'll explain next week.) In the meantime, please, feel free to describe your own earliest experiences with the comics medium. I can't wait to hear them!