How To Get Hooked On Comics

You think it's easy, don't you? You think you can just pick a book when you're six or seven or five or whatever it was and it just stays with you for life, huh? Well, let me tell, with me it was completely different.

As with most people (at least in portugal at the time i was growing up) my introduction to comics was a surreptitious one. I don't recall now precisely, but I believe it all started with those strange and wonderful fairy tale books. Words and images. What could go wrong? They sure looked innocent enough in those days.
Little did my family know what they'd created in those first innocent steps into language and form...

Flash forward a few years and I'm six or seven or five, i don't quite remember, all I do remember is that I'm walking down the road, back to my grandparents house, carrying two disney special editions (they came out once a month, brasilian translation, and had more than one hundred pages). I believe I even took the long way around, right next to the beach and the sea, in order to get home. But maybe this is a later memory, after I'd read them (which i did, many times, and for many years these would be my favourite books, to be reverently revisited whenever my heart thus deemed), for it felt I was carrying something momentuous, terribly important and secret. No one knew this but me. It was as if I was carrying the keys to an incredible universe only I knew about.
What could a kid want more than that?
The answer is obvious: MORE!

Up until I was sixteen or so, Disney comics were the big thing in my life, reading wise. Sure there had been other things: i developped an interest in all kinds of literature, classics, sci-fi, adventure, etc, i even read really weird stuff like Kafka and William S. Burroughs at the time but, still, I kept buying as dilligently as possible my weekly fixes of disney comics.
(and I have to thank my grandparents for it; that, despite my father's many prohibitions, martial laws and curfews, they defiantly supported this love of mine)

Like many other kids I read the Asterixes, Tintins, Lucky Lukes and many other european titles that graced all of our bookshops. I loved them but, in my mind, these were different books. For once, these european collections seemed always to be complete, whilst Disney was one huge and incredible mess. There was always new stuff, always a new adventure. And always with the characters you knew so well.

At the age of sixteen (or perhaps before, I don't remember) I started growing impatient with Disney comics. They felt too childish. I wanted something else.

I remember one day going to my usual comics shop and browsing through the rotating display. I'd seen the super-hero stuff many times before but I'd never dared to add any of those titles to the already heavily burdened grandparent financing.
There were several titles that day. Two attracted my attention. One was an Incredible Hulk issue and another was a Superman special with the Legion of Superheroes (John Byrne).
I picked them up. And I remember so clearly thinking: "if I take these with me I'm gonna get hooked on this for life".
I just knew it.
What do you think I did?
Right...

Well, I have to say that recently I browsed through those two books (they're always close) and I still think they're incredible stories. Those two stories left such a deep mark on me that still today I can recall many of the images and the ideas behind both of them.
The Hulk story talked about humans tinkering with nature for personal gain and the Superman story was one of the most powerful stories about love and sacrifice I've ever come across.
This holds true still today, especially the superman story. Whenever I read it I always takes the better out of my emotional side...

I was hooked from then on and I started buying the DC Comics and Marvel stuff instead of Disney's.

Actually this must've been before I was sixteen because I was fifteen when I went to Caldas to study and I was already looking for super-hero comics in english... well, nevermind...

the next big moment was sometime during the summer. I entered one of the local newsagents (there were two in são martinho do porto and, since the distribution was erratic more often than not, i quickly began to check all possibilities in order not to miss any important stuff...) and once again was faced with that comic that had some kind of vampire on the cover, whose artwork seemed really dodgy and that I'd seen there for the last two or three months.
But there was nothing new...
So, for the sake of pure experimentation I bought the damned thing and proceed to read it when I got home.

It was, of course, BLOOD: A TALE by JM DeMatteis and Kent Williams...

Suffice to say, this was one of the most incredible pieces of literature I'd read up until then and a comic that in subsequent years I bought many times to give to friends. My copy, then a brasilian translation, was lost in some lending or other to a friend.
(but i think I have an english one, my second english copy... I never learn...)

The narrative was just something entirely different from what I had seen so far - in any book. The drawings suddenly became these amazing pieces of artwork. That it had a vampire as the main character seemed of little importance. It wasn't a story about horror or fear. At least not blood and guts horror, but a fear of death and dying and, especially, of living. This was a story about the big themes, life, death, sex and JM DeMatteis was subtly punching me in the stomach of expectation.
I was happily bleeding away, along with the story.

JM DeMatteis and Kent Williams therefore became my first references in comics.

Soon after that I read another of JM DeMatteis stories, this time a Spiderman story called Kraven's Last Hunt. It also moved me incredibly for it was the first story that made me take an otherwise relatively uninteresting character as Spiderman seriously.

I read it about a year ago and what a disappointment it was... still a good story but all the magic and flow that I had felt that first time seemed to have evaporated...

Also when I re-read BLOOD: A TALE a few years ago, itdidn't feel as profound as that first time. But, by then, I had read many other things and the element of wonder had been taken out of it somewhat.

Time moved on and I suddenly found myself living in Lisbon, supposedly studying physics and eagerly searching for a comics shop in that city that would sell my lovely comics in their untranslated form.
It was through a good good friend of mine (studying psychology at the time - and I was so madly in love with her then... still am, just in a different way...) that she pointed me out to one of her colleagues, and he pointed me out to a street in Lisbon I'd never been in before, address in hand, rang a bell to an inconspicuous building, went to the third or fourth floor, had a guy with glasses called Pedro Silva opening the door for me and welcoming into my Aladin's Cave of comics.
I had entered BDMania and I knew I'd never get away.

If it wasn't that very first time, it was on the second time that I went there that I grabbed a copy of WATCHMEN. This was 92 or 93 mind you. I was 18. The book was already almost 10 years old. Already a legend. And Pedro said, read this. This is good.
I obeyed.
And, my god, I loved it. I loved it so much and yet I didn't really quite get it that first time.
It was something too big, too vast, too complex for me to fathom its repercussions in its entirety. Alan Moore was really the man...

From then on things rapidly escalated.

I read PREACHER as it was coming out. Same thing with THE INVISIBLES. Grabbed THE SANDMAN in all its compiled editions (now safely stashed at a friend's house that blatantly tells me that she will keep them for me for as long as I don't need them... obviously hoping that this will be for the remainder of my natural life... probably hoping that I'll buy the Absolute Edition, only then to swap my old, first and battered paperback editions, by these new, mint, wonderful, beautiful hardcovers... and I'm sucker enough to let her get away with it...). Grabbed TRANSMETROPOLITAN as it was coming out.
And the list goes on.

With the years I've learned a bit about comics. I've followed both artists and writers. The rise and fall of titles and companies and markets and games and films and whatnot. Not obsessively, but, as part of being a consumer and chatting to the experts at BD Mania.
(my usual question still is, what are you reading right now? what do you recommend?)
(and I've learned and enjoyed a lot from those answers!)

but a bit about WATCHMEN and all the other stuff I've talked about a few lines ago.

WATCHMEN is this incredibly complex narrative that tears the superhero dogmas apart by being more true to them than anything had ever been before. This is one of the things that Alan is great at doing. A bit like what Nietzsche did in philosophy he has done with comics.
In any case, WATCHMEN talks about a bunch of superheroes being preyed by a mysterious assailant. Even though their identities are secret somebody knows who they are and is taking them out one by one.
This is the shell. But the heart is really a story about the corruption of power, love and the two opposing forces of fate and freedom.
It's an incredible piece, one that I finally began to really understand on my second read. You can see the film of course, but the book has a lot more. The book tells that story in a much deeper and perhaps more devious way.
It's as scary as it is intelligent. And, let me tell you, in all it's fictional analysis of this would-be world, is frighteningly real and terrifying to contemplate upon.
This is a must for it heralded a new age in comics and redefined the boundaries of the medium by simultaneously destroying and rebuilding the foundations of american comics.

With THE INVISIBLES the story was completely different. I had read WATCHMEN you see. I knew some pretty strange stuff by then. I was used to the language. I was ready.
So THE INVISIBLES became to me exactly what it had been designed to be: a consciousness bomb.
(and thank you for that Grant Morrison)
In fact THE INVISIBLES did precisely that with me for 4 times so far. The first time I read the first volume. The first time I read Grant Morrison's final letter about the series. The first time I read an interview about his work on a book about Comics Writers on COmics Writing. And the first couple of times I watched his stint at a live conference about weird stuff (chaos magic, conspiracy theories, comics and the such)
THE INVISIBLES is this amazing destilation of revolutionary, mind boggling ideas in an adventure setting.
Again all the big themes were here but the level of connections, the depth of insight and newness content was unbelievable. it was this mindful rollercoaster destined to challenge every single aspect of my being and taking it into a different level. So rich it made you feel rich to the point of bursting.
which was what i did.
As soon as I finished reading that first volume (and I did not read it in one go, such was my pleasure at it) I ran out of the house, went into a phone booth and called two friends of mine. One didn't answer. The other did. I had to tell him all about it because I felt i was going to burst otherwise and that I needed to share this incredible gift I had received.
My second and third reads were almost as powerful. Or rather, powerful in a different way. That cathartic element was still there.