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i can't remember a time when i wasn't involved with that particular art form.
First, it was the strips in the Sunday paper my dad used to show me. I loved the colors, and the pictures were exciting (Flash gordon, Terry & the pirates, Prince Valiant). But mostly i loved PEANUTS, and had collections of strips in paperback form.
After my brothers went away to college in the late 60s (they're much older than me), they left me their comic collections, which consisted of a stack of silver-age marvel superhero books. Fantastic Four made the biggest impact on me; i remember vividly reading the Kirby/Lee run of issues from #44 on, introducing the Inhumans, the Silver Surfer, Galactus, Black Panther, Him (Warlock), and so many others. The stack also included the original X-Men, Daredevil, Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man, Hulk, Ant-Man/Giant-Man, Avengers, Namor... all the biggies. But the ones i loved most were drawn by that Kirby fellow.
I would then trade some of those books with my buddy, Gordon, who had an equivalent stack of DCs of that period. I was already familiar with Batman and Superman from their TV series, but i discovered Green Lantern, Green Arrow, The Flash, Hawkman and the golden age characters from the Justice Society. In addition to the Batman and Superman tv shows, there were saturday morning cartoons, and Marvel superhero cartoons, with their ridiculously limited animation, were my favorites. (I especially loved the theme songs). I was a true believer, and a card-carrying member of FOOM.
My grandparents had owned a store at one time, and when it went out of business, i got one of those "spinners", the rotating racks where comics are displayed. So i started putting my books in bags and storing them in organized groups on the spinner. I started writing down the data (titles, issue #, year and characters) from each comic on an index card, so i could know what i had in my collection and what i still needed ("got it, got it, got it, need it..."). So that was the beginning of being not just a reader, or a fan, but a "collector", which is a whole other category of insanity.
I loved those silver age books, particularly Marvels, but they were for my brothers. When I started buying books off the rack in the early 70s, a whole new bunch of characters were being introduced. The Bronze Age had begun, and it belonged to me. Luke Cage, Omega the Unknown, Conan, Morbius, Iron Fist, Man-Thing, Ghost-Rider, Warlock, Starlin's Captain Marvel. Then there was suddenly a whole new comics company... Atlas. I adopted them immediately and bought everyone that came out (the company went bust in its first year).
Gordon and I shared a subscription to the Comics Buyers Guide, a newspaper-style monthly publication with articles and ads for back issues and cool illustrations. We started creating our own comics character ("Gemini... he wields the power of an exploding star!"). We started to go to comics conventions in NYC, at the Commodore Hotel. We rented a table at Phil Seuling's Sunday Comics Marketplace when i was 14, and i sold some of the silver age books so i could buy others, expanding the collection. The only birthday gifts i would gratefully accept were either comics or cash (for comics). There was a teacher i had in middle school who actually wrote some comics, so i learned that my little 4-color fetish items were actually authored by actual people, not from gods on high. And i started to focus on particular artists and writers. Lee/Kirby of course, but not just. When Lee went to DC, i followed him. I didn't like most of the stuff at DC then, but i loved Kirby's 4TH WORLD titles, despite the fact that he wasn't much of a writer. But i discovered the GREEN LANTERN / GREEN ARROW "socially relevant" Neil Adams books then, and started following Mr. Adams around as well, particularly his Batman work. I also loved Jim Starlin's cosmic ouevre, from Warlock and Captain Marvel to Thanos and and the Magus.
When i was in HS, i started a comics club, and we had our own mini-con in school. Buying, selling and trading, i was a real wheeler-dealer. Howard the Duck just came out, and i knew it was going to be HUGE, so i bought a whole stack of them. The price boomed for a while, and i sold them, before the bottom of the market fell out. My dad had very little patience for the comic book thing (he called them "joke books") and preferred i was outside playing ball. But when he saw me making money at it, he started to help out. He'd drive me and my boxes to the cons, and he'd take me to comics stores (which had just started springing up then) and bought me a Spidey #1 in really shitty condition for $25 (this upset him greatly but delighted me).
The new X-Men had come out, and i didn't like it. Punisher, too. Who were these guys? You could feel things sort of turning. By the time i graduated HS, i felt like i was done with all of it. I needed cash for college, so i liquidated most of the collection and donated the rest to my HS school club. I was out. I was off on a new life.
In college, i was into movies, mostly. But in the early 80s, i had a roommate who had a connection at DC and he got stacks of free books all the time, so i started reading them. Since Marvel had surpassed DC by that time, DC turned the keys of the asylum over to the creators (figuring they had nothing to lose, i suppose) and they started putting out more interesting books. After college, i kept living with my college buddy (just to stay near his DC connection, i think), and that's when things in comics really got interesting. DC started putting out its "mature" line, with Alan Moore's Swampthing, Gaiman' Sandman, Morrison's Doom Patrol and Animal Man, Milligan's Shade the Changing Man... this stuff wasn't even comics anymore. It was literature. It was dadaist pop art. These were "graphic novels". Miller's DARK KNIGHT, Moore's WATCHMEN and V, The Killing Joke... I was hooked again.
By the time i was in law school, i had a serious jones for the old collection i once had. Books like FF 1, Spidey 1, X-Men 1, DD 1, Avengers 4, Tales to Astonish #27, Tales of Suspense #39, Journey into Mystery #83.... those books were now gone and out of my grasp for good. It would cost hundreds (no, thousands) to reconstitute that collection. So instead i focused on building back up my Bronze Age collection, and used my school loans for comics instead of law books (using the books in the library instead).
I was then dating Mrs. Sage, and she put up with this nonsense. In fact, our 2nd date was an "accidental" meeting at my alma mater, at an SF/comics convention that i had helped create there (and is still running, i think). She pretended to be interested in all that nerdy stuff. I was in love. For my 30th birthday, she gave me FF #48 (and talked my brother into getting me #49 and #50), which were the most valued books of my childhood... the silver surfer's origin trilogy. I'm not ashamed to say I wept. Before i proposed to her, i gave her a "Diner"-style test... i opened 4 comics out on the table and she had to correctly identify the one drawn by Jack Kirby. If not, no marriage. She nailed it of course. By this time, i had accumulated around 4000 books, and was buying new books every week. The boxes were stacked up in the living room. So it was a real leap of faith on her part to put up with it.
We started having kids, and i read comics to them, and put action figures in their cribs like they were stuffed animals. They now both like superhero movies, and my son will read a related book here or there. He has gone with me to NY ComicCon for the last few years, and we watch many of the cartoons together too.
As for me, I eventually got over buying new books. They were not as good, and they were overpriced. I just didn't care anymore. But i was still buying the odd silver or bronze book, just to keep plugging the holes in my collection. a few years ago, my old college buddy was forced to sell his own comics collection. It was mostly DC, including silver and bronze age titles, so they were not overly redundant of my stash. I bought them; another 2000+ books, bringing my total collection at this point to something over 7000 issues (plus trades, and related books and graphic novels).
That final purchase seems to have quenched my collecting mania, for the most part. I'll still pick up a back issue at a Con, but its not obsessive, and i'm not spending my kids' college money on it... anymore. I think, perhaps, i finally accepted that my old collection was never coming back, and taking my buddy's old collection was as close as i was ever going to come.
As to the appeal, i cannot explain it to someone who doesn't already understand it. I can talk about it being our native art form, and its place as the modern mythology of 20th century America, and i can talk about its roots in religious art and in Gilgamesh, and while all that's true, its all just an after-the-fact rationalization of what is essentially my emotional relationship to my childhood.
Your mileage may vary.
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