Does anyone have a story how a comic book had a significant impact on your life?

[bminor]

I remember receiving a 100 page Super Spectaculars #7 or so with a Neal Adams cover when I was in the hospital when I was in 7th grade.

[darkmark (RIP)]

When I was in the hospital circa '58 or '59, my mom bought me a copy of MOUSE MUSKETEERS.  Corrupted forever.

[Yoc]

She should have gotten you a copy of Mad. 

[Rocket Riley]

Justice League of America # 30 Sept 1964 on sale sometime in August.  I was 11 years old.  The last letter on the letter page was a request for back issues of the JLA.  The reply was the standard "we don't have storage space for back issues"  but then they gave the address for the Comicollector magazine in Florida as a place where one might obtain back issues.  My 11 year old brain was aflame!  Not really grasping the concept that it was a magazine not a person I wrote the "Comicollector" a letter asking if he had Superman # 1 for sale (might as well start big) I remember telling my dad that I'd pay up to .50 cents for a copy.  The usual rate for used comics in Detroit was .05.  A couple of weeks later I received this fat mimeographed magazine barely held together with one staple.  It was the Rockets Blast - Comicollector # 33, known with affection as the RB*CC.  This was my introduction to comic book fandom and I'm still enjoying it 55 years later.  Oh, by the way, there was not only a Superman # 1 listed for sale in that issue, but also a Action # 1.  The Superman was $50.00 (I was stunned when I saw where the decimal point was placed) and the Action was $75.00 for what was described as a Mint copy. 

[Yoc]

There's a great Facebook page called 'Fanzine Appreciation and History' that shares RB*CC covers and many other fanzines of the era if you are a FB user.  Lots of covers and other photos shared there.

[paw broon]

I'm afraid it wasn't an American comic.  What it was was an Australian Phantom (Frew), that I saw in a newsagents window in a Fife town around mid '50's - the family was on holiday.  I never actually got the comic as it was much dearer than a British title and my mother thought it was "too old" for me, but the image haunted me and I was hooked. Thing is, even now when I have a big collection of Frew Phantom books, I don't know which one it was I saw all those years ago.
The other comic that had a huge impact was Showcase 23, with that amazing "Invisible Destroyer" cover.  For a wee boy of around 10, it was a revelation. This was just on the edge of American comics starting to be imported and distributed in newsagents here. Not quite sure but I think the price, which was stamped on the cover, was 9d - dearer than the standard British comic of the time.  But this was all in colour.  That comic started my lifelong addiction to comics.  And coupled with my memory of The Phantom, confirmed my love of superheroes and Masked Mystery Men.

[Yoc]

Thanks for sharing guys!

Personally I didn't really get into the collecting comics until the early 1980s.  I was shown a copy of the Overstreet Price Guide #11 (with the LB Cole cover) and it has those colour pages of covers in the middle that I drooled over.  The comic cover I recall most vividly was Silver Streak Comics #6 with that amazing Jack Cole cover of the sinister Claw.  You can see the cover here but sadly we only have this issue as a fiche scan.  https://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?dlid=1687

After seeing that Price Guide and that comic cover in particular I was hooked on the idea of wanting to read more GA books.  And when I finally got online I started looking for scans like those we share here on DCM.  Eventually I found the old Golden Age Comics (GAC) site and it wasn't long before I joined the staff there... and just over 10 years later here we are today!

[Defiant1]

When I first started buying comics in the 70's, I was only familiar with stand-alone stories. One day I bought a Hulk comic that had the Rhino as the villain. I knew of the Rhino as Spider-Man's villain from the TV cartoons. If Hulk was battling the Rhino, then Hulk must exist in the same world as Spider-Man. It blew my childhood mind that all the Marvel characters could exist in a shared universe. After buying an Avengers comic where the Vision mentioned an event that happened in a Marvel Team-up comic that I just read, my mind was blown again. Everything in one comic affected the shared universe. I was hooked. I dropped DC and all other publishers and became a proud Marvel zombie.

[Poztron]

At age 11 in 1961, I was a fan of JLA comics from DC and followed the letters pages where I ran across a plug for the Comic Reader (and Alter Ego?) from Jerry Bails / Roy Thomas. I contacted them and I was easily drawn into early '60s comics fandom. From there I jumped to satire fandom, which was a brief sub-fandom covering Kurtzman's Help!, Sick, Monocle, and related mags. When that collapsed, I returned to comics fandom, which had now been invigorated by the new Marvel superhero comics. I still have a carton-full of fanzines from the mid-60s. Great times.

[erwin-k]

In some ways, my older sister helped shape my interests. She had a number of comics. I still have her copy of Dell's 4C Cisco Kid #1, for instance.

But, far more importantly, circa 1952 my Grandmother read to me her copy of "Only a Poor Old Man" from Uncle Scrooge #1. That long & complex story is what really got me interested in comics.

Later, her fiancé passed on to me a pile of his stuff. This included a couple dozen issues of Dell Tarzan's, the first three original Tom Swift books I'd ever seen, & the first two books of John Creasy's character the Baron when he was still called The Blue Mask. But most importantly, there were three books in the Rick Brant - Science Adventure series. I still re-read the whole series from time to time.

[Yoc]

Thanks for sharing guys.  This has turned into a fun topic!

[Calamity Jon]

Not me specifically but: My pop came over from Germany when he was a kid, in 1952, not speaking, reading or writing a snip of English. He would've landed in the same fashion, but someone on the crew fed him a steady diet of American comic books. We have a photo of him at a table during the travel, intently reading a copy of Detective Comics. When he landed, he kept reading 'em, and then collecting 'em, and he was half the reason I got to grow up in a house of weird old Golden Age comics!

[Yoc]

Great story Jon!

[bminor]

Did it help him to read and speak English more quickly?
B.

[Calamity Jon]

Did it help him to read and speak English more quickly?
B.

Ultimately, yeah. He ended up in deep rural Georgia with his step-family, where there weren't any ESL programs to take advantage of. And while his mother was fluent in heavily-accented English, she wasn't available to him. So it was comics, radio, movies and TV -- I'm informed that he lost his German accent completely by the Fifth Grade. My mother didn't even know he was from Germany until he introduced her to his mother!