I was recently asked by Tim Cundle at massmovement.co.uk to list ten comic books that profoundly affected me and shape who I am as an artist. Here’s what I submitted to him:
Here is a list of ten comics that shaped my life. How does one narrow it down to their favorite one hundred or less? I did what I could to try and find ones that came from those formative first ten years of my life. I think I’m off by a year or two with the final entry, but the publish date was during my first ten years, even if I didn’t actually read them until later, and it made a good endcap of the formative journey, I felt, so I included it too.
1. The Spider-Man cartoon series (1967). I’m going to start with a cheat, because this isn’t a comic, but it was the beginning of my intense love and fascination with super heroes. My mom had had me watching PBS – Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers and Captain Kangaroo which I wasn’t so big on. And we had slowly been transitioning to Popeye and Looney Toons and Tom and Jerry, and during the ads one day, a preview of Spider-Man came on. I couldn’t believe my eyes. This didn’t look funny and cute like the cartoons I knew. These looked like real people (to me). Like the black and white Flash Gordon serials, or the Batman tv series, but these were cartoons, not “real.” Spider-Man was red and blue, and covered with webs. And you couldn’t see his face. Why was he wearing a mask? Could we watch this? My mom conferred with my dad and said it would be all right, and it was an instant favorite. I had to memorize every word of the song. If I missed an afternoon’s episode, I’d be asking the kids on the playground what happened, trying to piece together any little thing I could about every story. Watching those episodes, I learned how a regular kid was bitten by a spider and gained the powers to swing through the air on webs and fight bad guys. The cartoons repeated the same shots over and over, and I would try to remember those shots and draw them. I would count how many web lines he had on his face and try to draw it just so, making sure I curved the webs in the right direction, facing out from the center.
2. The Mighty Marvel Superheroes Fun Book (1976). This is once again somewhat of a cheat, because this book isn’t a comic and I don’t think it even contained any comics, but its impact on me was significant! This book was my gateway into the Mighty World of (Marvel) Comics! I found it at Toys ‘R’ Us, and my mom bought it for me. Look at Thor and Iron Man holding up the title, Mr. Fantastic wrapping his arm around it, and Spidey dangling in from above! I’m guessing I was six or seven and the book had been in print for a few years. It was black and white, and each page was a puzzle, a word search, a maze, a game. But that was all secondary; it was all these distinct masked and caped characters who fascinated me. I would wonder what color all the super heroes should be, and look for super heroes at toy stores and memorize their colors so I could go home and color them in this book. One section of the book showed all the banners of Marvels’ comics titles that were coming out that year – each character’s logo, which included a picture of each of them to the left. I spent hours studying this, and all the characters of all the pages. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know who they were. I wanted to know the answers to the trivia questions of what was going on in these comics. I wanted to be a part of this club.
3. Justice League Limited Collector’s Edition C-46 (1976). This 52-page humongous tabloid-sized book reprinted a couple 1960’s Justice League comics. My mom or dad brought this home for me as a gift. If they bought it the year it came out, I was four. I only have two memories of it. First, I remember Superman used his super strength to spin his arms like a fan to blow away some poison gas, and so one night when my dad was barbecuing, when the smoke was really thick on our patio, I tried this technique – with significantly less success than Superman. Second – and this is the one that stuck with me – there were all these magical characters I was wanting to learn more about. Eight characters on the cover, whom I basically knew from the Super Friends cartoon on tv that I enjoyed so much. 
And on the back cover, the eight “Earth 2” equivalents of these characters. I was completely confused, and my mom took the time to try reading through and help me comprehend this business of two different earths with similar but different characters. So my earliest comics-reading memories were of confusion and realizing there’s this whole universe within these comics, and I wanted to put the time in to understand it all.
4. Pocket Book Series Vol 1 #Amazing Spider-Man 3 (1979). This is yet another cheat, because this “comic” is actually seven comics. But this is my earliest remembrance of not just super hero experiences, but actually really reading comics, and what a treasure trove – reprints of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Amazing Spider-Man #14-20! I was seven years old, I loved the Spider-Man cartoons on my local tv channel, and I was transfixed by this masked character. With all that as the backdrop, they had these pocketbook editions at the local grocery store, and my mom let me pick one out, and I chose this one instead of volume 1 because I liked the looks of the all villains featured in it. I saw it had the Hulk, Daredevil, and the Human Torch, but it wasn’t until years later that I figured out these were also the first appearances of Green Goblin, Kraven the Hunter and the Scorpion! The book was reprinted so small, I remember using a little magnifying glass to read them on my couch. Lee’s “We’re all friends here having a great time enjoying these stories, aren’t we?”, and Ditko’s ballet of choreographed fist fights are still magical to me. To this day, I aspire to create a joy in readers that these stories gave me.
5. Walt Disney Super Goof #54 (1965). I don’t remember for sure how or when I picked this up. I would have been younger than ten, I’m sure. I’m certain that my copy couldn’t have been from 1965, though. It must have a been a reprint, because it had a cover price too high to be a 1965 comic. We had a local shoe shop, and every time you bought shoes, they’d give you a free comic book. But these comics were smaller than half the size of regular comic books, I seem to remember they were pretty quick reads (not a lot of pages), and they were all funny animal cartoons-made-into-comics – Disney, Richie Rich/Caspar the Friendly Ghost, Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker kinds of stuff. I had a stack of them that I kept in a shoe box. Super Goof reminded me of these. As a kid, I was drawn to humor – Peanuts, Garfield, Bloom County, and later, Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes – possibly partly because that’s pretty much the only movie genre I remember watching as a family. I was very early on inspired by the humor of a bumbler, in detective films like the Pink Panther (Peter Sellers), Private Eyes (Don Knotts and Tim Conway), and super heroes like Condor Man (Disney). I was thrilled, years later, when I discovered Sergio Aragones and his bumbling barbarian, and that he was also the artist drawing the gags in the margins of Mad Magazine. I remember really enjoying the dumbness of Goofy as a super hero. I enjoyed inept super heroes so much that in elementary school, possibly my first comics project I endeavored to create was a dumb super hero comic of my own, Super Stuge (mis-spelled because he’s so dumb) that I wrote and drew for about fifty pages, then I threw it away! Then I wrote and drew that same character for another fifty pages as the member of a team of dumb super heroes, and then I threw that away!
6. Daredevil #207 (1984). I was twelve years old and at the super market with my mom, and while she shopped, a spin rack caught my eye, and she offered to let me pick out a comic from it, and she’d buy it for me. I didn’t think I wanted one. I specifically remember being in this situation at least three other times before – once at an airport, when I did pick out an issue of Nova that I read on the plane (and I didn’t enjoy it), once when I was intrigued but passed on her offer to buy me an Indiana Jones comic, and once passing on a G.I. Joe comic that I’d seen advertised on t.v. This time, she convinced me take her up on it, and I came home with Daredevil 207, and this was the comic that got me excited to start collecting comics. My enjoyment of this issue got me out to super markets and drug stores every week, either going shopping with my parents, or biking with friends, and picking up a few comics every time. The beginning of my fix. Denny O’Neal one-shot story, with Daredevil vs. Hydra, and I really enjoyed it. I loved seeing Daredevil’s acrobatics against all these villains. And I couldn’t believe he could possibly be blind – What a hero!
7. Marvel Universe #8 and #11 (1983). Despite the cover date, I picked this up probably a year or so after I started collecting. I know that once again I’m trying to break the rules here, because this is two issues, and they’re not really comics, but there’s a story to it! We were on a family vacation up to North Lake Tahoe, and on the way into town we stopped at a 7-11, and they had a spinner rack with a bunch of comics on it, and I found these two issues that I’d never heard of. It turns out they had been released at least a year earlier, but this store evidently didn’t keep a real close eye on keeping their rack up-to-date. It was a steep $1 cover price (comics at the time were sixty cents), and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Was this a legit Marvel comic? It didn’t read like a comic – it was an encyclopedia – but it looked like the real deal, with an actual Marvel logo, and real Marvel characters inside. Pictures of each character, and their names, heights, weights, origins, powers. It was all there, and it looked so scholarly to a middle schooler. I knew I had to have these! 
Volume 11 looked okay, but volume 8 was torn right down the center, every page of the comic, about two thirds to the bottom. I bought #11 but couldn’t stop thinking about volume 8. I convinced my dad to take me back, and all torn to pieces, there was #8, still there! I sheepishly took it to the register and asked if by any chance he might be willing to offer a discount. To my delight, he said if I wanted it, I could take it. I was overjoyed. I spent so much time not so much reading but just flipping through these encyclopedias to learn about all these characters, and it fanned my desire to learn more, to see these characters in action. I wanted to hunt down these comics, and read more comics.
8. Marvel Super Heroes Fantasy Jigsaw Puzzle (1983). Okay, this is really not a comic, it’s a puzzle, but I loved it so much. Are you getting the idea by now that I wasn’t as much into actual comics reading as just being into the mystique of comics? At least in these early, formative years. Somehow, the actual reading of the comics was never quite as exciting, for me, as the thrill of not knowing yet but wanting to learn, of inquiring and hunting to find out. I stumbled onto this 300 piece puzzle at a craft store, possibly on the same trip as I found the Marvel Universe encyclopedias – on a family trip up to North Lake Tahoe. It wasn’t much work to put the puzzle together, but it was super fun for me, seeing all the different Marvel characters, and then getting this great key on the back of the box that revealed all their names. Growing up in the eighties, kids didn’t have access to any piece of information they cared to look up online. These encyclopedias and puzzles were my only access to these universes, and I could spend so much time just staring at and studying things like this, and trying to draw all these characters myself.
9. Daredevil by Frank Miller (#158-192, 1979-1983). I’m gonna cheat one last time and end on number nine instead of doing a list of ten, for my “list of ten comics that most inspired and influenced me,” because first of all, this ends perfectly on my young life’s influences that formed who I would become as a comics guy, and second, even though I’ve included puzzles and encyclopedias and other nonsense, I’ve still listed way more than ten comics. By this time, I’d been reading comics for a few years, and a friend knew I was into comics, and he gave me a stack of Iron Man, Flash, and Frank Miller’s Daredevil. With the Daredevils, I was missing most of them from 158 to 168, but had basically everything else. I’m guessing I was in middle school, but it’s possible that this was as a freshman in high school. I was aware of the industry’s and fans’ reverence of these, and of Chris Claremont’s early X-Men (in particular with artist John Byrne), but I couldn’t afford the X-Men, and no one gave me a stack of them, so these were the issues that made my childhood. These were the absolute eye openers to my “moving toward adulthood” eyes. The story telling he could do in pictures. I could look at those pages of action sequences over and over, and just get absorbed in them. He was doing things no one else was doing in the comics on the racks. Seedy alleyways, crime in the streets and in bars, ninjas, violence, darkness. Portraying so much movement with photo-still images and without trailing “wind blowing from where the punch started here to there” action lines or other clichéd comic-book story-telling techniques. This was my first taste of just how much comics could be capable of, how much they could convey, how “mature” they could be, and how fun, with their stories, imagery, and subject matter, combining words with pictures.