Ramblings of a Fanboy: First Tastes
On alternating Thursdays, Lee French looks at modern fandom through the lens of his own behavior and obsessions.
by Lee French
I have been a fan of superheroes for as long as I can remember. Although some of my earliest memories are vague, there are a few vivid standouts. Among them are Superman and Batman, both of which I was first introduced to through television and movies before I came to appreciate the characters in their native media of comic books. I remember seeing an episode or two of the ’60s Batman show when I was very young, maybe three, but it honestly did not leave a lasting impression on me back then, even though my first ever action figure was a Super-Powers Robin (with Karate-Chop action!). Instead the nearly omnipotent alien had a monopoly on my attention, and it would be years before I became fixated on the Dark Knight.
Without a doubt, Superman was my first favorite superhero, almost exclusively due to the Christopher Reeve films. I don’t remember the first time I watched a Christopher Reeve Superman movie – I know I never saw any of them in the theater – but I do remember the awe I felt as a child whenever my cousins and I watched them repeatedly on VHS. I remember the anxiety I felt as Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane clung for her life to the radio of her news helicopter that was perilously perched on the edge of the Daily Planet building. Even today, I get chills at the moment in the scene when Superman catches her with one arm, grabs the landing skid of the helicopter with his other hand and the John Williams score kicks into full blast. Like many other kids, my cousins and I would run around my grandmother’s house with our arms outstretched in front of us, “flying” at top speed to save the day. Like the movie’s famous tagline suggests, I really believed a man could fly.
At the age of four, the line between reality and fiction is almost non-existent and seeing “live-action” footage of a man in blue tights and a red cape bouncing bullets off of his chest, walking through flame or spinning the Earth backwards by flying at super-speed is just as plausible as anything else on the TV, like the news. As far as I was concerned, everything on TV that wasn’t a cartoon was reality television, and I never bothered to question how the cameraman got such great shots without being noticed.
Despite the intro to the film, I didn’t even realize that Superman was a comic book character until a few years later. My mother bought me my first two comic books when I was six years old. I spotted them on a table at a flea market and pleaded with my mother to get them. They were an issue of Superman #7, drawn by John Byrne, and a ’70s-ish issue of Superman’s girlfriend Lois Lane. Of course by then I realized that all of it was fantasy, but the realistic style of the artwork and the serious tone of the characters lent some credibility to the story, and I came to appreciate comics for what they were. It would be about five years before I bought any more comics, but I knew from then I was hooked. I read those two Superman stories over dozens of times and I didn’t take very good care of them. When I was a kid, I would do abominable things like test pens for ink by scratching the ballpoint on their pages. Today, these two first comic purchases are missing their covers and a few pages, and even though they’re now worthless tatters I have them both bagged and boarded (like the rest of my comics – which, for the record, I don’t protect because I believe they are some kind of investment, but because they are part of my personal pop-culture treasure).
Batman finally dethroned Superman in the top-spot of my personal favorites in 1989, and he has remained there ever since. Like the rest of the country, I was swept up in Batmania when the Burton/Keaton film was released. I was probably the only 8-year-old kid that didn’t see it in theaters that summer, but I remember the excitement when I borrowed the VHS from the local library for the first time months later. It was a school night, so I rushed through my homework and inhaled my dinner and sped through the shower to complete all of my mother’s prerequisites for watching it that night. We didn’t have a surround sound stereo system, only the tinny television speakers from our 19-inch RCA screen. It didn’t matter. With the lights off at night, and the only glow coming from the TV screen, I was at the movies. No, better – I was in Gotham City.
I would make deals with my older sister to stop off at the corner store on our morning walk to school so that I could blow my 75-cent daily allowance on 3-packs of the Topps movie cards. At school, the other kids teased me by calling me a Batman-freak, not realizing that I didn’t take it as an insult. I wanted all of the licensed toys by Toy Biz (and later Kenner), especially the Batmobile, which was just too damn cool. My grandfather bought me my first Batman figure for Christmas, and all of my other toys collected dust after that, except for the random Transformer or GI Joe that I would use as a villain with an evil plan for my champion. Of course, the challenger always lost.
Years later, thanks to eBay, I bought a lot Batman stuff I wanted as a kid, and honestly, having it is not as fulfilling as I thought it would be. Probably because I am too old to be impressed by it. Now a lot of the swag is collecting dust in my mother’s basement, and she constantly reminds me that I have to come by and get rid of it or she’ll throw it out. I still collect, but I am much more particular about what I get, and I try to go for quality over grabbing everything in a vain effort at being a completist.
Naturally, there is more to my love of these characters than their movies and merchandise. Like I mentioned above, these were just my initial exposures to them, but there was a entirely different magic that I got from reading their comics, and it was definitely the comic books that first inspired me to draw, which is unfortunately, still little more than a hobby for me today, even though I had grand dreams of being a career artist when I was younger. After my mother bought me those first two Superman comics from a flea market, I did not buy another comic until all of the hoopla over the “Death of Superman” and the “Breaking of Batman” in the early 90s.
At school, other kids would bring in and show off their bagged and boarded copies, touting themselves as wise investors because “these issues are going to be worth a lot of money one day”. Anyone familiar with the speculative nature of comics collecting will get a chuckle out of that naïve statement, but even then, I honestly didn’t get swept up in all of that. I was about twelve years old and all I cared about were the stories in the pages rather than the value of the pages themselves. They were going to kill Superman?! Replace Batman?! How? More importantly, why?
I realize now that these shake-ups were intended to boost sales for DC (they are a business after all) and within several months the status quo was restored, probably disappointing some readers that were excited at the possibility of a risky change. At least one reader didn’t mind. After these events I picked up comics almost every Wednesday from my nearest comic shop for almost the next ten years-all through high school and college until I was deployed with my Army Reserve unit.
When I returned to the US, my fandom had morphed somewhat. After being out of the comic reading loop for about a year and a half, it was hard for me to just jump back in to the alternate realities of the books for escapism every week. Also thanks to time out of school for personal reasons as well as extended time away with the Army, I was entering my sixth year of enrollment and all I wanted to do was graduate and get out of there. Still, I felt a need to reconnect with the world of comics. I was excited about the rebooted Batman film franchise and very impressed with the justice done to my favorite character in Batman Begins (and blown away years later by The Dark Knight).
Later that summer, I attended my first San Diego Comic-Con and was just overwhelmed by the concentration of pure love for the art (and excitement for all of pop culture) that was present. I have been back every year since. A year later, back on the east coast, I attended the opening of Masters of American Comics exhibit at the Newark Museum and began to volunteer at a local museum dedicated to the medium. Today, I still try to keep my dream alive and I draw whenever I can – right now I’m teaching myself the basics of anatomy – and I’m involved with this new venture that you are now experiencing, the Sequential Art Collective.
I even still pick up a healthy sized stack of comics once in a while, but I don’t collect as voraciously as I used to in my teens and early twenties. I don’t know what the future of my fandom is, but I am sure that I will love comics for the rest of my life.
Lee French served in the United States Army during Operation Enduring Freedom before earning his bachelor’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. A life-long reader and collector of comic books, he fondly remembers his first comic as being John Byrne’s Superman #7 which he still has “bagged and boarded,” even though it has long since lost its covers.
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