Why All the Love? (My First Comic Book)

If you've been checking in on this blog over the last week and a half, you my be wondering, "Why all the love for Captain America?" (You're probably not, but it's a good way to start this post.) Here's an excerpt from a journalistic creative nonfiction paper about comic books I did for a class I took last year:

     But twenty-nine years ago, I knew nothing about specialty shops (and reading comics—or anything—on a computer tablet was only a science fiction idea!). I saw Captain America #300 on a spinning wire rack in a local deli/newspaper/liquor store; my mother let me pick one comic out of a few dozen that were stocked on the rack. I didn’t really know much about comic books. I had watched reruns of the Batman TV show so I understood some of the lingo and sound effects (WHAM! KAPOW!).  So, for an eight year old boy, the comic book with Captain America and his arch enemy the Red Skull beating the crap out of each other on the cover looked awesome! After reading it a few times, I traced pictures from it in order to teach myself to draw like the artist of the book, not realizing that I was erasing the monetary value of the comic. A few years later I learned how to take care of these precious collectable items that would make me rich someday. I learned that my defacement of this issue made it worthless, so it got tossed.

My search for Captain America #300 was used to tie various parts of my "journalism" together. Anyway, this issue has a cover date of December 1984 and Captain America went on to be the first comic book I collected.

Thanks for looking,
Mike