SECRET ORIGINS
by BK MUNN
Comics from 40 years ago: MAY 1982.
I fell down one of those online rabbit holes of looking at old comics by year and month, and realized what an important year 1982 was to my mental "development" and the evolution of my taste. This issue of The Comics Journal came out in May 1982 but I didn't buy it until a few months later. At the time, I was buying my superhero comics from spinner racks in corner stores. If Guelph had a comic shop then, I don't think I knew about it. I was visiting my cousins in London, Ontario during summer vacation and they took me to a magazine shop, one of those places that specialized in international newspapers and other exotic publications. They also had a large wall of new comics, and I remember I was very excited to find all four issues of the New Teen Titans miniseries that I hadn't been aware of as that sort of thing didn't usually make it to drug stores and Mac's Milk in Guelph. The regular monthly Titans comic book was my favourite at the time as a teenybopper and here were four brand new comics drawn by my favourite artist George Perez (Perez just died last week, reminding me I hadn't bought a new comic by him in 35 or so years).
Along with the comics was this issue of TCJ with its electrifying Neal Adams cover, the first "fanzine" I'd ever seen in the wild, and the whole thing blew my 12 year old mind. It wasn't really a fanzine but a 130-page real magazine full of serious "adult" articles and reviews of comics I'd never seen or heard of (or imagined!). Along with the epic Neal Adams interview (Adams died recently as well; all my childhood heroes are passing!), there were long articles about Moebius, the early Dr. Seuss, Judge Dredd and 2000AD, underground comics, illustrations by the Hernandez Brothers, a cinematic 2-page ad for Cerebus the Aardvark, and a whole lot of trash talk about my beloved Marvel and DC comic books. It was like an education in the history and potential of the comics artform in one single magazine and changed the way I thought about my little pubescent collecting hobby. Of course the first thing I sought out was the Adams' "Ms. Mystic" comic advertised on the cover (it was a major disappointment after the hype Adams gave it in his interview, hilarious in hindsight), but eventually I also bought my first issue of Cerebus and by 1986 or so, with a regular subscription to the Comis Journal magazine arriving in my maiIbox monthly, I had transitioned to the full-on insufferable teenage comics snob I still am today, reading only the arty-est, punkest, and most impenetrably obscure small press and self-published comix, and collecting ancient cartoon ephemera long forgotten by mainstream society. I blame this issue of The Comics Journal for keeping me interested in comics long after the then-accepted period of juvenile infatuation, continuing well into middle age, and for my continued stunted social development and collecting obsessions.
