We can’t always pinpoint the dates that change our lives. Not the big moments, but the little ones, like a hobby that you just can’t shake.
But there’s one date I’m pretty sure about: The date I became hooked for life on comic books.
I grew up reading comic books bought by my parents, but the true pathway to addiction was when I started spending my own money on them. The spinner rack at the long-gone Lucky’s supermarket was where I became hypnotised forevermore.
The comic book that hooked me for life was Marvel’s Star Wars #58, beckoning to me from the spinner rack with an amazing Walt Simonson cover featuring C3PO and R2-D2 floating ominiously in a scarlet sky.
Thanks to beauty of the resources at Mike’s Amazing World of Comics website, I can now pinpoint the exact date that issue of Star Wars went on sale – January 19, 1982. Exactly forty years ago now, ye gods.
Forty years, and I’m still hooked on comics. My library of comics and graphic novels is kind of embarrassing in its scope, but it’s also a big old cape-wearing part of my whole identity now, as a grown man teetering into late middle age.
Comics expanded the world to me, made me want to be a journalist like Clark Kent or Peter Parker, led to me working on my own comics through the years, and introduced me to a kind of secret society of like-minded dreamers and loners.
Forty years on, and comic characters that were obscure in 1982 are the basis of billion-dollar movie blockbusters and TV shows. I love a lot of those gaudy pop-culture successes, but it’s still those musty smelling, ad-festooned and humble physical comic books themselves I love the most, especially the ones I grew up with in the early 1980s.
Thanks to Mike’s website, I can see the issues that I bought back then and that imprinted themselves on me in those early months of 1982 – Spider-Man battling his way against the impossibly powerful Juggernaut in Amazing Spider-Man #230 (part two of a story that took me ages to find the beginning of!); the creepy photo cover of Saga Of The Swamp Thing #2, calculated to scare and entice readers; the Thing grumbling and arguing his way through teaming up with Ant-Man in Marvel Two-In-One #87; Batman facing off against the deliciously divided Two-Face in Batman #346…
Marvel’s irreverent Hercules, a figure out of myth having merry madcap adventures in outer space in Hercules #1; John Byrne’s operatic and epic clash between the Fantastic Four and Galactus in Fantastic Four #242-244, which seemed as grand as three Star Wars movies put together; the funky disco-esque costume of Firestorm, a hero I’d never even heard of, exploding off the cover of Fury of Firestorm #1; the Justice League of America apparently defeated, near death, at the hands of the Royal Flush Gang in JLA #205… I could go on.
Many of these comics I’ve still got today, a bit well-read and hardly near-mint, but they always carry me back to the winter and spring of 1982. I soon discovered comic book stores (as I’ve written about previously) and well, there’s no going back from that.
Through thick and thin, comings and goings in life and great adventures and sad setbacks, those comics bought starting in January 1982 were friends and inspirations in all their weird, wonderful ways, shaping the person I ended up becoming.
The 10-year-old me of 1982 would never have guessed, turning that rack full of comics in all their gaudy colours, that that spinning rack would change everything. Life can be like that.
The rack spins, and your fortune is forever changed by one simple gesture.
Nik Dirga 
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