The last few posts have had me thinking more about the things I fell in love with as a child that turned me into the lovable dork I am today. I think I am going to make this a regular column, posting whenever I get around to scanning some new gem from my treasure chest. In this installment, X-Men # 162, the first superhero comic I ever read.
I didn’t buy this comic. It was my older brother Johnny’s. I’m not sure where he got it, whether he bought it or swiped it or bartered for it. Johnny was a natural barterer. With him passed on almost a dozen years now, I guess I’ll never know exactly how he came across it, but I do know that like many things, he grew bored with it and passed it on to me. I remember it sitting in my nightstand for months before I read it. It was 1982, and I was 9 years old.
But when I did, I read it about a thousand times. Really, the photo doesn’t do justice to just how beat up this comic is. The back gives a better impression of the abuse it suffered before I learned to take care of my comics:
Still, this battered and beat up book is worth more to me than any mint-condition, mylar-sealed, autographed edition could ever be. This book opened a whole new world to me.
In the story, Wolverine is trapped on Broodworld, an alien planet dominated by a species that looks like giant reptillian killer bees. The brood lay their eggs in human hosts, who are comsumed when the eggs hatch. The new hatchling retains the special abilities of the host body, so the X-Men, with their mutant powers, were kidnapped and each implanted with the eggs of a brood queen.
Wolverine’s healing power, combined with his metal skeleton, saves him alone from this fate, though the process drives him nearly insane as he runs through the alien jungle, fleeing the brood as he battles the egg within. The issue ends with him triumphant, but knowing that his friends will not be so lucky. He resolves to kill them all himself before the eggs within them hatch.
Cliffhanger.
Words fail when I try to describe for you how this book captured my imagination. The nonstop action, the nonstop awesome, the triumph followed by the hopelessness of inevitable doom for his friends. It was beautiful, despite the fact that Wolverine spends the whole book covered in blood and monster guts.
The first superhero comic I ever bought myself was X-Men # 167, which closed out the brood storyline. I spent the next seven years hunting through back-issue bins and saving my allowance in order to get hold of issues # 163 – # 166 so that I could read the story as a whole. It was incredibly satisfying when I finally did.
These days, I have a collection of s different sort going, a collection of the different versions and imprints of The Painted Man from all over the world. Germany and Spain publish next month, but so far I have copies from the UK, Japan, Poland, and the US.
You can see them all below on my shelf where I keep 2 of each edition, guarded by the Jardir figure I have been customizing:
As you can see, including the ARCs, there are eleven printed editions, so far. Poland split the book in two, and Japan in three:
Showing how I squander my time, here’s them in a clock formation, in the order in which they were published (except for the last two, which I now realize should be reversed. The PM paperback published after the WM hardback):
Posted on April 19, 2009 at 12:39 am by PeatB
Filed under Musings, Writing
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