Animated Heroes!

or, It's always been more than comics

Jack Kirby’s Super Powers. Characters and art owned by DC Comics.

I often marvel at the number of aging comic fans (much like yours truly) that want to blame the loss of comic readers on the advent of characters in other media forms, whether it be TV, movies or video games. They act like some great generational divide exists where people read comics before it to get superheroes and after it, they just stopped.

I'm proof that such a divide isn't real. 

I read comics regularly pretty much as long as I can remember. But the number of superhero comics I owned before I was ten or so could be counted on one hand. My comic buying habits modeled my other buying habits of my youth. I wanted G.I. Joe and Transformers and M.A.S.K. and Sectaurs. I wanted to see my favorite toys come to life and get featured in cool stories, hopefully with my personal picks getting a heavy focus. (The Skids on his own issue of Transformers is still by far the best.) 

But I definitely knew my superheroes. I had Spider-Man and his close personal friends Firestar and Iceman, along with an array of Marvel heroes. I had Hulk and his cowboy hat wearing sidekick Rick Jones. I had the entire Justice League as they merged with the Super Powers toy line and brought in young heroes like Firestorm and Cyborg and villains like Darkseid. I even had young Benji Grimm and his mighty Thing Ring that did it's thing. 

My fondness for comics grew from the cartoons I was raised on in a steady stream every weekday morning and afternoon and for hours and hours on Saturday. For me, the Herculoids, Young Samson and Space Ghost were often on equal footing with the characters from Marvel and DC. 

Hell, I was well into my teens before I realized Atom and Hawkman were not nearly as important of heroes as their presence on Super Friends made me think. It's been nearly forty years and I'm still mad that few Doctor Fate appearances have lived up to his amazing action figure, nor has he ever hung with the Justice League as he did in the very first superhero comic I ever bought, a Super Powers tie in comic penciled by Jack Kirby and featuring a place that absorbed my interest as a kid: Easter Island. 

It wasn't until my voracious reading habits started to outgrow the comics and Choose Your Adventure novels that I was getting that comics entered my life. I started with my brothers X-Men and Spider-Man, dropping in on art by Todd MacFarlane and Marc Silvestri, even though I often preferred Alex Saviuk over on Web of Spider-Man. I made the jump to DC on my own to buy the Supergirl Saga, the arc that finished off John Byrne's days on the character. From there, I bounced around with my main focus being on Justice League whenever I could get my hands on it. (DC at the time had far spottier appearances at the local bookstore I used for my comic buying needs.) 

Alex Saviuk killing it. Characters owned by Marvel.

My love for comics grew from there, especially as I found ancillary media over the years, first in the form of American Entertainment catalogs and later in the pages of Wizard and Hero Illustrated. The Marvel TSR game and the DC Heroes intro game based on Batman drew me deeper as I ended up obsessed by the 90s. 

But none of that would have happened without those misspent hours in front of our family's little 19 inch screen. Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends made me want to see more of the X-Men especially that Australian guy with the claws. (Close enough, in hindsight.) Super Friends guaranteed one of the first DC books I ever bought was Firestorm, predating even my collecting of Superman. Those cartoons helped me find what I wanted to read and see in comic form, doing a far better job than I might do just by going "wow, that cover's cool." 

And the rest, as they say, is history.