Comic Saga: My First Time

There is a question that is asked on comic message boards every few months, that being “How did you get into comics?”. These questions always get me thinking because growing up I had no idea that so much of the stuff I enjoyed as a kid was influenced by the world of comic books. Hell, I had no idea there were actually comic books, my local store only carried crappy UK magazines that were filled with dot-to-dots and crosswords. The only comic books I knew of were the Beano and Dan Dare and they are only a source of nostalgia for parents these days.

When I talk about these influenced products such as television shows, movies, games etc. I don’t mean the obvious ones like Batman, Superman or Spider-Man because as a kid I had no interest in them what so ever. I knew they existed but I didn’t get the appeal.

The obvious early influence to me was the Teenage Mutant Turtles. I had all the videos, all the toys and could sing the theme tune with the best of them. For a while I even wanted to grow up to be a turtle. But I was too young to remember any of this stuff, so I can only go by home movies and embarrassing stories as told by drunken relatives.

What I would list as the comic book that had a biggest impact on me without having read the comic book was Sam and Max. Since I was very small I always had a fascination with computers and there are numerous pictures of me sat on the potty with a game controller in hand. In the early 90’s we got our first PC and my brother and me got hooked on the world of adventure gaming. Monkey Island, Broken Sword, Day of The Tentacle, we’ve played them all. We ran up bills of hundreds of pounds for phoning the game help lines, which we inevitably got in a lot of trouble for.

When 1993 hit we got the best of them all, Sam and Max Hit the Road! It was laugh out loud game that required you to think to complete the game. The two characters that were far beyond my scope of the world and their humour was adult and that has changed my viewing changes forever. Since I was 8 I’ve been watching adult sitcoms and cartoons soon became no existent to me. They were somewhat violent and never talked down to the gamer just because they were a cartoon dog and rabbit. It was so unique to me and I don’t think I’ve ever found a game with characters I’ve fallen in love since.

But the adventure game died out and was replaced. I’m still a fairly big gamer but it was sad to see my favourite genre die out because it wasn’t interesting enough as shoot em’ ups and today’s audience just don’t have the attention span to try and figure out puzzles which can take hours.

Then in 2002 Lucasart’s announced a return to their gaming roots and announced the sequel to the original Sam and Max Game and my heart jumped for joy… then they cancelled it. I, along with many other people campaigned for it’s return but Lucasart’s didn’t listen and instead continued to work on their 6 or 7 Star War’s titles a year quota.

Luckily I was instore for good news again as bunch of former Lucasart’s employees set up their own company called Telltale Games and announced they were bringing Sam and Max back!

It was about this time I found out that it was based on a comic book, a hobby I’d had for a while by this time. Sadly the back issues are out of my price range, although they are re-releasing an old trade soon. I find it so interesting to see stuff that was so important to my childhood were based on a hobby I had no idea existed but now have fallen in love with.