My First Prog

[Barrington Boots]

If I'm not mistaken, I think the prog that Barrington Boots started this thread with is one from a little bundle I just sold him!

It's true! My original was part of a batch left at my parents when I left for university and never seen again. Finding it in a pile of Kev's beautifully preserved old progs is what inspired me to start this thread.
Despite the fact that I've read almost everything in it in collections since, it was still so cool to re-read it in the original format. Made my day. Buy Kev's stuff everyone!

Anyway - some glorious progs and memories on this thread, loving seeing the old covers. They're all bangers - although I suppose if your first prog was, say, a 1996 stinker with Outlaw, post-Warmachine Fr1day and Black Light in it you'd not be on this board decades later.

[sintec]

Much more recent start for me. Spent my early teens reading Manga Mania rather than 2000AD (given this was around 93 that was maybe for the best). It was Hachette's Ultimate Collection that finally pulled me in. About a year into that, while killing time in an airport (remember those), I decided it was time to buy an actual Prog. Which landed me with Prog 2100. Not a bad start point with Kingdom, Brink, Fiends, and The Small House. Although having missed some of the build up The Small House didn't really have the impact it could of. And I've still not read the missing chunk of Kingdom between where the UC left us (book 6) and Alpha and Omega that was publishedd here (still hoping we'll see that in the extension even if it means a shorter than average book). It's a testament to Abnett's writing that despite having missed the preceding 2 series of Brink that one hooked me straight away.

Haven't looked back since - although I did switch from paper to digital in order to save space (those Hachette collections really do eat up the shelf space). Donated my few months of paper progs to a Marvel and DC reading office mate prior to a recent house move in a vague effort to downsize my hoard of "stuff" (and to bring him over to the light).

[zombemybabynow]

with a bowie-esque reference this was it : [bought from Gosh comics when it was opposite the british museum]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DpUrTYkXoAEeKqA.jpg

https://centaur-wp.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/designweek/prod/content/uploads/2018/03/08173116/bowie-cover.jpg

[TordelBack]

My Dad was (is, just about) great for pushing comics and SF on me, although history was (is) his thing. Alongside the period-standard diet of war stories and school comedies, I was exposed to a diet of Jet Morgan, Flash Gordon, Dan Dare and eventually Star Wars, and when I was off school with the exaggerrated ailments of the '70s child he would buy me an armful of comics. One such was Prog 291, my first sight of 2000AD.



The contents both disturbed and enticed me. Ezquerra's Blanch Tatum was coldly murderous and prifoundly sexy in a way I'd never seen in a comic before. But elsewhere strips were deep in their own weird continuity,: Fort Neuro,  Ace Trucking and Harry 20. There was one standalone thing, a short story by some guy called Alan Moore,  but I never looked at the names of the creators, if I even knew such people existed back then. It didn't really grab my timid self in the way the New Eagle did.

It wasn't until I saw this in the newsagent:


...that my life was changed. Magnificent, peerless, irresistible, unique; wouldn't you say, Colin?

And behind that non-story that I desperately wanted to imagine, there was this incredibly realistic thing about a cute girl in Birmingham, by that Moore guy again. It was the second part of Skizz, although I wouldn't learn that I had missed the good Interpreter's actual crashlanding the previous week for at least another year.

I could wax lyrical about the welcomingly simple opener of Starborn Thing, the fact that the impenetrable Fort Neuro was somehow still going all those months later, that there was yet more from Moore, or that the amazing artist that did that momentous cover had another equally bizarre strip about Nazi microbes and (crucially) the strange people that actually made the comic, but the simple fact is that it was Skizz that made my future purchase of Prog 292 inevitable, and the one after that.

And here we are.

[sheridan]

Anyway - some glorious progs and memories on this thread, loving seeing the old covers. They're all bangers - although I suppose if your first prog was, say, a 1996 stinker with Outlaw, post-Warmachine Fr1day and Black Light in it you'd not be on this board decades later.

You say that, but some of the 2000AD origins stories on both Mega City Book Club and Space Spinner 2000 reveal that some people did start in the dreaded 1990s, and are still Squaxx to this day...

[TordelBack]

...but the simple fact is that it was Skizz that made my future purchase of Prog 292 inevitable, and the one after that.

Yes folks,  I made a post about my first prog for at least the 53rd time,  and somehow got the numbers wrong. I started buying with 309, the next one was 310 etc.

[sheridan]

Much more recent start for me. Spent my early teens reading Manga Mania rather than 2000AD (given this was around 93 that was maybe for the best).

Don't be silly.  There's no way that Manga Mania was launched twenty-eight years ago.






Oh.

[sintec]

Don't be silly.  There's no way that Manga Mania was launched twenty-eight years ago.

Oh.

I know right. I recently rediscovered my tattered copies while clearing out a loft prior to a house move. They did not survive the cull sadly as I'd picked up trades of many of the better bits (Akira, Appleseed, Dominion) in the meantime and they hadn't aged well.

[abelardsnazz]

Mine was the 1984 Sci-Fi Special, as I was reading Eagle at the time (any chance of a collected Doomlord?) and Ian Kennedy had drawn Dredd on the cover - my thinking was, if Judge Dredd's good enough to be drawn by Ian Kennedy, it must be worth a read. The Dredd inside was drawn by Cliff Robinson, one of his earliest I think, and was about an illegal gameshow where if you got a question wrong you were disintegrated. Needless to say I was hooked.

[JayzusB.Christ]

Grud almighty, I can't remember where it all started.  It was my brother's comic of choice, not mine (which was Nutty), but I always got a read of it.  He stopped reading in his teens; I started buying it then.

I have hazy memories of the aforementioned Blanch Tatum, and of Chopper's graffiti war, though I was looking at the prog before that. Looking at the dates, I must have been somewhere between 5 and 6 when I discovered 2000ad.  And I wonder why I've turned out the way I have.

[Jim_Campbell]

And I wonder why I've turned out the way I have.

Basically, this. I've said for many years that 2000AD is pretty much the most formative influence on the adult (questionably!) I became. I mean, there's loads of other stuff, but the prog was there, week in and week out, from the age of ten onwards. Maybe I'd have had a black sense of humour, maybe I'd have had a suspicion of authoritarians, maybe I'd have loved science fiction and fantasy, without 2000AD... but I'll never know.

If I could go back and tell the ten-year-old me that one day my name would be in those credit boxes...? I don't know, but the fact that I am now in those credits? I was fifty when that happened, and I had no realistic expectation that it would ever happen.

Don't give up on those lofty dreams, ever. You never know.

[Timothy]

I had read some progs that friends had earlier, but the first I could call my own was the one with the first part of Citizen Snork. I was hooked. 356.