FFF Results Post #310—Time Off

On Friday, CR readers were asked the following: "If You've Ever Taken A Break From Buying Comics For A While, Please Answer The Following: #1. The Parameters Of That Break; #2. A Comic You Remember Buying Very Close To Your Taking Time Away From Comics; #3. A Comic You Remember Buying Fairly Soon After Starting To Buy Comics Again; #4. Your Reason For Stopping; #5. Your Reason For Starting Again." This is how they responded.



Tom Spurgeon

1. Early 1977 to Midway/Late 1979.
2. X-Men #103
3. X-Men #125
4. I just grew disinterested with them at a certain point, and started using my "you can have one comic book if you help me at the grocery store" dispensation on sports magazines.
5. I was intrigued by the cover and the art that I saw in the X-Men comic mentioned in #3, and picked it up on an impulse. Never looked back.

*****



Marc Arsenault

1. roughly 1999-2005
2. Blab 10
3. DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore, 2006
4. After nearly a decade of working in comics I got very burned out and disenchanted with alot of the business and the work coming out. Part of this was having to leave the fan aspect behind to get work done, I think. But some of that was caused by the nearness to the personalities involved and involvement in the process. Having typed that I'm not sure it makes much sense or speaks to the whole truth of it. One way or the other the love had died and I'd been a big fan since an early age. I would only visit a shop a couple times a year for about six years or so and usually only buy books by friends of mine.
5. I think Runaways was the comic that got me started reading them again on a regular basis. I soon picked up all the B. K. Vaughan books I could. I also got intrigued by a few artists that were new to me like Darwyn Cooke and Brandon Graham. Also Scott Pilgrim. I had lost alot of my old comics in a couple of flooding incidents and became a pretty serious bargain bin scavenger to replace old Defenders and MoKF comics.

*****



Matt Emery

1. mid 2000 - 2005
2. Preacher #66
3. Jonah Hex #1
4. The comic shops in my area had closed down, newsstand and bookshop distribution had dried up and I got distracted by playing in bands, alcohol and fast women.
5. The combination of moving to a town with a comic shop, Quitely's cover on Jonah Hex #1 and a longtime affinity with the character lured me back in. The addition of a new disposable income led me to trying a bunch of things, I remember being astounded at finding Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca's Street Angel in this relatively small town in New Zealand at the time.

*****



Sean Kleefeld

1. The longest I've gone without comics was about 3 months in mid-2006.
2. A battered copy of Green Lama #5 that I found in a consignment shop for two bucks.
3. The Oz-Wonderland Chronicles #1.
4. I was let go from my employer and needed to save money to ensure that I could eat.
5. I was hired by current employer and, while I hadn't actually gotten my first paycheck yet, I hadn't blown through all of my savings.

*****



Fabrice Stroun

1. Summer 1988. Stopped reading mainstream comics (never ceased reading alt books) / Summer 95
2. McFarlane's Amazing Spider-Man 299
3. The invisibles 10
4. Thought of myself as a 'grownup' and naively believed that Sim / Clowes / Hernandez / Panter would be enough.
5. Read a profile of Morrison and the Invisible in an imported art magazine ('World Art') . Never looked back.

*****



Todd Strending

1. Mid 1978 - Fall/Winter 1981?
2. X-men 109
3. Daredevil 180
4. Typical reasons: thought I had outgrown comics, going off to college, discretionary income. I had "discovered girls" by this time but sadly it took a while for any to discover me so I can't really use that as a reason.
5. Just for shits and giggles I picked up a Comics Scene at a drug store in the town where I went to college. There was an article on Frank Miller's Daredevil and an ad for Love & Rockets (this one, I think). The Love and Rockets didn't look like any comics with which I was familiar - those black and white drawings of Luba, Rand, Izzy et. al. were just so seductive. Unfortunately, comic shops were unknown in those parts so I bought the Daredevil and my relapse was complete. I caught up with Los Bros later on.

*****



Oliver Ristau

1.) From summer 1998 until spring 2000.
2.) WildC.A.T.s/X-Men: The Golden Age (published in the summer of 1998 as a German translation)
3.) Menschenblut #37
4.) Had to concentrate on surviving. Also fed up with the comics scene at that time.
5.) You cannot get rid off of every addiction. It's in the blood.

*****



Trevor Ashfield

1. Spring 1980 - Summer, 1980
2. Marvel Spotlight # 7 featuring Star-Lord, cover date July 1980
3. Avengers # 201 - "Jarvis Takes Over" - cover date November, 1980
4. It was not my choice -- the local drugstore in my little hometown stopped carrying comics books!
5. I discovered that a drug store in the next town to the east still had comics, so I started going with my father there; he had regular business in that town. I was deprived of a regular source of comics for only a few weeks. I stayed with this habit until the local service station started carrying comics, and later, once I started university in the big city, I entered the doors of an actual local comic book store and have never looked back!

*****



Gabby Gamboa

1. 2006-early 2010
2. Y: The Last Man Vol. 6 (I would like to go back and finish reading this series some day)
3. The Walking Dead Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye
4. For most of the 1990s, my day job was in the comics industry (retail and then distribution), and I spent all my free time drawing comics and doing illustration. I just burned out. I wanted to see how other people live.
5. A pair of good neighborhood stores drew me in -- first Amazing Fantasy, and then Mission Comics, both in San Francisco. Reading led to making, which led to more reading, so now I have a mountain of comics to read. This addiction was a lot cheaper when I sold comics for a living and could buy wholesale or read them during my lunch break.

*****



Tom Bondurant

1. Roughly October 1981-September 1984
2. Superman #367
3. Star Trek #9
4. This will sound either pretentious or typical, but... I stopped because I was in 7th grade and figured comics were somehow beneath me, at least compared to D&D and sci-fi/fantasy novels.
5. Later, as a 10th-grader getting snacks for D&D in the Convenient, I saw that DC's Star Trek comic was telling stories set immediately after the events of Star Trek III. Being a rabid Trekkie, I had to know what Kirk & Co. were going to do, stuck on Vulcan as fugitives. From there I found the local comics shop, saw a house ad for Crisis On Infinite Earths, and the rest is history.

*****



Justin J. Major

1. 1994 to 2001.
2. Legion of Super-Heroes (vol. 4) #61
3. Cerebus: Form and Void (the phonebook)
4. The Legion of Superheroes had been my favorite since my cousin left a copy of Superboy 202 at my house when I was five. DC rebooted LSH and wiped (flushed!) all that continuity away. I decide that if comics makers didn't care about their characters, it was silly of me to care. So I quit.
5. My wife gave me a library card for my birthday and that library had all of the Cerebus phonebooks to date. I reread High Society and Church & State -- and then burned through the rest and moved on to Love & Rockets and Bone. I fell in love with comics owned and cared for by their creators.

*****



Mark Coale

1. summer 1987 to fall 1989
2. Action Comics 590
3. Sandman 5
4, other interests (science fiction, sports, girls)
5. Finding proto-Vertigo comics (Sandman, Animal Man...) as college freshman

*****



Chris Arrant

1. 1987-1990
2. Transformers: Headmasters #1
3. X-Factor Annual #4
4. My childhood interest in Transformers and G.I. Joe via the toy line waned, and I wasn't aware that comic shops existed.
5. Saw this cover while on a cross country road trip from Florida to California; found it in a mid-texas gas station. It had interesting colors, and the composition was pretty gripping for a young 13 year old like me.

*****



Jamie S. Rich

1. Sometime in 1987 to Fall 1990
2. Grendel #38
3. Dark Horse's Tank Girl reprints
4. We had one comic book store in my high school town, and that closed down around the same time I discovered "real books."
5. I still went to Comic Con, and Bob Schreck gave me Tank Girl. Stuff like Sin City and the Vertigo books then suckered me back into the fold while I was in college.

*****

while I appreciate the entries that are humorous, I tend not to run them because it always turns FFF into an escalating set of attempts to tell the best jokes, with dire results

*****
*****
 
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