It’s ironic, considering the fact that we’re the ones who chose the categories for this meme in the first place, that James and I both had a similar reaction to the very first entry – namely, that it’s kind of impossible to name a “first comic” if you’re someone who didn’t have a Road-to-Damascus-style comics discovery moment as a teen or adult. Simply put, I’ve been reading comics for about as long as I’ve been reading (and I was reading stupidly early, to boot). I’ll have read, like most people my age in this country, countless editions of the Beano, the Dandy, Whizzer and Chips et al (not to mention a healthy dose of Roy of the Rovers) long before I ever got near superhero comics.

But I do have a vivid memory of what I’m sure must have been my first “proper” encounter with the American superhero form, and that seems as good a place as any to mark my real entry point into comics as a hobby – Superman #1, published by London Editions Magazines in 1988.

Before I first clapped eyes on a Superman comic, I was already a fan of the Christopher Reeve movies. So it was no great stretch that when LEM started putting out a biweekly Superman title – reprinting US stories, beginning with John Byrne’s Man of Steel miniseries and subsequent ongoing title – a copy would find its way into my hands, courtesy of my already-a-comics-fan father. These UK reprints were lovely, oversized editions – the covers generally cleaner versions of big iconic Byrne covers or splash pages (see this terrific version of the Man of Steel #1 cover from #3), and they offered what were at the time great superhero comics at a really good value price. This particular issue – of which I’ve recently managed to get my hands on a copy again, complete with the free badge I remember owning back in the day, courtesy of the excellent Incognito Comics – simply features issue #1 of Man of Steel, but by issue #3 the content would be expanded by Who’s Who pages; and later, other characters and titles would make backup appearances.

The fact that I can still so vividly remember scenes and moments from the first couple of chapters (particularly the space plane rescue and costume design bits from #2) probably explains why Man of Steel endures as one of my favourite superhero comics to this day. What was interesting was the way I took to it as a fan of the first movie – despite being a different take, it all still immediately felt like the same story to my young eyes, so moments such as Lois getting that first interview with Superman stick with me as definitive parts of the legend despite being told in different ways across the two versions. It would be some years before I was properly introduced to the idea of a changing continuity, but I was at least already familiar with multiple interpretations of the same basic story right from the beginning.

The Superman title wasn’t the only time London Editions introduced me to a US comic, either. My discovery of three of my all-time favourite series – Animal Man, New Teen Titans and Justice League International – also came as a result of the publisher, with the latter showing up in later issues of Superman, while the former two were printed in the later, short-lived but really quite fantastic DC Action (a comic my Dad got in trouble with my Mum for letting me read, thanks to the Animal Man issue in which Ellen Baker calls Mirror Master an “asshole”). Even without those reprints, I’m sure I would have got into comics anyway – my dad’s interest and collection were too extensive not to, and I was being taken to comic shops and marts in Liverpool with him before too long – but it’s undeniable that the choice of stories taken by those UK-based editors had an indelible influence on my tastes, and continues to to this day. Indeed, while I can give many reasons for being a Superman fan, the very fact that I read – and loved – this issue so early must surely remain near the top of the list.