I found it highly amusing to read about James buying the first issue of a particular comic, with a cover date of November 2001, from Comic Showcase in Oxford. Because I also bought the first issue of a different comic, also with a cover date of November 2001, from Comic Showcase in Oxford as well. It’s actually not beyond the realms of possibility that we did so on the same day – and even if we didn’t, it’s almost certain that we will have been in that shop at the same time as one-another at some point without knowing, it being one of the quirks of our friendship that we lived in the same town (and for part of that time, actually around the corner from one-another) for three years before we knew each other, and only met after we’d both left.

I have similar memories to James of Comic Showcase, though – chief among them the bizarre practice of not being able to get new comics until Friday, because the entirety of Thursday would be spent bagging up issues for those regulars with pull lists (a group I later joined when I moved back to Oxford for a spell in early 2006, although I still wouldn’t collect my books until Friday due to that being the day I got paid by my temp agency). The shop (now, sadly, closed down) had its good points, but it decidedly wasn’t the sort of place you take a non-comics-reader in an attempt to convince them what a friendly and inclusive world comics fandom can be. Quite the opposite. I don’t even think the owner of the shop (who bore an uncanny resemblence to John Byrne) held a conversation with me until I became one of the Special Pull-List Few. That said, in later years, he did have a much friendler assistant – a young Canadian guy – who helped improve the shop’s image a little.

Back in late 2001, however, just as I’d arrived in the town as a fresh-faced university matriculant discovering his regular comic shop for the first time, the shop’s main assistant was a comic book guy of Comic Book Guy proportions. But he seemed to warm to me when I slapped down my latest chosen purchase one early week – the first issue of Alias, one of the first examples of trying out a series purely because of the writer involved (who I’d become a fan of after spending a year buying Ultimate Spider-Man). There was a nod and perhaps even a murmur of recognition as he rang it up. “Is it any good, then?” I asked. “It’s Bendis, so – yeah,” was his reply, this being some years before his Avengers run would make the bald one the scourge of the fanboyest of the fanboy.

He was right, though. It was good. And so began a twenty-eight issue love affair with a brilliant, wonderful series – one that James and I have already yakked about to a great extent both here and back in our Noise to Signal days, it being one of the earliest bonds in our shared comic book fandom.  And that first issue utterly hits the ground running, too – a great opening scene, arriving at the end of another workaday case, sets up Jessica’s character and current situation perfectly, with typically Bendisian dialogue characterising the conversation with the two cops who show up after her altercation with an angry client (a really nice bit of subversion at the start sees Jessica put in the classic “victim” role as he attacks her, before turning the page to show him crashing through the window). There follows the controversial Luke Cage scene – but it’s one that, naturally, takes on a different meaning when viewed in the context of everything that would follow; and although I doubt Bendis ever predicted that a married Luke and Jessica would become cornerstones of the Avengers cast a decade later, he’s definitely sewing seeds for what would follow in the latter part of Alias itself (although, thankfully, he got a lot better at writing Luke’s dialogue). And finally, the closing pages set up the main plot of the first arc, which is itself filled with enough intrigue to drag the reader to issue #2 – although looking back from the perspective of 2010-era Marvel, there’s something quite quaint about a story that revolves around Steve Rogers’ secret identity.

It’s always nice when you stumble across something right at the beginning of its run that turns out to be an utter, unquestionable classic – I was too young to do so with things like Sandman and Preacher, but although Alias isn’t quite at those heights, and only lasted a short two-and-a-bit years, it was great to have been there from day one. As I’ve said before, I firmly believe Jessica Jones is the best new character created in either the Marvel or DC universes over the last decade or so – and I’ve been proud to have followed her story right from her first moments on the page.