My First Comic by Jake Pierce

Being a product of the 90s I watched the Spider-man animated series until my eyes turned red as a child. It was my first introduction to super heroes and the bad guys they fought over and over again. I loved every episode of the series and loved watching Spidey duke it out with each one of his villains, but there were always episodes where Venom would show up that stuck out to me. These episodes just felt more special to me. He was bigger than Spider-man, supposedly stronger and let’s be honest has a cooler costume. I would re-watch these episodes over and over making my mom record as many as she could on VHS. Then one day she let me tag along with her for her weekly Flea Market trip. It was then that I was introduced to comic books. No longer was I restricted to waiting for Saturday mornings to get my Spider-man fix in, so I stepped into this collector’s booth and came across Venom Lethal Protector #6, it had Spider-man and Venom on the cover ready to duke it out with the tag line “It’s not their final battle, but it just might be their greatest!” and I was immediately sold. I went to purchase it with my allowance and the clerk informed me that this was issue #6 and if I wanted to get the full story and understand what was going on I would need to start with issue #1. This blew my mind. I was used to single episode stories of the animated series where you could jump in with any episode without being lost with the occasional 2 part story here and there. So I look over to see issue #1 with a bright and shiny foil cover and knew I immediately had to have it and the rest of the series. So after about 20 minutes of begging my mother to buy all six issues she caved when the clerk mentioned they could be worth hundreds one day, which is funny because #1 goes for about $15 (thanks 90s). I went home and read the series over and over again, explaining every single last detail to my mom about what happened in this legendary showdown of the web slingers. From then on every Sunday my mother took me to the flea market to buy comic books feeding into this crazy obsession I had about super powered beings in bright colored spandex. Venom Lethal Protector may have been one of the over printed comics of 90s but for nostalgia reasons it’s priceless in my mind.