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NYCC's DC Nation Asks What's The First Comic You Ever Read?

Published Tue, 09 Oct 2018 11:00:51 -0500

Octavio Karbank writes

Do you remember the first comic book you ever read? Can you recall the feel of the paper on your fingers? While the stories are similar, nobody has the exact same tale when it comes to how they got into reading comics. For folks like comic book writer Robert Venditti, he didn't start reading comics until he was in his twenties. On the other hand, you have creators like Joshua Williamson who've had a comic book in hand since day one!

The NYCC DC Nation panel was one guided more by emotion that cold, hard news. Rather than discuss upcoming projects or any myriad of teases that could have been provided, the panel, lead by Dan Didio, focused more on the audience and establishing a kind of camaraderie with the creators on stage. Present were Adam Glass, Robert Venditti, Joshua Williamson, Keith Giffen, and Emaanuela Lupacchino and they each had amusing anecdotes to share.

There was plenty of focus on asking both the panelists and those in attendance questions like what was the first convention you attended, how's the convention experience going for you, and how long have you been reading comics. During it all, the only bit of real hard-hitting news came when Robert Venditti revealed that Hawkman #8 is going to feature Hawkman encountering his Kryptonian self. If you're unfamiliar with the character, let's just say the hero has a long and convoluted history.

The floodgates blew open when someone suddenly asked Dan Didio why he hates Nightwing. Didio laughed and explained that he finds Nightwing a difficult character to manage, if only because he's getting older. Having the character get older is tricky, according to him, because you can't have Nightwing get too old so that it affects the rest of the Batman line i.e. having Bruce become too old for Batman. Someone in the audience yelled out to just kill Batman. After all, Barry Allen, the Flash, was dead for twenty years and Wally replaced him marvelously, so why couldn't the same be done with Dick Grayson? Didio laughed, but elaborated, saying that if you have Dick get too old, he starts to become very similar to who Batman is, which then has a trickle down affect, since Tim Drake is influenced and becomes similar to Nightwing and so on and so forth. Didio purposefully said he didn't mention Jason Todd since Jason was characteristically different from the rest.

The panel concluded right around the time somebody asked about the Legion of Superheroes. Didio gave a nice, albeit generic answer, by saying that, "…the Legion will come back; they always do."

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