How many people can honestly say they ever heard of this comic book title. I can’t see everyone in the room but my hand seems to be the only one raised.

This morning I woke up around eight and I went on the computer (as I’m obviously on it right now typing this) and I was looking at a website and they had something about the Ghost Rider movie on and I went and I looked up Ghost Rider on wikipedia.org and I saw that he had a 2099 incarnation. Ghost Rider 2099 wasn’t a man inhabbited by the spirit of vengeance as his past version were but was a robot.

So, I continued to look and I found Spiderman 2099 and it reminded me of when I was little.

I mean, I was really young when this title came out. I looked and it said that it came out in November of 1992, which if usually means if it was written on the book as saying one date it actually came out a few months before (example: if it has August 2006 on it, it usually came out somewhere in June–or at least that’s how it used to be, I’m not a comic book expert anymore). But I believe I was in school when this title came out, so possible somewhere between September and November of 1992.

It was during this time that I was slowly getting into reading comics, my first comic book was a Heathcliff comic book. I used to watch Heathcliff the cartoon which was based on the daily and Sunday comic strip, but it actually had Heathcliff talking. The comic book was based more on the comic strip and I would read the same one over and over again and loved it. My father actually bought me my first comic book and I think I asked him to take me to a comic book store to find more and he took me to a comic store in the back of a used book store in Montclair. This used book store had everything, they’ve since expanded (so much so that during the mid-90’s during the comic book boom they got the store next door and turned that into a comic book store) but I went into the back and I got like two or three comics and with it (as is always the case) they gave a little comic book newletter thing about upcoming comics and storylines and what certain writers are doing and in this one it had the cover page of Spiderman 2099.

I knew who Spiderman was, I don’t know how, but as a kid you know all the names; Superman, Batman, Wonderwoman, Spiderman, The Incredible Hulk, you know the basics. Its only later you start to find out all the characters and what their powers are and this and that. But I at least knew of Spiderman enough to show interest in this title. So, my father called around and order the comic and brought it in for me. I remember that it came in a small brown paper bag (over the years I would get many comic books in the same thin brown paper bag, and at one point during the 98-00 period when I was heavily into comics before going off to college, the small brown paper bags would look pregnate because I was buying so many of them. All of which are saved and are really of no value what so ever…but I’ll save that explaination for another time). I can remember being in awe of this for some reason. I pulled out the sole comic book and it came with another edition of that comic book newletter (which the name of it escapes me, I would not really appreciate them until far later, when I could actually like and understand what I was reading) and I took them and flipped through the pages. I remember that the first panel had a bunch of people in this huge city in flying cars and they were all talking about this thing (spiderman 2099) that was roaming around.

I don’t think I ever read it, I didn’t understand much of it nor could I get into it, I was still into Heathcliff and slowly going into Back to the Future comics and Uncle Scrooge comics. It would be a few more years until I would see another issue. My cousin, Eluid, the one who got married about a year ago, gave me like two or three comics.These also confused me and I just looked at the pictures. Thinking about it now, I never picked up a Spiderman comic until around the time of the Maximum Carnage maxi series (it was also a video game) which came out probably a year or so later. But this too was something I did not get into, I think I was still into the kiddie stuff.

It was around this time that I started to know who the X-men were. I didn’t get into the X-men until I moved to Livingston and I watched the first season of it. But I remember waking up early on Sunday mornings (like I think many children tend to do) and they had like a Robocop cartoon and some other cartoons and one day they had an X-men cartoon which I never saw again, but I just looked up on wikipedia that they had one failed attempt at a pilot that was never picked up in 1989. But it was around this time that I started to look at the X-men 2099 comic and like the rest of the comics, I just didn’t understand it.

So, finishing this all up, even though I didn’t understand it at the time, I still remember it as a milestone in my childhood. I remember things about it I remember holding on to the comic and looking at it from time to time as one of my earlier purchases into the comic books. And I think to it with fond memories as one of those things that I looked forward to getting.

–Socram

PS if you didn’t notice, this is a rant/editorial, you probably don’t see these that much, and they don’t usually have the best of endings, but its the time that I spend telling you the blog readers about things in my life past or present or what I hope will be the future. Hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoying writing them and remembering.