What was the most influential book you read growing up?
My answer: Spider-Man comics. Yours?
A few hundred years ago, the editor at Calgary’s long-defunct Swerve Magazine asked me to write something about, “the most influential book I read as a kid.”
This was for a feature showcasing about a dozen Canadian writers. Pretty much everyone else she approached offered up a masterwork from the literary canon that would make all their high school English teachers proud or a piece by a fellow Canadian author they might have known from sharing the stage at a literary festival. I… did not.
I considered going with Kurt Vonnegut Jr. but as much as he rocked my world and my writing that answer felt more truthy than true.
Today I teach classes at the University of Victoria built around the Marvel and DC universes and I’ve paid my bills over the years writing superhero stories for the small screen, so I’m happy to stand by my answer. I’ve reprinted it below.
If anyone is game to share their most influential books below, that’d be amazing, fantastic and all sorts of other words than Stan Lee used to slap in front of his superhero titles.
The most influential books I read growing up were the ones you didn’t admit to reading in school… the ones with glossy four-colour covers featuring a dysfunctional dark knight, misunderstood mutants and, listen bud, a guy with radioactive blood. I didn’t read graphic novels. I read comic books. I called them “comics.” And when I was a kid, that’s what allowances were for.
In elementary school, I was all about the DC universe and I’d read anything with Batman, anywhere, anytime. The Dark Knight wasn’t that dark back then and the Comics Code meant he solved more problems with his brains than with his batarang. And I loved him because he was almost the only superhero without superpowers.
I was hooked on the Justice League of America — even though I wished they were the Justice League of Canada — because the most powerful heroes in the universe were always rescued by their least powerful members like Batman, Green Arrow or the impossibly tiny Atom. My favourite DC “super” hero was Green Lantern, because the only limits to his magic ring were his will-power and imagination.
When I hit high school, I fell for Marvel and its heroes with “hang-ups,” like The X-Men, Daredevil, The Hulk and Moon Knight. But no comics mattered more to me than the ones featuring everybody’s favourite web slinger. I liked the amazing Spider-Man, but I loved his über-geeky alter ego, Peter Parker.
Pete was Woody Allen with web fluid — nagged by Aunt May, tormented by Flash Thompson and abused by Jolly Jonah Jameson. But no matter how terrible Pete’s life got, he always slipped back into the Spidey suit because, “With great power, comes great responsibility.”
Maybe everyone doesn’t want to be a hero like Spider-Man, but I suspect there’s at least one grade in everyone’s school life when they feel like Peter Parker.
About once a year, comics make the news because a superhero like Captain America “dies” and lazy journalists do stories about how “comics aren’t just for kids anymore.” But the only person who ever truly believed comics were just for kids was Fredric Wertham, the German psychologist who convinced 1950s America that comics were warping impressionable young minds and should be burned.
But comics were never just for kids. And that’s why kids read them. I know it’s why I did.
’Nuff said.
I cover a lot of different topics here, but I’ve been on a bit of a superhero kick this summer, so if you’d like to check out more of my Substack super-writing…
And this’d be where I try to do my part to help the ocean and the animals who live there.
A series of books for me. The first comic book I ever owned was 'Godzilla #12'. Purchased with my own collected pop bottle money. I would even tell those outside of the neighbourhood I was a boy scout, if they asked. This would always lead to a side-eye, but hey, you don't interrogate a smiling 10-year-old too much over a few bottles of 7-up. However, I wasn't able to collect this series consistently as they sold it at a gift shop that had one of those spin racks. You got what came in that month, or you didn't. The first comic shop in Chilliwack that I recall, opened around 1987. Just around the time where I could get 'The Amazing Spider-man' #300' at cover price, and did! That was some iconic cover art. Now to get to your real question. The book or rather series of books most influential to me at the time however, were not comic books. They were the 'Dragonlance Chronicles' by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Page turners for me, and the first series I ever read, even as others had read the great masterpieces by Tolkien. A little side note; I did start on the Hobbit around the same time, but it didn't quite have the same catch for me. That and I didn't like all the songs to which I had to imagine the music.
Oh and Ally Oop for time travel and Dick Tracey for his watch and graphics and Little Abner for sexy drawings (I met Al Capp)