This week's poll was suggested by mrs_choco. Do you remember what the first comic you read? Maybe it was Batman, or maybe it was Naruto. What was the country of origin for that comic?

You can submit poll ideas here
http://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=3903

Previous Poll Results:
Question: Worst character trait of a lover?
Choices:
Cold / Dandere / Kuudere - votes: 76 (2.8%)
Tsundere - votes: 144 (5.2%)
Yandere / Obsessive - votes: 375 (13.6%)
Possessive - votes: 82 (3%)
Jealous - votes: 64 (2.3%)
Violent - votes: 765 (27.8%)
Secretive - votes: 118 (4.3%)
Genki / Deredere - votes: 16 (0.6%)
Simple-minded - votes: 53 (1.9%)
Perverted - votes: 139 (5.1%)
Egotistic - votes: 156 (5.7%)
Childish - votes: 98 (3.6%)
Arrogant / Proud - votes: 92 (3.3%)
Dense / Dumb - votes: 244 (8.9%)
Emotionless / Expressionless - votes: 113 (4.1%)
Spoiled - votes: 215 (7.8%)
There were 2750 total votes.
The poll ended: January 6th, 2024 9:19am PST

Violent ones are probably some of the worst in real life too

Last edited by lambchopsil at 10:38 am, Jan 13 2024

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A just ruler amongst tyrants

European.
Probably Tintin or something by a spanish comic artists

Euro or American
my parents gave me a number of classic Euro stories; Asterix, Tintin, Le petit prince
my dad also had an impressive Marvel silver & bronze collection although I didn't do much reading of those for a 'first read'

Swedish comics. Most likely Lille Fridolf or 91:an seeing as that is what my parents read when I was a kid. (91:an is still ongoing since 1956... I seriously thought that that one had stopped ages ago...)

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~4400 manga completed
~1700 ongoing...

Brazilian comic called "Turma da Mônica" when I was a kid.

I can't fathom what could have been the first - I don't remember much of my early childhood. The first comic I can remember reading was a random Simpsons comic from my local library. I think it involved some drama with Bart in the school canteen and some disgusting food...? So, American.

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...Hop!

Probably was El Guerrero del Antifaz or Purk el hombre de piedra, both Spanish comics from my early childhood. So my first experiences were I guess were with "European comics" which is not what many people would probably associate with the current understanding of European comics. They were very pulpy and seemed to have a very slight influence of the Lone Ranger for El Guerrero and Tarzan for Purk or at least that's what I thought as a kid. Later it would be American comics and then Japanese manga.

Last edited by MangaGhost at 3:38 pm, Jan 6 2024

Asterix & Obelix probably. 🙂

I thought at first it was Japanese, because my strongest memory of reading a comic was of an explicit manga I read as a 8 years old somehow in the school library. Then I suddenly unlocked a memory of a half destroyed magazine from when I was maybe 4 containing multiple pages of Donald Duck comics.

Le petit prince isn't a comic — it's a children's book with illustrations. You say "Euro" (as in European, right?), but all three titles you mentioned are French (linguistically; in other words, Franco-phone).

I'm honestly not sure what is meant by "comic": do you mean anything drawn in panels telling a story, or does it need to be at least an entire page long?

If you include newspaper comics or comic strips (what some people call the "funnies" or the "funny pages" ) then the answer would be American — since that's where I grew up, so the newspaper would always provide them.

But from this thread, I'm guessing that "comics" in the question refers to longer works, what are also called "graphic novels." For those… I haven't read any American ones, ever (I've seen / read experts, and that is it, so I don't think that counts, and even if they did, that began several years after I was introduced to manga). Growing up, I read a few European comics — my parents were big on making sure my siblings and I knew at least a little French, since we live in the Northeast and have relatives in France (not to mention my parents both being Francophiles, we all are actually) — so there were some French comics lying around, although I don't remember much about those (reading foreign comics is harder than reading foreign sentences, so… not having understood much, I don't really remember much either; I only learnt enough to understand them long after my elder brother had accidentally ruined them thanks to a leaky radiator). (Actually, they could have been from another Francophone country —which could mean anywhere in the world— but the biggest source of them is Europe and that's also where almost all of the French books in my house are from. So I'm guessing that's where they came from? One of the few thing I remember about them is the art style which was right for that source. ) After that (in 5th or 6th grade; I was either 11 or 12, I think), I read a translation of an Italian comic. That same year, I was introduced to manga… and instantly became addicted to East Asian comics (isn't that pretty much the case for all of us? ).

My first encounter with East Asian graphic novels came when my elder brother introduced me to some manga (Japanese), which stared me on manga in general. Later, browsing around, I introduced myself to manhua/Chinese and manhwa/Korean (I don't remember which came first), then Thai, and finally Indonesian.

Last edited by blackluna at 12:14 am, Jan 8 2024

Like blackluna, I was kind of confused about whether "comics" would include comic strips, because when I was a kid it was still during the time when people would usually get print newspapers, and my sister and I always fought over the comics, so that would definitely be first for me.

If we're talking about multi-page works though, it would still be American because I have a vague memory of when I was little (somewhere between kindergarten and 2nd grade) after school going with my mom to a convenience store after school sometimes and getting these Scooby Doo comic books they had there. I think maybe there were other comics there too, but I don't remember what they were and if I read them.

In either case, that puts me squarely in "American".

Probably Chinese, Old Master Q (Or better known as Lao Fu Zi/老夫子), but then again, reading some of the comments here, I did grow up with others like Tintin, etc

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I think first comic I read was European. It was from newspaper I used to read when I was kid.

European. Russian Disney comics.

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I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
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