Once upon time, there were two sisters. One day, one sister admitted to the other that lately she had been reading about the X-Men on Wikipedia, and was very intrigued by the saga she encountered. The other sister immediately divulged her time-wasting hobby of reading about the Avengers on Wikipedia. (Blood is thicker than water, right?) Seredipitously, all this happened in the middle of Booksamillion, one aisle over from the comic books. So they sidled on over to the comics while trying to appear like they were actually looking at the Twilight aisle. (Twilight is dumb, y'all. But compelling. Codependency much, Bells?) Thus came our encounter with Our First Issue.
Really, we have to give credit to Greg Land for getting us into comics. Because, you see, we chose Our First Issue based on the cover. The cover of Uncanny X-Men #509, with Psylocke/Kwannon on the front. She was a girl! She was wearing purple! There was even a butterfly on half her head! It was a sign that comics were girl-friendly, and it was all we needed. Dear, brave Natalie darted down and grabbed the bent-spined copy of Number 509.
"Hmm," we thought. "Let's look at it a little bit." So we huddled around the Twilight shelf, shielding 509 from view while turned pages and tried to make sense of the story. We didn't have much success figuring out what was going on, but we did notice that the dude on page 3 was hot. But he was gay? And Canadian?! Whoa, comic books are a lot more serious and society-conscious than we thought they were. Ten pages in, we looked at each other.
"Do you wanna split it? I'll give you two fifty if you take it to the register," I offered.
"Deal." So Natalie, again being more brave than me, bought it.
And we were hooked. I read that thing probably 10 or 15 different times while I got up the courage to visit a local comic store. But that's another story, you guys.
