This is the second in a series of five posts about comics that made an impact on me growing up. I'm not talking about anything I worked on as a professional, but books I bought that influenced me as a creator and as a person. You've just gotta love a George Peréz cover, don't you? I certainly did.
This was the first issue of DC's Dial H For Hero that caught my eye. I remember buying it at a Barney's grocery store. There was something just so interesting about the six colorful heroes on the cover. I read it and enjoyed it, and then I went back and bought all the back issues I could find. Fortunately, they weren't highly in demand, so a lot of them were in the quarter bins.
The cool thing about Dial H was that the fans created the heroes and the heroes. Chris King and Vicki Grant became a different hero very time they used their power dials, and they fought against an ever changing roster of villains. Every hero that appeared had a credit listing the creator, their ages (many were younger than me!) and where they were from. And then they got a t-shirt, too.[image src="http://thomz.com/blogall/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/adventurecomics.jpg" align="left" border="image_border" link="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401226485/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1401226485&linkCode=as2&tag=thozahartstu-20&linkId=5PQKWMZ6ECYDDCUO" alt="" title="" lightbox="false" ]
So, I traced the John Buscema bodies from How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way and started creating hero after hero. I remember creating a hero based on the Executioner, Bruce Wayne's pre-Batman identity, from Superboy. I remember a Queen of Hearts character, a gold and green lady and a hero with a car. Along the way, I also created a shape shifter called Any-Body.
[image src="http://thomz.com/blogall/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/anybody.jpg" align="left" border="image_border" link="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401226485/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1401226485&linkCode=as2&tag=thozahartstu-20&linkId=5PQKWMZ6ECYDDCUO" alt="" title="" lightbox="false" ]
Years later, in The New Adventures of Superboy #35, Any-Body appeared. I could have used that issue for this as well, but this is the issue that launched me on that path. It was the first time a character I created saw print and my first contribution to a comic book universe. I'd want more.