I've been thinking about my first comic book purchase and how it shaped my 42 yr. old collecting habits to this day.   I was 8 or 9 when I remember buying my first comic with my own money...an issue of HOT STUFF at a local pharmacy.  From there it was a 25 cent giant BATMAN (with Mirror Batman).  But it was a few years later when I discovered MARVEL TALES & WORLD'S GREATEST COMICS  (reprinting Amazing Spidey and FF respectivley) made me realize a bunch of characters were inhabiting the same universe!  Spider-Man became my fave and my first regular issue was AMAZING 144.

Looking back, Hot Stuff made me like things cartoony: Carl Barks & Peter Bagge (at the opposite ends of the spectrum but still "cartoony")

Mirror Batman: anything silly and weird; which is...a lot of stuff really!

Spider-Man:  Why I still buy his titles today. (A hopeless romantic!)

I started in 1972...I'm 44 now, so, that would've been around 11 or so.

Some of the first books I bought were FF #128 (the first I think), Iron Man #54, Hulk #157, MTU #7, Amazing Spidey #118, Avengers #105

The first X Book I bought was...#79 I believe (remember they were in REPRINTS then!)..the one with the Cobalt Man...

THe X Men confused the HECK out of me at the time...cause the Beast was...Hairy AND Smooth (in the reprints), and ...they kept switching costumes on them! Often using the ORIGINAL Blue & Yellow ones...
e.g.  the used the "Newer" ones in Avengers #110-111, the "Older" in Capt Amer #172-175 & Hulk #172 and almost NONE AT ALL(!) in MTU #4

It was in 5th grade where I started collecting my own.  Before that I swiped my older brother's.  When possible I would beg, borrow and steal rides to a little place here in Des Moines called The Comiclogue.  The owner Ken, could be a huge jerk, but he was always super nice to me, even though he generally hated childeren as a rule.  I think I always tried to be very careful and coureous and always bought.  I went there pretty regularly till I was about 17 and a shop opened much closer to me that gave me free bags and boards.  That was Dragon Fire comics.  The owners were super nice.  Of course I also had Comics Plus that a friend of mine owned, but their selection wasn't quite a varied. 

When I couldn't get to a shop, I picked up comics at Waldenbooks back in the elementry school years, which is where I buy most of my individual issues today.  Full circle.

I can't remember when or where or what my first comic was, but my earliest memories of comics were cutting up issues of FANTASTIC FOUR and AMAZING SPIDER-MAN with scissors back in the mid-to-late 70's!  I'd cut out the figures and then create my own stories.  I don't know how many comics I destroyed this way, but when I was about nine or ten I discovered tracing paper, and then I could actually save the comics to read again!

When I started buying them myself I had to frequent several places, because each store had different comics.  Between weekly trips to the grocery store a few miles away with mom, I would pedal my bike to the couple places around town to pick up the rest.

Damn, those were fun times...

I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. When I first started buying new comics in 1979, I got them from a spinner rack at Osko Drugs (sic, it was a small local family-owned chain) at 72nd and Maple Street and sometimes at Keystone Drugs at about 74th and Maple. Most supermarkets carried comics at that time, so I occasionally talked my mom into buying one for me at the checkout stand.

In 1981 or so, I discovered a comic shop called Dragon's Lair a few miles away from my house (83rd and Blondo) where I walked every week for most of my teen years. That shop is still there, has expanded considerably over the years, and to my knowledge still has the same owner.