My Dad wasn't interested in my comics at all. He would mention that he read comics as a kid. Not regularly, but my Grandpa worked for the Union Pacific and he'd bring home comics that were left on the passenger trains. He wasn't really opposed to me reading them though. He was, however, a big fan of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. So we would watch them whenever there were reruns on.

My dad was an Asterix fan and later enjoyed Achille Talon. I think he had fun reading Les dingodossiers and Lucky Luke as well (being a Goscinny fan and all), but overall he wasn't much of a comics fan. 

Nevertheless, he always encouraged my sister and I to read and comics were fine by him. Thanks to him and my mom, we grew up in a house filled with books. I never realized until much, much later that my family didn't have much money (we kids were always shielded from any mention of pecuniary uncertainty), but one thing's certain : there would be no cost-cutting as far as books went. We could choose one comic each come every payday, and made frequent trips to the public library. 

My father never commented on my collection of American comic-books either; never suggested that I should go out more. He even accepted to read the Thomas/Smith adaptation of Red Nails (published by Les Humanoïdes associés). 

We never bonded over comics, but then neither do my sons and I... it must be one of those generation-skipping things. 

I can point to my father for several of my nerdy obsessions like my love of Star Wars, Star Trek and Lord of the Rings, but also my love of comics. I can remember us taking a road trip when I was four years old and him buying me a jumbo-sized Justice League coloring book that felt bigger than me. He bought me the entire run of The Shadow War of Hawkman and told me that it would be worth something someday (he's not wrong, yes the comics are not worth anything from a money standpoint, but their value to me is priceless). The foundation of my comics collection are the random books he either bought for me, or gave to me out of his own meager collection. They inform a lot of what I still love to read 30 years later, those old Batman, All-Star Squadron, Hawkman, Star Trek and Star Wars comics.

My dad never showed any interest in comics, but a few months ago when I was showing him the comic books I had on my android tablet he said that he liked reading old comics from when he was a kid. So I put some old Superman & Batman comics on his tablet and he actually read them! When I was growing up reading and collecting comics he never said anything to me about ever liking comic books. Strange.

My father and mother forbade them without explanation, even though my mother had bought me and my brother two of them in 1963. Every so often they would find a comic, get rid of it and restate the policy. I ignored it and just became more clever.

My grandmother (father's mother) enabled me, alllowing me to keep a stash of comics at her house.

I continued to defy the edict and sneaked comics into the house in my coat sleeves, under my shirt and in schoolbooks. They knew I had stacks hidden somewhere, but chose not to make an issue of it until just after I turned 15, when after a bad year in school, my mother took out my big box of comics from the bottom of my closet (This was in June, 1969, so you can imagine the gems that were in there.), and angrily tore each one in half, forcing me to do the same. I tried to convince myself that she was right, that I was too old for these and that I deserved to be punished (the destruction of my comics was only part of the penalty), and that this would help to make me the mature, successful student I was supposed to be. That's how you do things in a cultlike atmosphere: recognize your sinfulness, accept your guilt, offer it up, and loathe yourself.

I began sneaking comics into the house just as quickly as I could after lying low for a bit.

Soon enough they gave up or just didn't realize what I was doing. That happens a lot in a large dysfunctional (euphemism) family. Had the comic-tearing ever been brought up again, I would have been expected to laugh it off as part of family lore or risk being thought overly sensitive or unaware of what an asshole I really was. Not that it was ever mentioned.

Denial, as they say, ain't just a river in Africa.

The first part of this is cribbed from the obituary I posted at CBR almost five years ago:

The first comics I ever saw were read to me by my dad. The Sunday comics sections of the Newark News and the Newark Star-Ledger were the beginning of my interest in comics. He particularly identified with Dagwood Bumstead in those days. I found out later that he'd been a big comics fan in the 1930s; back then his favorite was the intrepid pilot Tailspin Tommy. Dad always denied it, but I still suspect that my brother Tom is subliminally named after Tailspin Tommy.

He was 12 when Superman made his debut, and he and his friends read and traded comic books for the next five years. But the world got in the way - he was 16 when Pearl Harbor was attacked. They made him wait until he was 17 to join the Marines, and contrary to what I've read about comics during the war, he says he never saw one while he was in the service.

After the war he didn't pay much attention to comics that I know of. He did try to start a comic strip once - there was a really popular morning radio show in Pittsburgh, and the host had a handful of recurring characters. Dad drew up some sample strips of one of them, a tiny Venusian named Omicron, and brought them to the radio host hoping that they could get the strip into the local paper. The radio guy decided that it was better to let listeners imagine Omicron for themselves. A decade or more later, Dad still had the sketchbook with his preliminary Omicron sketches; I remember seeing it when I was a kid. That sketchbook seems to be gone now, or at least I haven't found it among the papers he left behind.

When I started reading comic books, he was very supportive. He may have been the one who encouraged me to try one initially; I don't recall which of my parents did that. But I do remember that he would read them to me and with me in the beginning. Later, when I was clearly enthralled by Marvel comics at the height of the Silver Age, he would copy my favorite characters from a comic book page onto cardboard, color them and cut them out, making some primitive "action figures". I still have those (the ones that survived) and will cherish them for the rest of my life.

I think my parents expected me to grow out of comic books some day, but they let me pursue my interest. A few years later, Dad went thru a "born-again" phase, and got a job with a religious publishing company called Logos. The folks at Logos saw the success that their rivals were having with Spire Christian Comics, and decided to publish some comics of their own. When their first two comic books came off the press, Dad brought them home and asked my opinion as a comics aficionado. Unfortunately for Logos, their comics were produced by Tony Tallarico, who was considered by many to be one of the worst artists ever. I was too polite to tell Dad that his company's comics sucked, so I said something like, "they're not really up to contemporary standards in comic art." To illustrate the point, I gave him a handful of recent comics that had what I considered really good art. Unfortunately for me, one of them was Dr. Strange #1. When his co-workers saw the book's subtitle, "Master of the Mystic Arts", that meant only one thing to them - Satan! I did have enough sense not to give him an issue of Son of Satan, but I didn't think enough about Dr. Strange. My original point about the art was lost in his colleagues' concern about my soul. Dad knew me well enough that he wasn't worried, and this blew over soon. Logos published a total of four comic books and lost their shirts on all of them. The owners of Logos turned out not to practice what they preached, and Dad's disillusionment brought his born-again phase to an end, although he remained a Christian and in retirement he became a beloved storyteller to the children at his church.

In his last years, I gave him a couple of comic-related gifts - a replica Tailspin Tommy pulp magazine and a collection of another aviation strip, Smilin' Jack. He was tickled to see them again but the actual stories weren't as thrilling as they had been in the 1930s. At that point he was on dialysis up to 18 hours a day, so there wasn't much energy left for fun. His kidneys gave out first, then his heart. He left us a few weeks after his 86th birthday, in October 2011.