Asterix and Tintin helped me learn to read, and I still love both series today. Along the way I started reading American-style comic books, perhaps initially to stave off the boredom as my mother browsed in used bookstores, though I came to love them too - Uncle Scrooge, Moby Duck and several UFO and supernatural crockumentary books at first.
I kind of got out of touch with comics for a while until in my early teems the classic Bill Sienkevitch covers of New Mutents #17 and 18 caught my eye, and I was instantly hooked. I had read some superhero comics before and they never really interested me, but the New Mutants and the X-Men where actually characters with personalities and troubles outside of battling villains. Chris Claremont, Bill Sienkevitch and Arthur Adams are largely responsible for my consumption of superhero books to this day, though the form has suffered a lot of dilution since then. There are still great reads to be found in comic form to this day, but fewer of them are cape rags.
Another notable moment in my history with comics came from the once-great electronics surplus store Active Surplus, on Queen Street in Toronto. Toronto had some great comic stores, and indeed there was a Silver Snail store just a block from Active Surplus, but the surplus store for a few months had a huge stock of used comics for dirt cheap - like 10 to 25 cents per issue, and that tempted me to experiment with the large number of indie or small-studio books I found therein. A few of those weird-seeming books are still favorites of mine today: Mars, E-Man, Zooniverse, American Flagg and others.
Presented for my reference when shopping so I don't buy too many duplicates, here is the list of all the issues and trade paperbacks I have. Click on a series to show the list of issues.