EDITORIAL: My Life in Comics: Part 1

(c) John Swindells http://www.flickr.com/photos/swindejr/

I love comics. There, I said it. I’m a geek, and proud. I grew up with comics, but in the British tradition. I first bought a copy of Buster comic at age 5, for a paltry 20p, and then bullied my parents into getting it added to the newspaper delivery every week for years. I couldn’t even read at that point, and comic strips like Cliffhanger, X Ray Specs, Faceache and Buster himself replaced my old Enid Blyton books as the bedtime story of choice. As I grew and developed, Buster taught me how to read. I could sort of tell what they were saying from the pictures, and as I learned new letters and sounds (no phonics in those days) I could begin to piece together a story.

I was hooked. Comics had everything: Excitement! Jokes! Slapstick! Exclamation marks at the end of every sentence! There was even a gateway drug comic strip to get older kids hooked on grown-up comics in The Leopard of Lime Street.

From then on, my reading widened and broadened, becoming the top reader in my class at school (I was so far ahead of the class that I was allowed to choose my own books from the tiny school library. Once I came back with a guide to the European Common Market because it contained – yes – comics.)
I began reading everything I could get my hands on. The three-panel strips in my dad’s Daily Mirror, a bumper pile of Roy of the Rovers mags from a school fete (even though I had no interest in football) and well-meaning relatives would buy me Beano summer specials, even though I was a Buster fan (It’d be like buying a Man Utd fan a Man City shirt, and vice versa. I still read them though). The anarchic OINK! served my purile, disgusting sense of humour, and I even got my sister to create a strip for me – The surprisingly good Thing’m’jig, about an alien with deelyboppers who lived with a little boy.

Sadly, it was very clear to me that I couldn’t draw. Not even a straight line. Never have, probably never will. This saddened me, and as I realised that I would never be able to draw my own comic, I let my enthusiasm wane. I soon grew apart from my comics, as school dictated that I read ‘proper’ books.
A fallow period began, punctuated only by the few pages of comics in my beloved Red Dwarf Smegazine. It would last until my tenure in the now-defunct Ottakars, a delightful chain bookshop in which I was entrusted with the Graphic Novels section. I immersed myself in them and was soon hooked again. I’ve never been much for superheroes, but Batman was lovely and violent, and Spiderman zippy and witty, so I read all I could. I longed for something a bit more…crazy.

And then I met Spider Jerusalem.

To be continued...

Editorial is a series of posts from StoryWorld Editors, containing random thoughts and musings. All views are our own, and please leave a comment below.