My first memories of comics date from around 1970. I must have read nursery comics before then – or had them read to me – but, like many Brits, I find
The Beano lurking at the start of my memory lane. My favourite strip was
The Bash Street Kids, by the remarkable Leo Baxendale, but my favourite artist was Robert Nixon, who had taken over
Roger the Dodger from Ken Reid.
I would later follow Nixon over to IPC (or Fleetway, or whatever the company was called that week), and strips like
Kid Kong for the likes of
Shiver and Shake and
Whizzer and Chips.
Adventure comics at the time were dominated by television adaptations. The finest in my young days was
Countdown, later renamed
TV Action, and I was particularly taken by the artwork of Gerry Haylock on
UFO and
Doctor Who.
It wasn’t until a dying
TV21 was swallowed by
Valiant that I encountered the original characters now associated with 1970s British comics, like
The Steel Claw, Kelly’s Eye, or my favourite,
Janus Stark.
By the time
2000AD started up, I felt that I was too old for comics, so it was with guilty pleasure that I picked up the occasional issue. A few years later, and more secure in my tastes, I bought up a complete run to date from a younger boy.
But I hadn’t given up comics completely in the meantime. The hardbound volumes of
Astérix were much more respectable than the British weeklies, and Albert Uderzo’s artwork appealed to me enormously (as did René Goscinny’s writing, although at the time I tended to attribute all virtue to the artist). I soon ran out of the English translations, and started struggling through my older brother’s copies of the French editions, whose British distributor used to enclose notes explaining all the French puns and cultural references.
And there were also newspaper strips. My father preferred the
Daily Mirror, my mother the
Daily Express or
Daily Mail, so I was exposed to a range of strips from
Andy Capp to
Garth to
Fred Bassett.
There were also the political cartoonists: Keith Waite, Cummings and Mac in those three papers, and, best of all, Trog (Wally Fawkes) in
The Observer and
Punch.
(The original of that portrait of British Prime Minister Ted Heath would have been in colour, but I have scanned it from the 1977 black and white collection,
The World of Trog.)
What of American comic books and superheroes? To tell the truth, I wasn’t impressed. To be sure, I hadn’t seen them at their best, but in the weekly editions put out by Marvel UK. What had been intended as a single issue in America would have been chopped nonsensically into three or four parts to be read separately. In addition, the colour would be missing, and the artwork blown up to about half as big again as the intended size (and possibly “bodged” to fit a different shape of page), leaving it looking empty and crude.
It wasn’t until I missed a bus in 1981, and bought a US comic on a whim to pass the time, that I engaged with the real thing. The comic was
Justice League of America 195, the first part of a JSA/JLA team-up by Gerry Conway and George Perez. I was instantly taken with the idea of Earth-2 and its 60-something Superman.
After a few months trying to cope with the seemingly random distribution of US comics to British newsagents, someone told me about specialist comic shops. So, during the 1980s, I was able to eat up Frank Miller’s
Daredevil and
Dark Knight Returns, Warrior, with its remarkable starting line-up of
Marvelman, V for Vendetta and
Laser Eraser & Pressbutton, Eddie Campbell’s
Alec, Love & Rockets, Levitz and Giffen’s
Legion of Super-Heroes, American Flagg, Escape, Watchmen … in short, I had joined the mainstream of English-language comics culture; where I am still paddling a quarter of a century later.
In a bold move, the inaugural issue of DC’s new series Countdown is set not on New Earth but on the hitherto unexplored world of Earth-21, which appears to be inhabited mainly by characters from British television series of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In a radical story-telling move, the issue is split into short, almost fragmentary episodes, augmented by fake articles with titles like “Towards 2000” (is that what we are counting down to?). Cleverly, DC have not only hired John M Burns, a veteran of comics of the period, but have found artists capable of mimicking to the last brush stroke the work of his contemporaries Gerry Haylock and Harry Lindfield, among others.
