Biscuits or crisps, biscuits or crisps..I can never decide.
I suppose I live a fairly normal existence these days, eat work, sleep, repeat. I live next to the beach in Ayrshire, Scotland, a little south of Glasgow. ‘Adventure, excitement; a Jedi craves not these things!
Comic wise, I suppose I started early with weekly escapes into books like ‘The Spectacular Spiderman’ and ‘The Incredible Hulk’. I still own a full set of high quality prints from 1974 by Lopez Espi (Hulk, Spiderman, Captain America, Ironman, Thor and Daredevil) which I have framed and have recently given pride of place on my living room walls. Whoops giving away my age a bit there…doh! It was the DC heroes which really captivated me though and I still to this day keep the softest spot in my heart for Ollie, Barry, Hal and friends.
I was soon sidetracked in 1977 with the release of Star Wars and spent my pocket money on the Star Wars comic; until that is I joined the comic revolution. Other papery things were landing on the newsagent’s shelf, papery things which were both violent and absorbing, and which credited kids with intelligence; and it was a very British revolution. I’m talking of course of 2000AD and it’s imitators like Starlord. Anti-heroes like Judge Dredd drawn by incredible artists like Esquerra and Bolland were suddenly essential reading for me and I lapped them up.
The revolution soon spread to America and Marvel and DC were suddenly hiring new talent from across the Atlantic and revamping their books and characters…comics started being cool, not just gentle Saturday morning escapism for kids who crammed them in between episodes of ‘Casey Jones’ and ‘The Virginian’. Comics began to grow up with their readers, and the readers, like me, decided to stop putting down childish things and embraced the new masters. Writers like Frank Miller, Grant Morrison and Alan Moore have taken comics onto another level with books like ‘Watchmen’ or brushed off old heroes like ‘Animal Man’ and ‘Doom Patrol’ and have breathed new life into them.
Recently I’ve enjoyed Kevin Smith’s resurrection of Green Arrow and his work on Daredevil was … well visionary. Very recently though I’ve been enjoying ‘The All New Atom’, the new ‘Blue Beetle’, ‘Antman’ (the irredeemable one!) and Deadpool is always a great read. I’ve also been following the ‘Civil War’, ‘52’, and ‘Countdown’, although all these crossovers and alternative realities are getting quite confusing and I hope that DC especially will get back soon to writing good solid adventures with a beginning and an end as I worry that all this tinkering in the past and tweaking of parallel worlds will eventually stomp all over classic storylines like ‘The Killing Joke’ in the same way that they have done with ‘Infinite Crisis’ (the clue was in the title there I guess), and ‘The Omac Project’. If I was cynical (who me) I would say that the whole thing has been developed to sell multiple books at the expense (literally) of the fans.
Ohhh I nearly forgot, I also recently tracked down a few issues of Glen Danzig’s (yup, he of the Misfits fame), ‘Jaguar God’ book which are fabby and well worth hunting down, and I completed my Neil Gaiman (he can do no wrong) collection with the ‘Harlequin Valentine’ graphic novel.
Log in to comment