I try and make my posts so that I am adding something to people's knowledge of comics or a way of grabbing some more information to add to mine and I hope that in the main my posts either entertain or educate or even both at times.
My love for comics has been with me since I can remember. While I am not quite old enough to remember the Big Five, my brothers and I had our own version with Wizard, Warlord, Hotspur and Victor making their weekly visitation with Commando rounding the month off nicely. So no real surprise that I am a dyed in the wool DCT fan, but IPC put their temptation in our way and we read Battle, Action, 2000AD and the odd other comic. Very rarely can I say that I have met a comic that I didn't like.
I have dallied with the US comics, but men from another planet and invincible? Come on! Bites from radioactive spiders I could just about deal with and rather dodgy lab experiments could get by at a push as well, but the whole US genre was never something that I could relate to living in rural Scotland where the Broons and Oor Wullie weren't inventions of R D Low, but us and our neighbours! And we used the Doric so we didn't need anyone to tell us that The Broons wur awa' neeping, as we would do that as well!
Watching the comics fade away one by one was saddening for me as they were my childhood friends leaving me all alone, but I held tightly onto the Annuals and to this day I still have all my Warlord annuals! I read phoenix's post as he listed the demise of the comics year by year and it amazed me that I could list those dates in my head without reference to any source material.
Reading the same comics now that I read as a child is an amazing experience as it is the only time-travelling device found so far that can actually take you back 30 or so years. I can remember places where I read them and what I was doing before and after. There are few items as evocative of memory as your childhood comics.
The commentary on social change astounds me as when we look at the stories (Alf Tupper, Twisty, Look Out For Lefty, Tasker, Dozy Danny and many more) with the idea that having a dysfunctional family (Aunt Meg, Twisty's uncle, Lefty's Grandad) was not considered as a good thing, whereas now, it not only is accepted, but treated as something to be pitied and cured. The idea of people sleeping rough only (a device used in most of the stories mentioned) goes to show how much the more things change, the more they stay the same. (Current stats for homeless are 95000, whereas in 1966, it was 11000)
It's also interesting to look around the homes of these characters. Few had phones or cars. No-one ever had a computer. Their idea of a playstation was the compendium set of 100 games at Christmas!
Wow, what a monster post and I haven't even said anything about how my perception of comics has changed over the years! I think I'll leave that to another post. Perhaps my 2000th!
Oh well, that's out the window as an excuse now, no more revising for at least a year!
