Untold Tales From A West Reading Comic Collectors' Community - Part Two B: A New Dawn
UNTOLD TALES FROM A WEST READING COMIC COLLECTORS’ COMMUNITY
Part Two B: A New Dawn
Welcome to Part Two B, whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Marveldom….
Captain’s log, 1973. Myself and first officer, And Y Dee, start to explore our sector on a form of transport appropriate for the era, a relatively scarce commodity for the particular demographic we represent. Our chariots are powered by rotational pedal devices that required a significant, lower limb, pump action to operate. Thus, we boldly go, departing our base amidst split infinitives, cycling mile after mile on our identically sparkling, green and light brown machines.
As that summer drew to a close, our collectors’ community was yet to come together. Far, far worse, and almost to a level of cosmic absurdity despite the greatest of endeavours that could arguably outshine those of the few that were owed so much by so many, I was still a US Marvel virgin. The same was true for Andy D, my school mate, current best bud and the only local collector I knew. For a while now, we had been mainlining on nothing but an ever-increasing supply of Marvel weeklies. However, these were not enough. Like hardened junkies, we needed a new and better fix: in this case, the original American all colour comics. Sadly, they were proving impossible to acquire and as hard as we looked, as far as we looked, and as distant as we travelled, we just could not find them.
We scoured our neighbourhood. We moved out to the adjacent ones. We extended our radius to include the entirety of our suburbs; and then adjoining suburbs; and further afield; and beyond; and over the whole of western Reading, and Tilehurst and Norcot; and thence to the villages further afield; and eastwards too, to those distant edges of the town. Every newsagent we found, we checked. Every viable shop was probed and explored. There were some along the Oxford Road, we were convinced, behind their blackened windows and signs forbidding under eighteens, that held the magazines of our dreams. Of course, we were correct in this assumption, but just a few years out.
Beyond these bounds, we were less comfortable navigating, less familiar with the warren of roads and network of neighbourhoods. But still, it was a very large area to check week in and week out, in whatever weather and with absolute determination. And as we grew increasingly frustrated by the lack of colour in our UK marvels, onwards we sought. Surely, one fateful day, we would be rewarded and our endeavours would unearth that proverbial pirates’ chest of all colour US originals?
Nope. Nada. Zippo. Zilch. Diddly-squat. Nothing. Ever. And on this went, week after week, usually within our five-mile radius. We begrudgingly came to the realisation that, unlike the relatively scarce but nevertheless available DCs, they were just not distributed in our area. Call it false optimism, or obsession, or even a kind of madness for repeating the same activity without ever changing the outcome, but we persisted.
One day, we ended up in Pangbourne, one of these aforementioned villages to the west of Reading and a good four miles from home. Here we discovered some Alan Class black and white reprints in a newsagent-come-general store. They were just a couple of modest Astonishing Stories, but we each bought one. Mine had Giant Man and X-Men tales which were strangely new and exotic fodder to my malnourished eyes, fed as they were on the strict diet of weeklies. However, a panacea it wasn’t - that itch was not satisfied. But we felt that it was a further sign, that the wind was about to change direction.
Skip forward to the latter eighties. It was just such a similar find, in this case a lonesome comic on a newsagent shelf, that saw my rebirth as a collector. After several years of inactivity, this single comic, Thor 318, rekindled those dormant passions. It was a chance discovery, spotted as my wife and I pit-stopped a short way inland from the coast, before we commenced our journey back home. I bought it on an impulse. Back in the car, gently, almost reverently, I held it to my nose and took it in. That tantalising, musty aroma, what a joy it was. It invoked wonderful memories from my teenage years, when I would likewise come across random, but far more significant comics, nestling on a rack or shelf of a newsagent – and sniff; or when the proprietor brought out a wrapped bundle of the latest monthly shipment and open it before me – and inhale; or the journey back home from a London mart with forty or more hard fought for back issues – and breathe them all in, one at a time. Old habits, I guess. However, from then on, I could never recapture that sheer enjoyment of acquiring a US Marvel.
Rewind once again to 1973, when we were yet to discover those exhilarating experiences, to the end of the summer and the return to school. Literally within minutes of arriving and taking my seat in the classroom, I was met with news that shook my foundations. A close school friend, though not one that had any interest in superheroes or comics, told us how he had been on holiday abroad.
Screeeeeeeeeeech.
Abroad!!!!!!!!!!!!! ?
What the hell was abroad? Who went abroad? No one went abroad. My parents could barely afford the occasional weekend in Wales (Dad liked mountains) and, in leaner years, we were lucky to get a couple of daytrips to Hayling Island. Note: it had a really nice sandy beach back then which was subsequently neglected and has long since washed away. Sigh.
Second note: I have fond memories of the one-hundred-and-twenty-mile round trip, passing by extensive road building and ginormous earthwork vehicles that looked like something out of Thunderbirds with wheels higher than our car. Anderson fuelled fantasies – sigh. And, by the way, those works would later become the M3.
Third note: our cars didn’t have built in sound systems, or even radios, so dad would drive and mum would sit in the passenger seat beside him, holding a battery powered radio on her lap, and by revolving it, try to maintain a decent signal for Radio 2 (musically acceptable), Radio 3 (jeez, Dad, really) or Radio 4 (almost as bad). This was tricky as we followed the often winding, invariably two-lane A or B roads, down to the coast. The only motorway in our vicinity was the M4, not that it went in the right direction for a visit to the seaside, and it didn’t even reach Reading anyway, petering out fifteen miles east at the edge of Maidenhead. On the plus side, it did afford a great deal of excitement for a young boy’s imagination as it approached London with its elevated section that rose high over, back then, a sea of almost entirely two storey houses and independent commercial establishments.
Fourth note: where was Radio One, you might think? Maybe Capital? Or any other local radio? Well, though FM had been invented, it wasn’t common on affordable transistor devices such as ours. These were limited to medium or long wave. The latter hosted these interminable excreta, with the more palatable offerings residing on medium wave. Sadly, radio stations such as Caroline or Luxembourg which tended to live on medium, were quite hard to pick up, let alone maintain a good signal, even at the best of times, which was usually in periods of better weather or in the darker hours. Furthermore, for our household, though the Beeb had the monopoly, pop radio was not in our charts. Or, rather, my dad’s. He hated it. He could just about tolerate musical theatre, a passion of my mother’s, but his tastes inclined more towards the classical and, for me, horror of horrors, opera. Witness another Charlie Brown moment.
Fifth note: still more or less hate opera to this day. Have similar feelings towards ballet, another passion of my mum’s which dominated many evenings. These were times when one should find greater satisfaction watching the box rather than a younger sister, pouting and sulking, but nevertheless toeing the line, or tipping on toes, across the lounge floor as she was forced to rehearse ad nauseum for the next ballet competition. Is it no wonder that we both rebelled a few years later, she becoming a teenage prima donna and me picking up guitar with delusions of rock grandeur before punk became an all-consuming game-changer.
Sixth note: in retrospect, my mum and dad were snobs. Beeb boobs. This covered all household media, both radio and TV. So, what about ITV, you may ask, the only other, generally available, alternative to BBC One? Though BBC Two was airing, even into the early seventies it was still a rarity, requiring a more expensive and specialist telly. But when it came to that commercial television channel, apart from the odd exception, not a chance after 6pm. My dad frowned on their dramas and sitcoms: too bawdy, the language too ripe. Or, in plain English, too crude and rude. My school friend, the one who had returned from distant shores bringing foundation-shaking news, was just one of many peers who would regale me with tales of the previous evening’s viewing I had been denied. Particularly sour for me were their descriptions of those Dracula, or Frankenstein, or Werewolf films. (I never admitted that these films were actually shown after my enforced bed time).
It was this cultural abuse, this genre denial, this supplication at the altar of suffocating Catholic abstinence that fed the flames from which my phoenix-like geekdom arose. Another side effect was that it also propelled me to seek out contemporary music, another commodity that had been censored. The nearest to anything remotely like pop music we were permitted was Radio Two’s Junior Choice with Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart on Saturday mornings; and the only record I owned was a LP of Children’s Favourites, given by a friend of my mum’s when I was ten. Talk about unfair: my sister received a Dairy Milk dispensing toy, complete with little bars of chocolate – I was so jealous. As for that God-forsaken LP, the only song of note was The Runaway Train, which came down the track, and she blew, blew, blew, blew, blew, blew.
Strike three for Charlie: aaugh!
Had I noticed then that it was sung by Jon Pertwee, maybe I would have been more gracious. How about that, serenaded by my favourite Doctor Who! As for the other tracks? Music for Pleasure, it said on the album cover. Yeah, like what kid at my ripe young age would gain any enjoyment from The Ugly Duckling or Three Little Fishes (credibility wipe-out for Jon who also sang this one). Puh-lease, maybe half a life time ago, when I was five or so. Yeah, maybe then.
So, I hated that vinyl abortion with its orange glove puppet lion festooning its cover. In my sad, naïve, uneducated way, if it had to be a LP, I dreamed that my mum’s friend, a sweet Polish student girl, had given me The Planets by Gustav Holst instead. It was not that I liked the music. Actually, I had no idea what it was like. I had never heard it before. It was just that the only albums I saw were those advertised in black and white by classical mail order clubs, often Readers Digest, in the Observer newspaper on Sundays. Nestled amongst those small pictures of covers was that of The Planets, resplendent with its star strewn space scape, and it looked really cool to my eyes. Geek plankton for an interstellar whale calf.
The same way that genre starvation was a lynchpin in launching my comic collecting career, our similarly force-fed staple of bland muzak and highbrow classical led to a second wave that would overwhelm my love of Marvel and superheroes and replace it with music: the listening to, the acquisition of and the making by way of electric guitar. This would not happen for a few years yet, and it would begin gradually. And it would see my collection of over one thousand comics, if you include the English Marvels, sold off to fund my new interests.
I suppose it was inevitable, and I can pinpoint one event that precipitated this change. The following year, an older female cousin came to stay with us for a week. She brought along some Elton John LPs and they received heavy rotation on our stereogram. We all enjoyed listening to them – me, my two sisters, our mum and maybe even our fuhrer father. This dip into the mainstream initiated the decline of our Holy Roman Empire.
When our cousin left, after a period of insistent nagging from my sister who was an Osmonds devotee, my dad succumbed, the wall came down, and we were allowed to watch Top of the Pops. A short while later, capitalising on this apparent softening, as and when I could prise him away from his beloved Radio Three, I would borrow the recently replaced radio and search for new sounds. We now had FM, so my choice broadened and my selections were reliable. Radio One, Capital Radio, Caroline and Luxembourg became firm favourites.
My musical education had begun, though my tastes and sense of direction were ill-defined to start. By the mid-seventies I had veered more to the rock end of the spectrum. With varying degrees of failure, I tried to emulate my heroes on an old nylon strung acoustic I had learned for about six months as a ten-year-old. All I could remember now was On Top of Old Smokey and Froggy Went A-Courtin’. Dammit, no rock god fodder there, then. Curious note and definitely not serendipity: this last song also sung by Jon Pertwee on my nightmare LP.
Rorschach: “Hurm.”
Rorschach: “Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains...”
When we came back to school in that September of 1973, my travelled friend, whose father was an airline pilot and whose mother had a family in Canada with whom they had just visited, presented us with the unbelievable news. What do you know? There were newsagents in the Heathrow airport terminals and they sold the mythical US Marvels. That was it. I had to go. A holiday? No chance. Yet somehow, I had to figure out a way of duping my dad into taking me there.
As we entered the new year, I found a way and my cherry was taken. I came of age and I was, in my naïve way of thinking, a real Marvelite at last.
Rorschach: “... and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout: 'Save us!'. And I'll look down and whisper: 'No.’”
To be continued…
