A Comic Aside

Continued from 'One Saturday'

The Future Never Happened Chapter V: A Comic Aside

Five.

Like most boys my relationship with comics went way back to being a
little kid. 'Commando War Story Picture Library' was a little sixty
four page digest sized comic published by D.C. Thompson, the people who
still publish the 'The Dandy' and 'The Beano'. Issued at four per
month, each little book was a self-contained story of the 'Achtung
Englisher Pig-Dog' type, printed in black and white on yellowy paper.
Even as a four and five year old, they seemed trapped in the same
Sunday afternoon universe as 'A Town Called Alice' and 'The Guns of
Navarone', all brave salt of the earth privates and square jawed
officers, swarthy Turks and cold, evil Germans. My Dad would buy me
them, giving me them when he got in from the club on a Sunday smelling
of beer, distracted and giggly then nodding off during the mashed
potatoes and gravy of Sunday dinner.

Sometimes when he couldn't get 'Commando' he would get me either
'Warlord' or 'The Victor', both again published by D.C. Thompson and
printed on grey newspaper-type paper, complete with serrated edges that
made them seen like relics of another time. The content wasn't much
different to that, 'warlord' being again primarily concerned with the
first and second world wars, while 'The Victor' broadened the palette
to include sport and adventure. In 'The Victor' the sports stories took
place in an England which could have been anywhere between nineteen
fifty and nineteen seventy, the same England where Carry-On films
seemed to be set, an England where only cosmetic changes ever seemed to
occur, such as length of sideburns or style of tracksuit. Names such as
Wilf and Alf were common. The adventurers, on the other hand, were
invariably 'Lord Peter This' or millionaire's son Sammy That', taking
part in ripping adventures set in far flung parts of what used to be
the Empire, enjoying narrow escapes from witch doctors and cannibals
and other simple savage folk, aided by either comedy working-class
friends of faithful comedy, usually black, servants.

Sat there reading them in front of 'The Antiques Roadshow', the paper
and the print even smelled musty and old, the same vinegar, dusty smell
that newspapers found in attics have. After a week the paper would
begin to yellow and crumble, like ancient parchment exposed to the air
for the first time.

Looking at it, it seems weird that out of everything my Dad could have
bought me, he bought me war comics. I suppose he was doing for me what
his Dad did for him, bought him boys comics because he was a boy. There
must have been something comforting to my Dad in the idea of an
unbroken thread, continuity between generations, boys and their fathers
uniting on something they both understood. I tried to like them, I
really tried. I remember the frustration of having to talk to my Dad
about the adventures of 'Alf Tupper - The Tough of the Track' or
'Sapper Simkins - The Human Fly', when ultimately they meant as much to
me as the news on the telly. As I needed more and more encouragement to
even look at them, after a while they stopped arriving, my Dad never
making reference to them again.

What my dad had done was wet my appetite. Comics being a direct mixture
of words and pictures are easier to read then books, and therefore more
accessible. And I knew that what I wanted to access was out
there.

Around that age I started to walk up and down the racks of magazines in
the newsagents, gazing at all the garish covers with their free gifts,
while my Mam stood talking as she bought her tabs. I must have been
about six, because the comics were about face height for me, when I
still wasn't tall enough to see over into the ice lolly cabinet.

There, among the yellow-haired footballers and potato headed school
children was a comic with a man with an enormous truncheon, face half
obscured by an imposing helmet, stamping on the face of what looked
like a punk. I knew what punks were because you used to see them,
huddled on street corners, bright hair reaching up to the sky. I
remember that my Mam would always tell me not to stare, that they were
'making a statement' by looking like that.

There was something about that cover, the great muscled man, with what
looked like a golden badge pinned to his chest, joined to the zip of
his outfit by a thick metal chain, great big knee and elbow pads, the
metal gleaming gold, the uniform blue/black. He was stood in front of a
gigantic tower block with roads and walkways spinning off around it, a
snarl on his face. Looking at it, my chubby little face slack with
fascination, I couldn't tell who was the goody and who was the baddy,
was it the punk or was it that great hunk of a man, scowling behind his
helmet? It seemed scary that uncertainty, scary and grown up.

I remember picking the comic up from the shelf and taking it to my Mam,
who would stand for ages and chat with the woman behind the counter,
complementing her on her sari or asking how her family was doing.
Tagging at the bottom of my Mam's coat, I looked up at her holding the
comic out.

"Mam, can Ah have this?" She looked down at it, narrowing her eyes and
sizing it up.

"No Tony pet, put it back. That's for big lads." She smiled at the
woman behind the counter. "Ee, he loves his readin' does this one. Why
don't y' go and choose another one, somethin' for lads your own
age?"

The two women shared indulging smiles with each other as I trotted
away. That was my first awareness of 2000AD. I put it back on the shelf
and next to it noticed a similar looking comic. This one had a dashing
young man with blond hair running toward a sleek looking space ship,
the ground around him erupting with explosions. A speech bubble from
his mouth said something like "Quickly Digby, we've only thirty seconds
before the planet explodes!"

When I took this comic up to my Mam, she looked at it and said with
surprise "Ee, your Uncle Alan got that when he wuz your age!" Taking it
from my hands and looking in her purse, she shook her head in
disbelief. "You'd never think that The Eagle wuz still goin'."

Really this wasn't 'The Eagle' that my Uncle Alan had got when he was a
kid, but a relaunched version of it. Unlike 'The Victor' which had kept
on for decades, 'The eagle had been relaunched in the early eighties,
to cash in on the science fiction boom. Its heyday had been in the high
fifties, enjoying massive popularity largely due to its front cover
star 'Dan Dare - Pilot of the Future'; grandson of whom who was
avoiding the explosions and escaping the detonating planet on the issue
that caught my eye.

'The Eagle' had been born and nursed to life in the fifties by a
reverend in the Christian church, created explicitly to provide a moral
alternative to the debasing flood of American pulps and movies, to turn
away the tide of horror comics and gangsters and superheroes. Dan Dare
was on the front page, a life of Jesus in pictures on the back. The
reverend may have thought it was Jesus who was bringing the punters in,
but it was Dan Dare all the way.

In all essentials, Dan dare was nineteen fifties Britain in space,
atomic style and the Skylon form the Festival of Britain, writ large.
Dan and his faithful batman Digby, round and chubby with dropped 'H's
and humorous appetite, were essentially the popular conception of
Spitfire pilots, 'The Few' of The Battle of Britain, transplanted to
late twentieth/early twenty-first century surroundings. In this they
worked to maintain the safety of a United Nations style league of
planets, complete with a Nazi type foe, The Treens. Green skinned and
bald with yellow, almond shaped reptilian eyes, the Treens were a
fiercely militaristic culture, originating, I think, on Venus.
Genetically engineered and maintaining a strictly delineated caste
system, they were ruled over by a hyper-intelligent Treen with a
massive cranium and a body so small and feeble that he had to move
around on a special flying platform. This leader, The Mekon, was the
ultimate commander and despot of The Treen Empire, and completely
ruthless in his wish to expand it, subjugating lesser races along the
way.

Dan and his fellows would thus adventure around the solar system like
intergalactic Dixon of Dock Greens, making space safe for shared values
and righting wrongs, all in time to be back at Space HQ for tea and
crumpets.

What was exceptional about Dan Dare was its vision of the future; all
sleek rounded buildings and space ships with glass domes and bronzed
turrets. The artwork itself was beautifully rendered, the alien worlds
realised in superb detail. The things was, in Dan Dare's future,
nothing was really that different, everything was simply refined by
technology, as if Welwyn Garden City had come to rule the
universe.

The vision of the future in 'Dan Dare' seemed suburban, homely, not
urban. Dan, you would feel, still had a landlady who went to the
butchers to buy meat for the Sunday roast, be it Martian Space Beef
from the robo-butchers. In 'Dan Dare' nothing had really changed,
nothing new had really come into being. Comfortable, stable Britain, a
land of decency and honesty and upheld standards was still there, but
more so.

In its eighties incarnation, the Dan Dare of the title was meant to be
the grandson of the original Dare but very little had changed. The
technology had progress slightly and the space ships were less sleek
and more 'functional' looking. For me at the time there were enough
gadgets and space battles to keep me interested, back up to a lesser or
greater degree by the other stories in the comic. To be honest I don't
remember that many of them, but most of them tended to be set in the
present with some science fictional device. I remember one about an
alien, defecting from an invasion scout party, who disguised himself as
a human teenager and his spaceship as a BMX bike and another about a
boy who would be sucked into his Commodore 64, where he would be forced
to play the latest computer games as if they were real, failure leading
to eternal purgatory in a kind of arcade limbo.

Every week I would make sure that I managed to get 'The Eagle', if not
from my Mam then from my Nana when I visited her in Benwell after
school during the week. I would sit in silence and read it, the ink
rubbing of the pages and ending up smudged all over my face like coal
dust. It was interesting, but not as captivating as science fiction
films or picture books about robots and spaceships. 'The Eagle' was
just a fact of my life, like getting picked last for football or fish
finger on a Thursday.

Getting older it got less and less interesting. I was starting to read
'proper' books, science fiction novels, and watch reruns of 'Star Trek'
and 'The Invaders' on telly. By then it would often lay unread on my
bedroom floor until the middle of the week.

One of the problems was that the average page length of an episode of a
series was three pages, starting with the resolution of the previous
week's cliffhanger and ending with a new one. This left space for very
little in-between. Also, 'The Eagle' was continually merging with less
successful publications, often leaving Dan dare as the only forward
looking story. During the time I was reading 'The Eagle' it was
variously: 'Eagle and Tiger, 'Eagle and Battle', simply 'Eagle' and
'Eagle and Mask', with stories about a semi-popular toy line of the
same name.

As I grew older the stories and characters engaged me less and less,
seeming more and more flat and uninteresting. I found myself guiltily
looking at 2000AD as I went to pick up 'The Eagle', feeling a rush of
disloyalty as I eyed up the powerful man on the cover, mouth snarling
under the obscuring helmet, gigantic gun glistening. Reading his big,
golden badge I discovered that this man was called Dredd, Judge Dredd,
and reading the captions I found out that he was 'Mega City's most
famous lawman'. While 'The Eagle' seemed to be in the same category as
the Star Wars toys I was stopping playing with, 2000AD seemed more
grown up, less embarrassingly childish.

When I was ten I finally made the plunge, asking my Nana to get me
2000AD instead. When I went to see her we would always rush down to
Adelaide Terrace before the shops shut, were she would buy me sweets or
cakes. In the newsagent she asked me whether I wanted a comic, whether
I wanted 'The Eagle'. When I told her I wanted 2000AD instead she
looked at me questioningly through her finger smudged, thick rimmed
glasses.

"Don't y' want the 'The Eagle' any more, luv?"

"Nah Nana, it's gone dead rubbish."

Sitting in her cramped living room, enclosed on all sides by furniture
and nick-nacks, smiling photographs of family members staring out from
every available surface, I felt an excitement I can only compare to
having just bought pornography. The comic sat on the coffee table,
filled with a wondrous other world of delights, but I didn't dare open
it while my Nana was there, knowing that I needed to be alone before I
could finally give myself to it.

Ridiculous as it sounds, I made my excuses and left early. Sitting on
the bus I remember tapping my feet impatiently, compulsively feeling
the carrier bag filled with home made cakes and biscuits to be
reassured that 2000AD was still there. All I could think of was getting
home and giving myself to it, wallowing in it, diving into it. Finally
it felt that I was moving away from childish things, moving into the
future. I can still feel the ache in my lungs as I ran full pelt home
form the bus stop, and the way the pages stuck to my sweaty fingers as
I read.

I wasn't disappointed. Rather than the dead, comfortable, homely future
of 'The Eagle', 2000AD was harsh and vibrant. The stories were longer,
more involved, less cartoonish. There was real grappling with the
mechanics of the future, of how the future would feel. Visually, the
stories were sometimes anarchic and messy, other times beautifully
crafted and designed but, unlike other comics that I'd read, never
simply workman-like. Reading that first issue I felt disorientated,
almost reeling, because in 2000AD the future wasn't simply a backdrop
for ripping yarns, a place for morally clear adventuring, cops and
robbers or cowboys and Indians, the same but with rayguns and
hyperspace wagon trains. 2000AD was about the effect of the future on
people. Here were the heroes of the future who weren't even sure they
were heroes, or whether they would want to be. Here were aliens, who
really were alien, not just bug eyed copies of one country or another.
Not every episode ended in a cliffhanger, not everything was clear-cut,
people died and people lived. 2000AD was real.

In that issue was a page of music reviews, talking about groups and
styles I'd never heard of on Metro, the station my Mam listened to.
Seeing this I knew for sure that this was something older, more mature,
more sophisticated, that this was something meant for grown ups. Little
kids don't buy records that no one else's heard of, only adults
do.

There were hints of sex, of swearing, great swathes of realistic,
shocking violence. Finally it felt that I had got to the proper stuff,
I was experiencing what I had waited for my entire life. In comparison
to 'The Eagle', these stories and their worlds were intricately thought
out, the technology and its effects examined carefully. Compared to
what I saw in 2000AD, the pulps and their luminous cities and flying
teardrops would seem whimsical, like dreamstuff.

Reading 2000AD for the first time felt like finally coming home. My Dad
was wrong, the future wasn't just kids stuff, there was grown ups
looking there too. Rather Than growing out of comics, I had found one
to grow into. If anything, at that age, I was still too young for
2000AD, which was about the same age as me, but had grown up much
quicker, like the first kid on the estate to sniff glue.

Comics at that time were going through a period at that time of proving
they could be adult. Graphic novels were beginning to become acceptable
and even fashionable in some circles, the tide of derision seemed to be
turning. 2000AD was part of this, playing with a more adult way of
writing and presenting stories, producing material without the idea of
an eight year old audience in mind. Kids who'd grown up with the big
explosion in the fifties and sixties, who'd sold themselves heart and
soul, had managed to redefine what comics could be. Sick of guiltily
reading comics that seemed more and more childish the older they got,
they started writing and drawing comics that fitted their concerns,
their preoccupation's, their influences. It was like the bands of the
sixties who grew up on the relatively simple and wholesome fare of rock
n' roll, who when it came to making music of their own pushed the
boundaries and redefined what music could do. The majority of the great
producers of 'comics for adults' were British, and the majority had
worked for 2000AD. Reading 2000AD every week I felt like I was
participating in a meeting of like minds. When usually I felt outside,
finally I'd found a club to be in.

After that first issue I decided there was to be no mistakes. I made my
Mam solemnly swear to get me my comic each week. I remember her saying
that she would, because of the look in my eye. She could see that it
was serious.

Like your first proper love, 2000AD came to dominate my thoughts. It
validated everything and my Dad was keeping me from it. Stood at that
bus stop I imagined just running, running back to my Mam, back to my
comic. Standing there, looking at my dad, the future couldn't have
seemed farther away. All I could think of was getting home to the
future.

A first real love is always the strongest.

Continued in The Future Never Happened Chapter VI: Journey Into The
Unknown!