Comics were a big part of my life. We read and bought thousands over the years. Wandering down to the high street and browsing the comics was one of the joys of life. We’d buy most of our comics at ‘City News’, which still exists at the market end of the High St and at WH Smiths at the other end, where the Oxfam bookshop now resides.

I don’t remember ever reading a comic when in Saudi Arabia, but from our first day in Wells I can’t recall a  time without comics. The first comics I read were most likely The Beano and The Dandy, the staple diet of children at that time. We read The Beano each week but The Dandy much less frequently, as apart from Desperate Dan, the stories were just not as good or funny as those in The Beano. Stories in the Dandy seemed to be about the time when Mum and dad were growing up, whilst the Beano was more modern.

We also tried the other similar comics – Whizzer and Chips, and the Beezer.

Of the Beano, the ones I can remember now, as I write, and before looking at Wikipedia, are  Dennis the Menace, Roger the Dodger, The Bash Street Kids and Billy the Whizz. Five minutes later, after  a brief trawl of the WWW, memories of some of the other stories are slowly coming back: Little Plum, Minnie the Minx, Baby Face Finlayson; I vaguely remember Little Plum, a Red Indian I think. Was Minnie the Minx a female version of Denis the Menace? I can see Baby Face Finlayson but cannot remember what the premise of that story was.

Other names drift into my mind; ‘Lord Snooty’, was he a Dandy or Beano character? He feels more Dandy to me, a comic that somehow was more class conscious than the Beano, whose stories , excepting The Bash Street Kids  perhaps, was less rooted in the culture of schools of post war Britain. There was another story which pitted a bunch of public school toffs against rougher , tougher comprehensive school boys. This must be a Dandy story surely?

I go to Google again: to my surprise, I find that Lord Snooty was a Beano character. Wikipedia tells me:

“Lord Snooty (or Lord Snooty and his Pals) was a fictional character in a comic strip in the UK comic The Beano, first appearing in issue 1, dated 30 July 1938, and was the longest running strip in the comic until Dennis the Menace and Gnasher overtook it. The central character was Lord Marmaduke of Bunkerton, known to his friends as Snooty, a very ordinary boy who just happens to be an Earl.”

Another search of Google, and I locate a story called ‘The toffs and the toughs’. This must be the story I am thinking of. I am even more surprised to find that this story was not from either the Beano or The Dandy, but appeared in a comic called The Knockout between 1971 and 1973. We must have bought this comic a few times in that period.

At some point I must have moved on to the comics for slightly older children. Based mainly on stories about the Second World war, with some sport thrown in, these are the comics I really fell in love with. I started to buy the Victor every week, and whereas with the Beano or Dandy, Mum must have bought the comics for us, I started buying the Victor myself, which added to the joyous ritual: every Saturday morning I would physically go to the shop to buy the comic. Whether I paid for this out of pocket money, or whether we were allowed a comic a week, I am not sure.

The Victor had a story, in colour, on the two outside pages of the comic. This was always a war story and was the first thing I read.  It took me some time to realise that the story did not continue the following week, unlike most of the other stories; I used to get confused when trying to understand how one weeks story followed on from the previous weeks.  I have just read Wikipedia again, and I have discovered that the cover “ carried a story of how a medal had been won by British or Commonwealth forces during the Great War or the Second World War.” I never got this at the time!

Most of the stories in The Victor were Boys Own type stories in which brave British or American soldiers defeated ‘Jerry’. British soldiers were typically unfailingly polite and fair, even when killing Nazis; American soldiers were rougher, more likely to be unshaven.   One story I remember: “Blighty or Bust”, which my memory tells me was a long running story about a mixed group of Allied soldiers returning to England after a daring raid. Time for Google again: this web site http://www.victorhornetcomics.co.uk/vicnethistory.html confirms that the story existed, but gives few details.

The same web site tells me that four key characters appeared in the comic every week for 25 years: Alf Tupper, the runner; Sergeant Matt Braddock, World War Two pilot; Morgyn the Mighty, the strong man, and Gorgeous Gus, the rich owner/sometime football player. Of these , the only one I recall is Alf Tupper, ‘The Tough of the Track’.  Alf is Described by Wikipedia as a  “working class, ‘hard as nails’ runner”, which is pretty much how I remember him. The strips showed him training on dimly lit cobbled street between rows of terraced houses, smoke from the local factories always billowing in the background. Apparently there were places in the North of England like this. I could never quite understand how someone who could not afford to eat – perhaps the occasional bag of chips – and who worked so hard and did so many good things, could then  win all these races. Did he never sleep?

Pretty much all of the few German words I know are courtesy of Victor and similar comics. I learned that Germans always shout either ‘Achtung’ or ‘Gott in Himmell’ when surprised, or being shot at, and that they call English people ‘Swinehund’, or,  occasionally, ‘Englisher pig’ (I never fully understood why Germans would sometimes use this half German/half-English variant of ‘swinehund’).

Occasionally, typically during school holidays,  I could get an extra fix of war stories from Commando comics. These were small, stubby books full of war stories; the comic strips were all in black and white and there were no  frills in these books. There was a toy shop opposite the City News that sold stacks of these little books. You could spend a happy hour or so in this shop browsing the comics and the stacks of Action Man models and accessories they stocked. Action Man was big in my life for a short while; the uniforms were the best part of the model;  the standard army figure was clothed in what seemed to be  authentic canvas. There was a diver with a wet suit and scuba gear, and a soldier dressed in ski war. The problem with Action Man was there was little you could actually do with one: the action of holding it and pretending to fight in a war lost its allure quite quickly.

Other comics based around war stories included The Hotspur and Warlord. Wikipedia tells me that Hotspur merged with The Victor in 1981, by which time I would have moved on to other comics.

 I remember far more about ‘Warlord’ than ‘The Hotspur’. This Warlord was first released in September 28^th 1974, so I would have been eight when it came out. Much like the Victor, most of the stories depicted brave allies defeating Germans and Japanese, who were usually depicted in a negative stereotypical style common at that time. The Warlord immediately seemed edgier than the Victor. They also had a cool Fan Club. Fan clubs were popular in the early 1970s ; all the pop stars had them. Typically you had to send in a postal order, then perhaps 28 days later you would receive perhaps a flimsy newsletter and a badge, possibly a photocopied autograph of the pop star. In the Warlord fan club you received a badge and a wallet with your identity card. I thought it was really cool.

During 1976, two legendary comics were launched: ‘Action’ comic on 14th February  and ‘Roy of the Rovers’  on 25th September. 

I may have discovered the first edition of Action comic in The City News , whilst shopping with Jeff. I would have been 9 years old and Jeff just short of seven. ‘Action’ took comics to a new level; reading the first edition was a revelatory experience. The likes of the Victor and the Hotspur may have been guilty of negative stereotyping of ‘Jerry’ and ‘The Japs’, but they were essentially sanitised versions of war; and the non-war stories always involved someone like Alf Tupper bravely succeeding against all odds. There was a moral code at the heart of the stories.

‘Action’ did not bother with morality. The stand out story was ‘Hook jaw’, about a Great White shark which had become deranged when harpooned. The film Jaws had been released a year previously and killer sharks were ‘big’; Action comic was clearly jumping on the bandwagon with Hook Jaw, who was far more savage than even the shark in Jaws; he was happy to kill and eat anyone or anything, and his victims were shown torn apart in graphic detail.

Jeff has told me that he suffered nightmares after reading a Hook Jaw story in which children, gaily diving off a cliff, were torn apart and eaten by Hook Jaw as he emerged from beneath the waves just as the children hit the surface.  I also used to lie awake at night, my head racing with a fantasy about floating in dark, deep water 50 yards or so from the safety of a beach.

A few Christmases ago, I bought Jeff   an Action annual that I found on eBay. To much joy, I found it contained the story in which Hook Jaw ate the diving children. I then started reading about the history of the comic, and found that in October 1976, 8 months after it was released, Action comic was withdrawn from sale, after pressure from, amongst others, Mary Whitehouse, the moral guardian of the 1970s who was outraged by the violence in the comic.  Publication resumed in November 1976, with the violence much toned down. Sales dropped, and the comic lasted another year or so before being merged with ‘Battle’.

I am surprised to read now, on Wikpedia, that there were only three Hook Jaw stories in the original violent incarnation of the comic. In my memory, I was reading Hook Jaw stories for many weeks.

Roy of the Rovers was of course a much gentler proposition. Obsessed by sport, I was very excited by the release of the new comic. Roy of the Rovers had a strip in Tiger comic, which I bought occasionally so I was aware of the character.  I clearly recall buying the first edition from the small WH Smiths at the bottom end of the High St. I can still feel that sense of wonderment. The first edition was not only crisp, colourful, packed with great stories, but had a free gift. The free gift in the first comic was a chart with spaces to write in football results (I have had to look this up), and further free gifts followed in the early editions. I am sure there was a gift of a football ‘ladder’: a  flimsy cardboard sheet in which there were slots to place little cardboards tabs for each team. You were meant to manually move the tabs to put each team in its proper league position. This was a massive faff and I can’t believe anyone would do this for more than a few weeks. These football ladders were staple free gifts in the football magazines of the late 1970s and early 1980s : Shoot and Match Weekly both knocked them out.

I have a feeling that Mum and Dad bought me a subscription to Roy of the Rovers so that it was delivered to the house every week. There were many great stories in the comic, but my favourite aside from Roys owns strip was probably Hot Shot Hamish, a story about a mild mannered Scot possessed of a thunderous shot. Billys Boots was also an old classic that also moved over from Tiger comic; I kind of loved that Billy played football in the winter and cricket in the summer, pretty much reflecting what I wanted to do.

 ‘The safest hands in soccer’ was the other story that I still remember quite vividly. The strip was drawn in a very realistic style and there was more dialogue than in most stories, giving the story an intensity that others did not have. One story graphically illustrated how the main character (I think), had his legs crushed whilst saving a child form being hit by a car, thus ending his career at a tragically young age. I can picture the exact frame as if I am looking at it now.

I probably carried on buying and reading Roy of the Rovers for several years. I read other football magazines too. The major title of the 1970s was Shoot! This was a mix of black and white photos and articles ‘written’ by guest columnists: Ray Clemence one I remember.

In September 1979, around the time of my thirteenth birthday,  a new title was released: Match. I think I got the first issue of this and carried on reading it for several years; I suspect it replaced Roy of the Rovers as my weekly purchase. Match was competing directly with Shoot. The first edition, of course, came with a free gift, an 80 page sticker album.

I was still buying comics when I left school; by that time, 2000AD was the favourite.  I find that the first issue of this was released on 26 February 1977, when I was just 10 . This surprises me, as I picture myself being much older when reading 2000AD. I was still buying and reading 2000AD when I was 20, so of all the comics I read, this is the one I read for the longest period.  

Though I find it hard to believe I was only 10 when 2000AD came out, I know for certain that we bought it from the start. Jeff also read it, and the used comics became a massive pile in his bedroom in St Andrews Lodge. At some point, possibly when Jeff had gone to University, Mum threw away the lot, her powers of reading the future failing her; if she had known that the pile of comics would be worth a few hundred quid now, she might have kept them.

I have never been a massive fan of science fiction or fantasy, so my love of 2000AD was definitely atypical. The Judge Dredd story was OK, easy to read and over the top, but some of the other stories were much more interesting. I guess I was like most fans of the comic in loving the artwork, which was very realistic. Where Action comic might have gone in for instant shock value, 2000AD was sustained by good stories and characters. The stories I can remember include Slaine, Strontium Dog and Rogue Trooper. Slaine I loved for its mixture of historic myth with sci-fi: it was not pure space fiction.

I suspect 2000AD was pure escapism for me, a release from the rest of my life, to which it bore absolutely no resemblance. As a tortured late teen and young man,  pondering the meaning of life whilst reading Orwell, Camus, Kafka and ‘Hunger’ by Knut Hamsun,  it was my secret pleasure to go and buy 2000AD. I bought my final edition of the comic when I was perhaps 20 or 21. I was by this point wilfully forgetting my entire upbringing, and had made the fatal error of wishing to engage with the real world. 2000AD was then consigned to history.

In my mid to late teens, as I became increasingly interested in pop music, I stated reading pop magazines. Jane bought the magazine ‘Smash Hits’, a glossy, bi-weekly publication, that I would also read. I then discovered the ‘serious’ music press, which in the late 1970s and early 1980s was at its peak: there were four weekly papers – Record Mirror, Melody Maker, Sounds and The New Musical Express. I started buying Record Mirror, which was perhaps the natural step up from Smash Hits. Sounds concentrated on rock music, not really my thing, so I never bought it. Melody Maker and NME were the competitors at the really serious end of the market. I started reading the NME during the sixth form.

Discovering the NME was revelatory. Here was a magazine that took something as trivial as pop music and turned it into serious, high art. For a pretentious, angst ridden teenager, this was manna from heaven. Many of the articles in the NME were long winded, over blown, and filled with literary allusions. Record reviews would hone in on some lyrics and dissect them as if they were written by Milton or Shakespeare. I would read much of it without understanding too much; I revered the people who could write this stuff as  Gods, and challenged myself to understand it. Over time I learnt the views and the tastes of the various writers, and developed my favourites. For several years buying and reading the NME pretty much cover to cover was a weekly ritual.

Top 5 comics

Victor
Roy of the Rovers
Action
Warlord
2000 AD

Others:

Hotspur
The Beezer
The Beano
The Dandy
Whizzer and Chips
Scorcher
Commando