A real life location that was not here..

Resident Alien. Part 7.

 

From the moment my consciousness came online comic books were there and they were one of the first things in the outside world that I reached out for as a child. One day in 1977 I was at the local newsagents with my friend and his punk rock big brother and I saw a small stack of Marvel comics at the end of the magazine rack and I headed straight for them. In our grey Garrison town full of army barracks stained by rain these comics looked like they had just materialized from another dimension and I remember wanting one so badly that it felt like a need. I only managed to flick through a couple of issues before I was bumped out of the way by the big brother who wanted to take a look for himself and under the watchful eye of the shop keeper he pawed through them with his dirty fingers made shiny by solvents and sniffing with the turn of every page. 

American comics were a rare sight for us in the UK then and only a few newsagents carried any titles and no title was ever regularly in stock so you had to buy from what was available and the choices were always limited. The punk rock big brother bought two and on the walk home he would not let me look at them or tell me which one’s he’d bought and I harassed him all the way. About a week later I was standing at our front gate talking with the dog next door when the big brother walked over to us and pulled one of the comic books out of his back pocket, rolled it up tight like a relay baton until its pages squeaked, then he slapped it into my hand and told me I could keep it.

Marvel Comics retold the old stories, the myths of gods and mortals, with elemental battles between good and evil being fought on the streets or high above the skyscrapers of New York City, which was then, in my mind, filled with superheroes. Comic books put America right into my hands and I felt it viscerally. Unlike the America on TV where nothing at all ever felt real, comic books were actual things that I could touch and carry with me and look at anywhere I wanted. They were like cultural artifacts from another world that was just as captivating for me as the comic book characters themselves. Even the ads, for the secret agent spy camera, live sea monkeys and x-ray spex captured my imagination. There was a wild creative fantasy taking place at a real life location that was not here where I lived. Comic books opened up one of the first true portals in my life and I have felt lucky to have been transported.

A few years later I found my way to the homegrown renegade sci-fi prophecies of 2000AD weekly and I read it without hardly missing an issue until I was in my 20's. When many of its most beloved artists and writers later left to join Vertigo Comics in the USA, I vicariously followed their careers out there too and I kept reading the graphic novels they published. Notably, but not in any way limited to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Grant Morrison’s Invisibles and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. These UK comic book artists and writers went on to revitalize the medium and changed the perception of comics in the wider culture in much the same way as the ‘British Invasion’ of bands from the 1960’s did with American music. For me this creative cross pollination between UK and American artists has always been an exciting one and part of my own family history.