Comic Buying: The Missing Past and the Bendy Future / Stephen Walker

Comic Buying:

The Missing Past and the Bendy Future

Stephen Walker

Children are like Santa Claus.

They have many gifts.

Chief amongst them is a seemingly limitless capacity to convince themselves they believe things that they should know can’t possibly be true.

At the age of eight, I was somehow convinced that, if I smashed my way through the wall at the back of my nan’s closet, I’d find the Fantastic Four on the other side.

I also believed that, if you squinted at street lights, it made them emit death-rays. Why any local authority would install social illumination of such irresponsibility, I have no idea, but still I believed it.

Equally, in my childhood, I’d convinced myself that American comics were hard to find.

This was nonsense. Looking back at it, if you lived in Sheffield, they were easy to find. You could get them from any newsagents you walked into.

But that’s not how it seemed at the time, and the first place I can remember ever seeing a super-hero comic was in a stall in Sheffield’s Rag and Tag market.

The Rag and Tag market was a semi-open-air thing you passed through on your way from the bus station to the nearby Castle Market. I have no evidence to back this theory up, but I’m fairly certain it was standing on an old World War Two bomb site. I believe this only because the idea has a certain romance and because it’d explain why there was an open stretch of land slap-bang in the middle of a city. It also has to be said that derelict land left over from the war wasn’t entirely unknown at the time. In retrospect, I was growing up in a post-war society, though the days of the War seemed like ancient history to me at the time.

To my youthful mind, the Rag and Tag market had three claims to distinction.

One, it had some giant scales at one end, upon which you could weigh yourself.

Secondly, it once sold me a Jon Pertwee Dr Who jigsaw puzzle that had a piece missing.

And three, it sold super-hero comics.

To be more precise, it sold Spider-Man comics, as I can’t remember ever seeing any other super-hero for sale there.

Needless to say, it was from this place that I purchased my first ever super-hero comic: Amazing Spider-Man Annual #6.

To claim my mind was blown would be an understatement. In that comic’s zillion and one pages were Spider-Man’s first meeting with the Sinister Six, a reprint of his first meeting with the Fantastic Four, and a reprint of the tale where our hero gatecrashes a party being thrown by the Human Torch. Not only that, but it seemed like virtually every Marvel hero guested in the pages of that one comic.

This was 1972. This was Phase One.

Phase Two came some weeks later, on holiday in Blackpool, when a visit to an indoor market yielded comics featuring the Flash, Superman, Batman, the X-Men, Teen Titans and Captain America.

Back in Sheffield, the Rag and Tag market was demolished not much later, to be replaced by the indoor Sheaf Market, which also had a comic stall. Maybe it was the same stall, just moved across the road, I don’t know. But whatever it was, Thursday was going-to-town day and that meant it became comic-buying day.

This was the spell when Marvel blocked distribution of their major titles in the UK so they wouldn’t clash with sales of their Marvel UK reprints. In retrospect, this was a good thing. It meant we benighted residents of Blighty only had access to the more quirky titles. Thus it was that that stall in Sheaf Market introduced me to the likes of Werewolf by Night, Ka-Zar, Tomb of Dracula and Killraven.

In the mid 1980s, I stopped reading comics.

In the early 1990s, I started reading them again.

In the mid 1990s, no longer able to make sense of them, I stopped again.

But, if new comics no longer appealed to me, older ones still did—and that meant only one thing.

eBay.

Suddenly, through the power of the Internet, I had the chance to re-buy all the comics I’d read as a kid.

This was magic and this was a wonder. This was expensive.

But the truth is that even nostalgia must warp itself to accommodate the future, and the reality is I may never buy a comic again. In an age of the digital, the idea of having an ever-growing stack of printed paper piling up in my cupboards seems positively archaic and inconvenient.

Now we’re in a world of downloads.

And that’s the odd thing about my experience of buying comics—that it forms a kind of overview of the entire history of human retail: from open air markets, on to indoor markets; on to proper shops, then specialist shops; on to online buying, and then to downloading. Who’d have thought the simple act of buying comics could see one work one’s way through 5,000 years of human retail evolution in just four decades?

If there’s anything I’ve learned from buying comics, it’s that nothing lasts. The Rag and Tag Market’s gone. The Sheaf Market that replaced it is also gone. The neighbouring Castle Market, which also had a comics stall, will be gone in the next few months. The indoor market in Blackpool, where Phase Two of my comic buying commenced, is also gone. Nostalgia and Comics, the first specialist shop I ever used after resuming my comics-buying in the early 90s, is likewise gone.

Just as a possible bomb site gave way to a market, everything ultimately gives way to something. That means that, one day, comics won’t exist anymore.

That day probably isn’t too far away. With each week that passes, printed matter seems that little bit less convenient and that little bit more antiquated.

Does this make me sad?

No. Life moves on, and the truth is it’s only through the loss of something that we learn to fully appreciate it.

I still wish I had that missing jigsaw piece though.

What all children in Britain looked like in the

1970s—or at least that's what the CFF would

have had us Canadian youngsters believe (scene from

Betcher! by the Children's Film Foundation, 1971)—Ed.

UK Marvel in the age of Slade and T Rex

A longtime British original: The Beano

When guns were considered less dangerous

than comics—or at least on the same level

(1973 Daisy air-rifle advertisement found in DC comic titles)