1. Doing Things Differently There
Writing recently about the current "state of the nation" of superhero comics has made me think of how ubiquitous what used to be known as "American comics" were in the newsagents of the Britain of my youth. When I was stumbling incompetently into adolescence, when my obsession for comic books was hardening into something close to an addiction, if not an actual addiction, there were quite literally stacks of American comic books for sale everywhere. Everywhere. And we all know that's quite gone now. If it's the job of comic book publishers to protect and advance their market share in order to benefit their owners and employees and shareholders, then it's also incumbent upon them to make sure their properties and the medium that they have flourished in are introduced efficiently and successfully to each new generation of readers. And as far as American comic books are concerned, that didn't happen, to say the very least, and now we find ourselves in a situation where comic books, and especially those of the super-hero genre, constitute a relatively minuscule niche market. Hard times indeed, at least where those lost millions upon millions of readers are concerned.
I thought it might illustrate how very much things have changed if I had a crack at describing how and where I was constantly tempted by those wonderfully colourful and absurd American comic books as I grew up. Yet now I find myself doing so, it reminds me uncomfortably of the self-proclaimed and rather disreputable Desert Rat who collected the trolleys at the supermarket where I worked when I was 16 and in my last year of O-Levels, who would rattle on over boiling mugs of tea-break tomato soup about his carefree youth in music halls and his shady maturity dancing at the local Pally. All those lost worlds of his, that we cared nothing for and heartily mocked as he rambled on and seemed not to care, that had once been an indivisible part of his familiar everyday environment, and now were unknown to us and of no interest to us.
And here I am, growing old in my knees, with no steaming powdered tomato soup to slurp on, and yet full of my own unsure tales of lost little empires, doubtful of the truth of my doubtful memories and yet happy to spill them out all the same.
2. The Local Killing Ground: Church Road & Her Eight Fine Newsagents
I grew up in Ashford, Middlesex, a town of nondescript estates and rows of suburban semi-detacheds clustered around and away from the one long inconsequential street of undistinguished shops. Ashford was a few bus stops and a railway station, a brief interruption in a journey from somewhere else to somewhere else. It was the kind of town that was supposed to inspire resentful and ambitious teenagers to cluster together into bands and escape into pop depravity, but of all the nowhere towns around, only Ashford produced no-one of any musical consequence. (That is, if the deadly sideburns of Mungo Jerry can be discounted, which I fear they can.) It was so unimaginably dull that it couldn't even propel a few adolescent guitar-spankers into the lower reaches of the charts for a week or two, something Staines, Feltham and even Walton could manage.
Within ten minutes walking time from my home, or just about three if I were on my old bike, was Church Road, that thin mile or so of high street along which clung most things of any slight consequence in town. The Catholic church, the Church Of England, the Grammar School and close by two feeder schools, the multi-storey car-park, two dentists, the doctors, the war memorial, the Record Scene, and then, just beyond the road's end, the railway station and the railway bridge. Yet, all that considered, most human life certainly wasn't there or even there abouts, though it was said among the lads of the Fourth Form that there'd once been a brothel above the "Record Scene" that'd been destroyed in an unexplained fire.
But none of that mattered too much to me, although the rumours of the famously beautiful M. being found by the Police somewhat undressed in the street while the "brothel" burned certainly disturbed me in a strange new way. Nope, what mattered as my years raced from ten to eleven and unimaginably beyond was the newsagents, of which there were no less than eight within less than fifteen minutes walk, all of which stocked British comics, and five of which received regular, blessed shipments of shiny American comics.
"American comics". The very words ring with the edge of my father's contemptuous, though strangely not unkind, Scottish accent. "American comics", meaning "tawdry", "stupid", "violent", "childish", and quite possibly "riven with moral corruption".
How wonderful!
3. "Sweet Dreams"
Our favourite local newsagents was "Sweet Dreams", known I regret to recall amongst us brats as "Wet Dreams", the first local shop I can recall to be run by an Anglo-Asian family, which meant it didn't close inconveniently every Wednesday afternoon and all Sunday, but that it did stay open until 6pm in the evening. (For a while, it also had a barber working out of what seemed to have been a little stockroom beyond the shop, which meant that the premises was an untypical blur of activity. If they could have fitted an exercise bike in the corner and a tumble drier next to the Walls ice cream freezer, they surely would have.) Most shockingly for our seventies sensibilities, the woman who took charge of the customers was kind and helpful and called every one, including sweaty little thieving children, "love", and even let me have the box that the Wombles Dairy Milk bars came in. (She has a special little fond place in my heart. Shame on me for not thinking about her in thirty-five years before tonight, and thanks to D. for reminding me of some few of the facts we know about her.) And right before the till, at the end of the double-sided display of cards, stood six foot of spinner rack, the bottom three levels of which were occupied by Marvel Comics, though never those of DC or Charlton. (Why did comic books always occupy the bottom three rows of the spinner racks? Was there a rule, a map, a shop steward from the Newsagents Union who insisted upon uniformity between sister shops?) And the most memorable comic book I ever got from "Sweet Dreams" was "Fantastic Four" # 128, which fascinated me as I stopped each afternoon on the way home from junior school in the spring of 1973, because it was Marvel, and it was American, and it had flying men on fire, and because it uniquely had both a glossy paper poster insert, by John Buscema, and, within that, a quite useless-to-my eyes cardboard advert for cheap jewelry. I read much of it in what I imagined was a discreet fashion over four days of post-school visits while the woman charged with walking me home bought her daughter and myself treats of chocolate, and I found myself upon reaching the last page sniffing at the Mole Man's cruel abandonment by Kala, his rather attractive and exceptionally faithless no-bride-to-be. (On the fifth day, the Friday, my pocket money had arrived to be invested in the so-thankfully not-already-sold comic book.)
"Sweet Dreams" is now a "gift shop", selling cards and party goods.
4. "Listers" (?)
Straight across the street and ten boy-strides to the right was a newsagents I recall, no doubt erroneously, as (2) "Listers", a far far less kid-friendly establishment. Known to we nippers as "posh", it sold luxurious leather-covered journals and appointment books and diaries and even big thick luxury reams of paper. It smelt unnaturally neither of children or sweets or newsprint. It had an old and intimidating counter built so high that it was nearly taller than my child's head, and upon the top of it at practically a ten year old's eye-level were rows and rows of newspapers and magazines. To the far left were two rows of British comics, the "Victor" and "Whizzer And Chips" and "Countdown", obviously there for parents to pick up for their children who themselves couldn't see what was on offer. And then, at the closest point to hand of the last column, was a neat pile of each month's Marvel comics. These were always better preserved than those well-thumbed copies from "Sweet Dreams", because even those kids who could reach the counter wouldn't dare sneak a lasting glance at the interior pages; posh newsagents could have three people working together to demand payment and intimidate customers. Nothing escaped their six eyes. I was once so unnerved by the whole atmosphere of the place while buying a copy of the "X-Men" - the 1972 reprint of the Thomas/Roth Super-Adaptoid story - that I pointed out I'd been returned too much change, gave back far more money than I'd received, and then raced out of the shop and didn't stop until I'd passed the Council Offices and was closing in on the safety of Clarendon Road.
But I still think fondly of my favourite comic bought from there, Jim Starlin's post-Thanos War "Captain Marvel" # 34, picked up for me before Christmas in 1974 by my Mother while I was pretending to have flu rather than pretending unconvincingly to be popular with my classmates. Just looking at the cover still tastes like Scots vegetable soup, which would have surely have made me well if I'd actually ever been ill.
"Listers", or whatever it was known as, is now, somewhat appropriately, the premises of "Lodge Brothers Funeral Directors".
5. "Martyns" (?)
Five shops to the left of "Listers", and just past the town's shopping wonderland of Woolworths, stood yet another American-comic-selling newsagent, which I recall - perhaps again wrongly - as being a branch of the "Martyns" chain. Far more crowded-full of saleable stuff than its fellows that I've mentioned so far, which perhaps helped it flourish against all the more pleasant competition, it seems in my memory to be crowded with glass jars full of sugary varnished sweets, and packets of exotic shag tobacco and pipes, and great silo-busting fireworks stocked for far more months of the year than Fireworks Night would seem to justify. It also contained the profound and disconcerting mystery of a spinner rack which displayed the usual crossword-puzzle magazines and glossy periodicals fronted by tattooed women holding guns, but which held no American comics! These were instead stacked in unpredictably different places every month on the wall-mounted magazine racks. This was all too strange for me, and so I tended to only visit the dark interior there when all other options were exhausted. But I do recall coming across a copy of Batman # 244 in late 1972, an unexpected and unimaginable treat, DC comics being rare in this part of town and therefore always likely to disappear quickly from the shelves. Even then I knew what a Neal Adams comic book looked like, and I knew that I was thoroughly impressed by a shirtless Batman hauling Ra's Al Ghul away across the desert while the luscious Talia looked on full of admiration and lust. Strange feelings stirred and settled, a little stronger for the exercise, ready to completely hijack me in the years to come.
This newsagents is now - and perhaps always was - called "Select News". Last time I was there, there were a few Panini reprints of Marvel and DC superhero stories on sale there. But nothing American by Neal Adams, I'm sad to say.
Interlude: The Not-Hard Slog Beyond The Golden Triangle
So, that was three shops selling American comic books situated in a golden triangle within about 75 feet of each other. The very act of seeking out a packet of the new and very credible salt'n'vinegar Chipsticks meant brushing your child's uncreased elbow against a copy of the Avengers. Paying the papers for your old man meant laying out his note - of which days the Daily Express had been misdelivered to a neighbour and the unwelcome Daily Worker pushed through our letterbox - upon a stack of old well-thumbed DC mystery books. Super-heroes and their various colourful American compatriots were part and parcel of every day life. They barely needed to be searched out and, as my parents discovered to their despair when they tried to wean me off my very bad four-colour habit, it was hard to travel anywhere where they weren't on open and abounding display.
6. The (almost) Empty Place
Now, if it were one of those interminably endless weeks between monthly shipments, when the stacks of comic books had been whittled down and nothing remained in those three key newsagents, then a very little travel was required to track down alternatives to stare at and perhaps even paw, if not actually purchase. So, turning right out of "Martyns" and steeling myself for the deathly dull newsagent-less 150 yards walk in the direction of St Matthews Church, the short trek would begin. The "Record Scene", specialists in vinyl rarities by the whitebread Cliff Richards and The Shadows, marked the half-way point of the journey. The Astoria Cinema, where I was traumatised by "Kes" and "Soylent Green" and "Bambi" and a terrible date with LD, was the three-quarters down marker. And then, sandwiched between the coffee-cheese and-bacon branch of "Craigs" and the more traditionally bloody "Craigs The Butchers" was the fourth of my feeding holes, the emptiest newsagents in town, which I assume was a reflection of the relative wealth of its clientele, though I rarely actually saw anyone in there. There never seemed to much of anything at all on sale in the emptiest newsagent in town, and a few years further on towards the end of the Seventies and it would abandon even the few American comics it stocked in favour of, well, even less stock on its shelves. It was a very tidy shop. Yet regardless of the counter-intuitive laws of economics operating there, I can distinctly recall buying there two of the most influential comic books I ever succumbed to. One was "Swamp Thing" # 2, the cover of which you can see at the head of this entry, and the other was "Amazing Adventures" # 18, the first appearance of Killraven. I bought them both on a Tuesday afternoon, my memory tells me, which would be odd, because it would mean that the Wein/Wrightson "Swamp Thing" had been waiting for months in a shop that barely let the morning newspapers sit until noon. I suspect my memory deceives me, though I am certain at least that the Killraven adventure was a reward for taking a fill-in without undue fuss at the top-of-the-town dentists. (I can't think I ever did anything else brave at all that would have earned me the riches of a "Swamp Thing". Maybe I fibbed about some imaginary act of fortitude.)
There is no newsagents at the top of Church Road anymore. Craigs the butchers has absorbed the premises, part of its' decades-long plan for world domination, of which my sacking from my first-ever Saturday job there in 1975 was but a minor and yet surely a strangely essential part.
7. The Very Crowded Shop
Finally, if that 5 minute walk to the top of Church Street seemed too long and dull an expedition, then it was a left turn at "Martyns" and a two minute canter to the bottom of Church Road, left again into Station Road and on down Woodthorpe Road towards the Railway Station, where the second newsagent to be owned in Ashford by an enterprising Anglo-Asian family - I think - awaited. I didn't think of it as a newsagents then, because it was more like a massive cheap-goods supermarket all crowded up into a tiny space, in which the stated business of the shop, namely the selling of news, seemed to be less important than the enterprising shifting of food tins and tacky bright plastic toys. But I do particularly remember a rainy late spring day in 1975, when for some reason the shop contained two huge cardboard boxes full of a few hundred well-rustled comics books, from DC, Marvel and Atlas. And there my classmate P., who would play friend expertly to my face while perfecting Iago-levels of treachery behind my back, would shop-lift great quantities of these comics, hidden as he was behind a born liar's insouciance and a great deal of pile-it-high-sell-it-cheap merchandise. Troubled by the conscience he lacked, I recall more conservatively and yet still-dishonestly investing my 15 pence dinner money on a copy of Daredevil # 121, which containing a miraculous example of unlikely and impossibly enticing Vince Colleta inks.
There's still a newsagents and general store at the top of Woodthorpe Road, called J R News. Perhaps it always called that. (Nothing has so reinforced for me the truth of what I used to teach about the unreliability of memory as the writing of this piece. The sense of what's here may certainly be true, but I'm not sure I can trust myself about a word of the detail. I just thought I should say.)
8. Lost Empires, Unstewarded.
Ashford was always a small town, an terminably unimportant place. But if a girl or boy had half an empty mind to pursue an obession with comic books, it could provide all the raw material for habit forming and future nostalgia with just some dinner money in your back pocket and a half-an-hour lunch break from school. It took no effort to be exposed to comics. It rather took a massive effort not to notice them.
And beyond Church Street lay the adjacent suburbs of Surrey, and there a bike and some small perseverence could offer yet undreamt of riches. Yep, Charlton comics, and Marvel black-and-white magazines, and DC 100 page spectaculars, and strange Atlas and Skywald and Warren magazines which looked like they should deliver a familiar charge, and yet provided something subtly, and profoundly unsubtly, different.
We may well yet take a final journey out into those wild and dangerous lands in the coming weeks.
Thank you for reading. Good day to you.
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