It was always going to happen, and I’d been putting if off for the longest time. But this weekend I finally went through the oldest of my comic boxes to see what should be kept and what’s moving on to the comic stack in the sky. These were the oldest of the old, from the grim teenage years and even earlier. Back when you could just pick up a random issue and get a good read, and money-sucking crossovers were few and far between.
I got most of them from jumble sales and loved every one of them. The Iron Man issue when he fought the Endotherm. (It should be a totally one sided fight but damn if the writer doesn’t make Stark work for every inch he gets). Another Iron Man one that introduced me to the terrifying Grey Gargoyle. A fantastic old Incredible Hulk book when the Vision was trying to integrate the Hulk and Banner and winds up trapped inside the Hulk’s body. Awesome stuff, all.
When I was a little older I discovered a comic shop next to my Aunts in Byres Road, Future Shock, and started to pick up as many cheap comics as I could get my hands on. I could get a whole stack of Quality Comics Judge Dredd reprints for two quid, and then I was picking up Scavengers. That was a nasty little book that reprinted the Flesh storyline from 2000AD, but the biggest draw for me was a forgotten little gem of a story which played in the back pages called Helltrek. So far as I know it’s never been collected in any form since. It was a merciless story about what happens to a group of settlers making out from Dredd’s Mega City 1 to a new life on the other side of the Cursed Earth and, without fail, every single instalment had at least one horrific death from either dinosaurs, cannibal mutants, or the dreaded “black scab.”
When the 90s hit, it spread like a virus through my comic collection. I got really into Jim Shooter’s Defiant line, especially his Warriors of Plasm, and ate up everything Dark Horse released on their Aliens line. Foil covers, trading cards, I wanted them all.
That’s not to say there aren’t a few embarrassments in there. Frankly, I don’t know what I was thinking with Spawn, but I think my regular purchase of Wizard had something to do with it. My rationale for collecting X-Men 2099 went something like I figured it’d be easier to get into the X-Men without needing to know all the backstory of the modern titles , but.. yeah.. that bombed. Doom 2099, let’s not talk about, and you know when it gets to Hulk 2099 that there are some serious problems in there.
I refuse to apologise for my love of Zero Hour, even though it’s pretty shoddy now and the line-up of heroes when they assemble in one of the early issues is thunderingly unimpressive. Entropy! The end of the universe! Time paradoxes! I inhaled it and as many tie-ins and I could get my hands on.
Every comic collection has to have an abomination though. Something that really is beyond the pale and there’s no reasonable explanation for why it stayed in there, and for me it’s… John Byrne’s Marvel: the Lost Generation. It’s supposed to tell the story of a kind of linking generation of Marvel heroes between the 40s and the 60s and reading it you’d be forgiving for wishing they’d stayed lost. It’s like Astro City but with sillier names and none of Kurt Busiek’s skill or love of the genre. It’s also numbered in reverse to make it even more annoying and difficult to follow, and the only thing it succeeds at it over 12 painful issues is being completely incomprehensible.
That piece of crap aside, I’m sorry to see them go, especially my beloved Judge Dredd’s. But it’s time for them to move on to new owners. I hope that wherever they wind up, some kid will pick up one of the books and discover a whole different world and get inspired by the old school heroics. Or at least that the giant spiders in Scavengers will give them nightmares.
Adventures in Comics 