Comic Effect

My Doctor Who Magazine came this week.

It’s a magazine not a comic (feel free to imagine me saying that in a defensive, whiny, teenager sort of a voice) but even so, and although I no longer sit under the letterbox like I used to when I was a kid, there’s undeniably that same ‘new comic’ vibe when I know it’s due.

Comics seemed to figure very heavily in my youth, in a way that they don’t seem to with kids today. When I look at the magazine racks in supermarkets or in newsagents, the children’s section is full of over-bright, generic, photographic covers, and the only selling point seems to be the free gift.

In my day, as a given you’d get free gifts with the first three issues (very occasionally, the first four). After that, the comic had to stand on its own two feet, with free gifts used only very sparingly – a Judge Dredd badge with issue 178 of 2000AD for example, or the occasional plastic glove puppet of Dennis or Gnasher in The Beano.

And we seemed to have so many comics. Whizzer & Chips, Topper, Krazy… Starlord, Tornado, Battle… Roy of the Rovers and especially the long-running Tiger were my brother’s particular favourites (featuring Johnny Cougar, Skid Solo, Hotshot Hamish – and of course Billy Dane, the one with the boots). I started with Buster, another long-runner, which had Faceache and The Leopard of Lime Street.

I regularly got Star Wars Weekly (later Monthly (later still, back to Weekly)) and the 1980s revival of Eagle with Dan Dare the headliner, accompanied by a host of other, mainly photographic strips. (A curious delight of the subsequent DVD age was spotting heroic-but-doomed ‘reporter Howard Harvey’ from the legendary first Doomlord strip, popping up as an extra in 1980s Doctor Who stories.)

But I was probably most passionate about, most engaged with, 2000AD. Some of its strips were extraordinary storytelling – targeted at kids (well, presumably) but pitched at an adult level. The classic Dostoyevsky dilemma (to create a Utopia could you torture to death one innocent creature?) I first came across in one of Tharg’s early Future Shocks. And an instalment of one particular Robohunter story ended with the Mayor discovering that he was actually a robot replica of himself. It would be a great cliffhanger with somebody else finding out; but to discover it of yourself… That still blows my mind.

Occasionally I think about tracking down some of those memorable back issues: Dredd’s Judge Child saga say, or the Sam Slade story where they all burst into song. Halo Jones maybe, or Fiends of the Eastern Front. Something always holds me back.

As a child, no question, I had an awareness that at their best these strips were treating me ‘as an adult’ in that they weren’t patronising or condescending, and they certainly weren’t shying away from ideas. But I’m not sure that necessarily translates today as ‘for adults’.

Many memorable and influential things from my childhood come a cropper with this dilemma unfortunately. On the one hand, I’d sort of love to revisit them; on the other, for all that they felt grown up to me as a kid, I know they’re not really meant for me as an adult. Grange Hill was extraordinary back in the day, but I’d feel just a little bit odd about buying the DVDs and watching them now.

Maybe I’m feeling that “when I became a man, I put away childish things” (which, depending on your point of view, is a quotation either from Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians or Doctor Who’s The Curse of Fenric). I definitely remember collecting Star Wars toys well after Return of the Jedi had been released, until in my mid-teens, having just bought a large Kenner Rebel Transporter toy, it suddenly seemed ‘childish’ and ‘wrong’.

Of course Doctor Who is, as ever, the exception to the rule. There’s a show that’s absolutely intended for children but with adult levels to it, yet I revisit that (and often!) without ever feeling it’s ‘inappropriate’.

I don’t even feel childish when my comic turns up each month.

Magazine. When my magazine turns up each month.