Comics UK

The first comic I remember seeing is issue 1 of Warlord. Seeing as I started school that year, it's not really a surprise. I then discovered my brother's stash of Commandos and was working my way through them when my mum chucked them out, but the first one I ever bought myself was Avalanche! Commando 968.

My first comic was Harold Hare's Own Paper no.1 which I pestered my Mum to buy for me after it was advertised on TV. I've never forgotten the sheer excitement of seeing her waiting for me outside my Infants' School with a pristine copy 'hot off the presses'.

Some years later I was confined to bed with mumps feeling utterly sorry for myself and bored out of my mind (remember that in those days televisions in the bedroom were unheard of...and the average computer would have filled a medium-sized aircraft hangar!). Then out of the blue the paperboy delivered my copy of that week's Wham! - after which the hours just flew by as I became lost in the worlds of Ken Reid and Leo Baxendale, reading and rereading strips such as Eagle-Eye and Frankie Stein and constantly being rewarded with new sight gags or excruciating puns that I hadn't noticed before.

...Forty-five years later those pages are still etched onto my mind!


- Phil Rushton

philcom55 wrote:Some years later I was confined to bed with mumps feeling utterly sorry for myself and bored out of my mind........ Then out of the blue the paperboy delivered my copy of that week's Wham! - after which the hours just flew by as I became lost in the worlds of Ken Reid and Leo Baxendale, reading and rereading strips such as Eagle-Eye and Frankie Stein and constantly being rewarded with new sight gags or excruciating puns that I hadn't noticed before....Forty-five years later those pages are still etched onto my mind!

I really can empathise with those feelings, Phil. In my case it was The Wizard, and I was in The Royal Lancaster Infirmary, aged 9, having just had my appendix removed. I was in a men's ward for a fortnight and inevitably utterly bored because I had read every book the nurses could find, some more than once, and the conversation with the other patients in the ward was a bit limiting, as you can imagine. Then one day, after I had pleaded with them to find me some more, a nurse came in, put a pile of issues of The Wizard on my bed, saying that she was sorry but those were all she could find. That was a life-changing moment for me and, presumably because they were not books, the nurse had felt the need to apologise!! If only she'd known! Every so often I reread them but, no matter how hard I try, I cannot relive the sheer joy that I felt when I read those wonderful serial stories for the first time. I certainly felt it once, though, so that will just have to be enough. Nowadays I merely enjoy the stories all over again.......and again.

Phoenix wrote:Every so often I reread them but, no matter how hard I try, I cannot relive the sheer joy that I felt when I read those wonderful serial stories for the first time. I certainly felt it once, though, so that will just have to be enough. Nowadays I merely enjoy the stories all over again.......and again.

Aaah, how I sympathise - the poignant lot of the adult comic/story paper collector, striving to recapture a feeling that we know is lost forever...sigh...

Just a detail, Niblet. The quotation you have just posted was mine, not philcom55's.

Phoenix wrote:Just a detail, Niblet. The quotation you have just posted was mine, not philcom55's.

Oops, those damn nested quotes Fixed it now.

Niblet wrote:Aaah, how I sympathise - the poignant lot of the adult comic/story paper collector, striving to recapture a feeling that we know is lost forever...sigh...

Whereas Sidney Smith's idea of Heaven was 'eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of
trumpets' mine used to be reading comics while drinking Tizer. Nowadays I can still experience a faint echo of the thrill I used to get from comics - but the Tizer is completely undrinkable.

...I wonder - did they change the recipe, or has my aging palate just lost its sensitivity to the taste of magic?

- Phil Rushton (...'trailing clouds of glory!')

I have no idea what my first comic was but I do remember just looking at each paicture in turn so that was before I could read. Also remember later pronouncing OK as ock as I was unfamiliar with the word. Me and my mate kept talking about "orgin" issues as we had never see the word origin before. We used to do carbon copies of the fantastic and Terrific pin-up pages onto plain paper by drawing over the actual pin-up. I still have those comics and look at them in despair because of my vandalism.

philcom55 wrote:Whereas Sidney Smith's idea of Heaven was 'eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of
trumpets' mine used to be reading comics while drinking Tizer. Nowadays I can still experience a faint echo of the thrill I used to get from comics - but the Tizer is completely undrinkable.

...Try buying a new bottle, then!

philcom55 wrote:Phil Rushton (...'trailing clouds of glory!')

There was a time, Phil, when I was susceptible to this uncritical idea of Wordsworth's. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, he says a little earlier in the poem, a concept whose comforting words bypassed my critical faculties at the time. I think I was just too busy learning quotations. Fortunately, such faculties as I did possess were sufficiently persuasive for the GCE 'O' level examiner to decide that I was worth a pass anyway. Mind you, one of these days we will find out whether Wordsworth was right............or then again, perhaps not.

Did Harold Hare comic ever give away a deluxe plasticine free gift in the 60s that you are aware of, Phil? Coz I definitely have a vivid memory of a multi-coloured plasticine set, wrapped in cellophane, from some free-gift nursery source from this period.....

I have a similar memory of that "Ispy" would be good to know if its the case. I loved that character as a kid

I can't remember what exactly it was, but it was probably some colourful nursery title. Earliest comic memories I have are of Thunderbirds ones, probably all-reprint titles from the late 80's or early 90's. I can remember one strip jarringly having square speech bubbles.
I also used to get "Turtle comics" but can remember virtually nothing about them, other than one scene "looking up" in a sewer.
I can remember my first Beano (my mum got it "instead of" the Turtle comic, which had probably ended), it was the first one with "The Pink Glove" in.

No mention of a Teenage Mutant HERO Turtles comic on the TMNT Wikia. As usual, the UK ones get no coverage (not the first franchise I've had this problem with).

They were probably just reprinted US stories anyway. In fact they may even have been US imports (I vaguely remember them being that size and full colour). It was around 90-91 and newsagents still had a shred of "individuality" up to the mid 90's. Later on (96/97) I found an issue of a fairly obscure US comic called "Lady Justice" in the local Mace! That certianly wouldn't happen today.