I can only remember a period of about three months during my early teens when I made a conscious attempt to give up comics for good. Even then it wasn’t as if I actually wanted to - rather that I felt as though I ‘ought’ to follow my friends in putting aside childish things and preparing for a life of adult responsibilities. All it took was the sight of a spinner rack in a department store and I was hooked all over again!
Having said that the focus and form of my collecting have changed many times during the last fifty years or so. The very first comics I encountered - titles such as
Harold Hare,
Topper,
Beezer,
Dandy and
Beano - were read and enjoyed, then disposed of almost as casually as tea leaves and the evening newspaper. Comics were ephemeral indulgences on a par with gobstoppers, lucky bags, water pistols, cap bombs and transfer sheets - all acquired out of my limited pocket money from Mr Norbury’s magical paper shop. What’s more, the weighty decision to splash out on a relatively expensive comic rather than ice cream or sweets would often be prompted by the added novelty of a free gift: something that became quite common during the early 1960s as publishers like DC Thomson, Odhams and Fleetway fought for my pennies as though their lives depended on it. Of course their main aim was always to lock readers into the fixed commitment of a standing order (hence the serial nature of most British stories, with their ‘continued next week’ cliffhangers) - and sure enough I eventually succumbed to this siren song by convincing my mum that, as she had her
Woman’s Weekly and my Dad had his newspaper, it was
only fair that I ought to have my own comic every week! Thus, beginning with
TV Comic (which had recently begun to feature Supercar and Fireball XL5), I started to accumulate a growing pile of consecutive issues which qualified me as a proper collector for the first time - though it still didn’t prevent me from picking up odd free-gift issues of other comics like
Hornet and
Valiant. Over the next ten years my standing order underwent regular changes, as well as expanding from one weekly title to two. Comics that found their way onto the family paper bill at various times during this period included
Boys’ World,
Eagle,
Wham!,
TV Century 21,
Smash!,
Pow!,
Fantastic,
Terrific,
Valiant and
Lion! - and with each shift in my enthusiasm I generally allowed any earlier collection to be disposed of with the household waste (in those days the thought that old British comics could actually be worth money would have been laughable!).
However this was only part of the story as I was lucky enough to be around just as Thorpe & Porter began importing American comic books on a regular basis for the first time in almost twenty years. Better still I happened to have an uncle who, remembering these with affection from his own pre-war childhood, developed a habit of buying copies to read on his dinner break at work - after which he passed them on to me! The funny thing is that these comics, which mostly featured one-off stories rather than the endlessly-continued serials of their British equivalents, proved to be collectable in a new way. In effect they became the playground version of legal tender!
Consequently a small pile of American comic books could be like a bank account, allowing you to swap individual issues over and over again, thereby reading as many as a dozen comics for the price of one. And just like a bank balance one judged the value of one’s collection by its size rather than the actual contents at any one time.
Then one day I discovered Stan Lee and Marvel Comics, and everything changed overnight! Thanks to their innovative inclusion of artists’ credits and the exciting feeling that we neophyte ‘Marvelites’ were in on the ground floor at the creation of a whole new universe I turned my nose up at ‘Brand X’ (DC, Dell, Charlton, etc.) and began to seek out individual titles like
Spider-Man and
Fantastic Four with fanatical zeal - carefully building up complete runs that I wouldn’t even dream of swapping. This was collecting on a whole new level of seriousness and, thanks to Odhams’ fortuitous creation of their ‘Power Comics’ line, I was able to combine my British and American purchases into a single project.
So, for about three years I ‘Faced Front’ and ‘Made Mine Marvel’ as the Inhumans, the Silver Surfer, Dormammu, Galactus and even the Norse Ragnarok came and went in thrilling succession. Then, all of a sudden, it somehow seemed as though I’d had enough. Maybe there are only so many times you can watch the universe flicker on the brink of extinction without becoming the tiniest bit bored; besides which
Fantastic and
Terrific had in the meantime caught up with the backlog of American material and duly expired. This was the comic collector’s equivalent of the long night of the soul and it resulted in a firm decision to move on with my life: I said farewell to the FF, Nick Fury, Spidey, Doctor Strange and friends, boxed up my collection, and resolved never to look back.
As I said this resolution lasted for all of three months...and the thing that broke it was a brand new collecting drive: nostalgia! The fact is that once the Marvelite blinkers had fallen from my eyes I began to notice other comics once more - in particular those I’d enjoyed years before like
Green Lantern,
Flash,
Justice League of America...not to mention
TV21,
Eagle,
Valiant and the newly-revamped
Smash! And in addition to the current incarnations of those titles I discovered that a number of my contemporaries at school had large collections they were eager to offload in exchange for my box of Marvel comics! Thus I progressed to the next stage of the obsessive collector as I began to look more and more to the past, and less and less to the present.
I was just fourteen years old!
A couple of years later my brother picked up a cheaply-produced fanzine from a Manchester newsagent, wondering if it might interest me. Needless to say it did - leading in no time at all to pilgrimages to Dark They Were and Golden Eyed, the first London Comic Marts and my own fanzine submissions as an enthusiastic fan artist. After that there was no going back!
But though comic collecting has remained an important part of my life from then till now it has continued to evolve. Unlike Derek and Ray I’ve become less of a completist and more of a sampler - spreading out my interest across a wide range of comics-related fields. Whereas my original enthusiasm was confined to serious stories with a fantastic element - Superheroes, Science Fiction, Fantasy, etc. - it gradually widened to include Humour, Westerns, War, Girls’ and Nursery comics...even Sport! And as writers and artists became more widely known through the efforts of a handful of pioneering researchers I started to follow creators rather than characters.
As Rab says, old comics were much more affordable back in the early 1970s (though even then the thought of splashing out
two weeks’ pocket money on a single item like
Fantastic Four no.1 or
Amazing Fantasy no.15 was more than I was prepared to countenance!). While not particularly plentiful British comics were especially cheap when you could find them as most fans simply weren’t interested in the home-grown material: this allowed people like Denis Gifford and Bob Monkhouse to stagger home with masses of rare titles and artwork that nobody else wanted! Since then, of course, prices have skyrocketed for many items leading to the appalling phenomenon of ‘slabbing’ in America, and making any prospect of acquiring long runs of early
Dandys or
Beanos out of the question for the less well-off.
In retrospect it makes me squirm to think of all the things I could have bought at some of the earliest comic marts I attended! These days, not having a great deal of spare cash, I rarely buy anything from Ebay or dealers such as 30th Century Comics - yet in some ways this has become an advantage as it forces me to search out obscure and unregarded items instead. And, while my initial preference for American comic books has become somewhat dimmed by the exhaustive extent to which they’ve been catalogued and reprinted in recent years, the joy of British comics is that there is still so much
Terra incognita to explore. In a way I’ve come to think of my collecting as a form of archaeology: exploring those areas of British comics that have yet to become fashionable with other comics fans. And it never ceases to amaze me how many amazing treasures there
are out there, just waiting for the discerning collector to uncover...!
- Phil Rushton
