Nostalgia & Comics & me - part 2

My first ever visit was one I'll never forget.
Mom & Dad lovingly trudged through Birmingham with me looking for the shop.
When we got there I couldn't believe a place so big could be full of comics.

Being the uneducated little fool that I was back then, I headed straight upstairs for the British comics section. Yes, back in the 80s there were still British comics. And they didn't even have free gifts on them either. Of course, the British comic I was after was a crappy reprint of Captain America, but that's besides the point.

It was on coming downstairs and looking around properly that I knew I'd found perfection. All those wonderful American comics.

One of the comics I can remember getting on that first visit was New Mutants #1 (wiki). I've just googled this and found out that it was published March 1983. Now even in those days, we still managed to get the comics fairly near to American release dates, so I must have been in the shop sometime around summer 1983. Making me 12. This is actually much younger than I seem to remember but my memory, as I keep reminding you, is completely shot.


After that, I was back every couple of months.

I'd carefully save my pocket money and would usually have about £20 to waste on comics. (As Mom would always put it).

Eventually, Mom & Dad got fed up with trying to hurry me up and would drop me off for a couple of hours to wander around carefully trying to decide what to get.

Back then my tastes were very very strictly Marvel only. X-Men, New Mutants, Alpha Flight, Rocket bloody Raccoon and many more.


But the change came quickly. From what I remember Phil Clarke gave me a Cerebus poster and a copy of the comic. I've just googled it to find the issue and I'm amazed to see it was this one:

Issue 67 - October 1984. Even assuming a gap of a few months between publication and me getting it, that means the first great comic I ever read was when I was something like 14.

Even following Cerebus from then on, I still read loads of crap, something that didn't really change until I started working there in 1987. But nice to realise I started young!

Links -
Cerebus wiki
Grand Comics Database Project (great for cover scans and where I found the one above)

Nostalgia & Comics / Comics