A year older

Back in the office after a weekend extended by two days because I do not wish to work on my birthday and also because it’s nice to have an extra day off, anyway.

Saturday we journeyed up to Bedford to see ellefurtle’s cousin whom she had not seen for many years, so it was nice for her to make contact again after all that time. We spent much of the afternoon in the pub where we adjourned for lunch and then went back to meet the cousinlings, the youngest of which I think postdates last contact. It turns out that the younger sister is a promising musician and the older has some talent as an artist and I at least, enjoyed looking over her portfolio (in which there were many cartoons).

Little if anything was achieved on Sunday, which is as it should be. I got a great deal of Warcrack played and we watched a reasonable amount of telly. There was some tidying, however, in anticipation of the visit of the in-laws on Monday, which in itself occasioned a trip to the local.

Furtle made me a dalek cake, which was very tasty, if a little wobbly. I have a photograph of it which I am forbidden to post up either here or on FarceBørk, so if you want to see it you will have to pester the shy cake-maker herself. It is largely eaten now, which is just as well, because it is not immediately obvious how something made with two Swiss Rolls, dollops of icing sugar and chocolate buttons entirely dovetails with a low carb diet…

In the evening, after a further hour or two lolling around to overcome the effects of afternoon BEER, we decamped, just the two of us, to a local Indian restaurant where had a very fine curry.

This is how you do birthdays.

Yesterday was largely a matter of getting over the strain of relaxing by relaxing, though we did nip out to the shops for a breath of fresh air.

This morning was back at the office. There is nothing quite like a commute on unsympathetic trains to break the mood. Never mind, soon be the weekend.

Full Figures in Action!

My ever informative Twitter feed tells me that today is the nineteenth anniversary of Jack “King” Kirby’s passing.

Jolly Jack was always my favourite comic book artist/creator when I was a kid, and in many ways, probably he still is. I mean there are better – or at least more realistic –artists out there and there are people with greater imaginations, but Kirby brought the two together in a way that no one person really did before and no-one has really done since. A few have come close, but none have really equalled him, especially for sheer energy and creativity.

I guess it was only for three or four years before I decided that I’d grown out of comics (in that period of about 12-15 years from the age of puberty, where everybody quietly discards their childhood, before rediscovering it in their mid twenties) that I religiously comber the local newsagents, but I have find memories.

In the late 60s and early 70s there were no comic shops. Or at least there were none in Telford. American comic book distribution was erratic and was achieved, I guess, in much the same way it had been in the immediate post war period, where bundles of them were shoved in ships’ holds to make up the weight where no more lucrative cargo was available. And when they arrived, they were not always in pristine condition. Nonetheless, I waited avidly and armed with the tiny amount of pocket money I had (tiny even by the standards of the day), I would spend Saturdays wandering from newsagent to newsagent in the area, rifling through the rotary magazine stands for my favourite titles.

Sometimes I would leave it a month or two before going to a particular outlet if it was some distance away, but if I noticed a newsagent with a likely-looking magazine rack, I would file the information away and pay a visit as and when I could. I had a small network, too, of like-minded friends and sometimes would receive word through the grapevine that such and such a place had restocked.

Thinking back on it, I must have travelled miles – sometimes on foot, sometimes by bike. Rarely if ever, by bus.

My favourites were always Marvel, never DC. In the 1960s only diehard Superman and Batman fans liked DC titles. They caught up eventually, but at that time there was simply no comparison. And at the top of the Marvel tree were Stan and Jack and for me, the Fantastic Four. With patience and sometimes wildly out of chronological order, I managed to build a fair old collection of Marvels (most of which were given the hoof by my Mum while I was at school one day, though I managed to save my FF collection). I remember particularly, for some reason, having bought and read FFs 75 and 78, it took months for first 77 and then 76 to turn up. And once I saw a copy of a comic while I had no money on me and when I went back a day or two later IT HAD GONE!

My loss of interest in the genre started a few months after Jack Kirby had left Marvel for DC. I didn’t know he was going and I was horrified when I saw (I think) John Romita’s (or was it John Buscema?) artwork in the Fantastic Four. I hoped it was maybe a one-off, and when some of Jack’s artwork appeared around issued 110 I was encouraged, but no. He had gone and was working on his New Gods saga over at the Distinguished Competition. I bought a few, but didn’t like them much and then around the age of twelve I discovered music and shortly afterwards began to notice in a tentative way that there might be something more to these girl creatures than mere bossiness and annoyance and slowly, that was that. There was a short dalliance with war stories in British Commando comics, financed through emergency bus money until Mum found out and made me feel as though I had somehow committed the crime of the century (fibs were told, it is true), but that was that until I discovered the concept of the specialist comic shop in my mid twenties, after following a friend into one.

It all came back with a vengeance and although over the years my consumption of funny books has dwindled again, I still buy them (mainly now in graphic novel format) and enjoy them. At the age of fifty-four, my internal ten year old still gets his comic book thrill from deep down. And it’s largely down to Jolly Jack Kirby and his unrivalled ability to make a comic page exciting.

Full Figures in Action!

My ever informative Twitter feed tells me that today is the nineteenth anniversary of Jack “King” Kirby’s passing.

Jolly Jack was always my favourite comic book artist/creator when I was a kid, and in many ways, probably he still is. I mean there are better – or at least more realistic –artists out there and there are people with greater imaginations, but Kirby brought the two together in a way that no one person really did before and no-one has really done since. A few have come close, but none have really equalled him, especially for sheer energy and creativity.

I guess it was only for three or four years before I decided that I’d grown out of comics (in that period of about 12-15 years from the age of puberty, where everybody quietly discards their childhood, before rediscovering it in their mid twenties) that I religiously comber the local newsagents, but I have find memories.

In the late 60s and early 70s there were no comic shops. Or at least there were none in Telford. American comic book distribution was erratic and was achieved, I guess, in much the same way it had been in the immediate post war period, where bundles of them were shoved in ships’ holds to make up the weight where no more lucrative cargo was available. And when they arrived, they were not always in pristine condition. Nonetheless, I waited avidly and armed with the tiny amount of pocket money I had (tiny even by the standards of the day), I would spend Saturdays wandering from newsagent to newsagent in the area, rifling through the rotary magazine stands for my favourite titles.

Sometimes I would leave it a month or two before going to a particular outlet if it was some distance away, but if I noticed a newsagent with a likely-looking magazine rack, I would file the information away and pay a visit as and when I could. I had a small network, too, of like-minded friends and sometimes would receive word through the grapevine that such and such a place had restocked.

Thinking back on it, I must have travelled miles – sometimes on foot, sometimes by bike. Rarely if ever, by bus.

My favourites were always Marvel, never DC. In the 1960s only diehard Superman and Batman fans liked DC titles. They caught up eventually, but at that time there was simply no comparison. And at the top of the Marvel tree were Stan and Jack and for me, the Fantastic Four. With patience and sometimes wildly out of chronological order, I managed to build a fair old collection of Marvels (most of which were given the hoof by my Mum while I was at school one day, though I managed to save my FF collection). I remember particularly, for some reason, having bought and read FFs 75 and 78, it took months for first 77 and then 76 to turn up. And once I saw a copy of a comic while I had no money on me and when I went back a day or two later IT HAD GONE!

My loss of interest in the genre started a few months after Jack Kirby had left Marvel for DC. I didn’t know he was going and I was horrified when I saw (I think) John Romita’s (or was it John Buscema?) artwork in the Fantastic Four. I hoped it was maybe a one-off, and when some of Jack’s artwork appeared around issued 110 I was encouraged, but no. He had gone and was working on his New Gods saga over at the Distinguished Competition. I bought a few, but didn’t like them much and then around the age of twelve I discovered music and shortly afterwards began to notice in a tentative way that there might be something more to these girl creatures than mere bossiness and annoyance and slowly, that was that. There was a short dalliance with war stories in British Commando comics, financed through emergency bus money until Mum found out and made me feel as though I had somehow committed the crime of the century (fibs were told, it is true), but that was that until I discovered the concept of the specialist comic shop in my mid twenties, after following a friend into one.

It all came back with a vengeance and although over the years my consumption of funny books has dwindled again, I still buy them (mainly now in graphic novel format) and enjoy them. At the age of fifty-four, my internal ten year old still gets his comic book thrill from deep down. And it’s largely down to Jolly Jack Kirby and his unrivalled ability to make a comic page exciting.