Collecting Comic Books, A Personal History Part 3

The adverts from Vince Harris and Derek Powell had addresses near the Bartley Green Reservoir, on the outskirts of Birmingham and I lived in Shirley, also on the outskirts of Birmingham and not that far away from them!

So, I screwed up my courage, marked out a route, in the 

A to Z map book of Birmingham and one wet, saturday morning,

set out to meet them.

It was quite a shock to discover that these two "kids" (I was, after all, already 16, out of school and working) had collections that put mine to shame.  Not only that but they were connected to the larger comic book community, buying, selling and trading comic books with the early dealers of the day.

In so many ways, they were far more knowledgable than I was and they were happy to educate me.

That first afternoon, my strongest memory is of sitting in Derek's bedroom and being amazed that he had a complete run of the first six issues of the Hulk.  I was vaguely aware that they existed but I had never seen them and I was in awe!

I borrowed these images from Mycomicshop.com

because I never actually owned any of these issues

and even if I had, they would have been

traded away, back in the late Seventies, when

I let my Fantastic Four #1 go.

Returning to the main thread of the story,

Vince and Derek invited me to join them, the following weekend, when they went into Birmingham city centre.

There were a couple of places that they wanted to show me and a dealer, Pete Lennon, who sold comics out of his car, down by the old Bullring Market.

If I remember correctly, I think we met up at the tables, inside the market proper, of a secondhand book and magazine dealer.

I was introduced to Pete Lennon that morning, who was what my mother always described as a "wide boy", a wheeler-dealer, always on the lookout for a sucker to fleece.  Not a bad guy, he simply was what he was.

Later that same morning, we walked up Corporation Street to a Science Fiction & Fantasy bookshop named

JAPETUS

the first place that I ever saw the Frank Frazetta Conan paperback covers.  In their basement, in an incredibly small space, sat a longhaired young man, Alan, who sold brand new american import comic books!

I bought Marvel Premiere #13, by Frank Brunner, a comic that I still own today...the SAME comic! I might have bought #14 too but it is too long ago to be sure and which ever way it went, I became a regular weekly visitor to Japetus' basement for about a year.

After leaving Japetus, Vince and Derek took me to see a brand new bookshop on Summer Row, over by the reference library.

That was my first visit to the

ANDROMEDA

BOOKSHOP

and the first time that I met the proprietor

ROG PEYTON.

I have detailed, in an earlier posting, how shabbily I treated him at that first meeting, placing orders for comics that I never returned to buy and I take this opportunity to apologize to him again,

for being such a callow youth.

One moment, from that first visit to Andromeda, really stands out because it was a missed opportunity.  On a top shelf, at the back of the shop, there were two copies of Berni Wrightson's

Badtime Stories, priced at two pounds and fifty pence each.

I remember looking them over but they were by an artist that I had never heard of and they weren't superhero style stories.

The price was more than I could afford anyway and I walked away without one!

Within a couple of years I would be kicking myself over that decision!

That's all for today, kiddies.

More later.

Collecting Comic Books, A Personal History Part 2

In the last post, I brought up the 

second-hand bookshop in Digbeth and the part

it played in bringing older comics into my collection.

It was not where my weekly comic supply trips began,

since I had been riding my bicycle, from Shirley, along the Stratford Road, as far as Sparkhill, or further, checking the newsagents along the way for anything I wanted.  But, once I knew of the shop in Digbeth, I would usually head straight there, once a week, usually on saturdays and search through the waiting piles.

In my love of all things Marvel, I am sure that I must have passed over a lot of really good early DC comics.

In fact, I distinctly remember a young guy who worked there, asking me WHY ONLY MARVELS?

I don't remember my response but I am confident that it was probably fairly inane, since I remember him wandering away with a bemused look on his face.

I have wondered, over the years, whether that young man was the same person who sold comics out of the basement of Japetus, a bookshop I discovered in 1973 or 1974, after meeting with

Vince Harris and Derek Powell.

I met Vince, through an Adzine that I bought through an advert in an issue of The Exchange and Mart, a now defunct publication,

where one could advertise all manner of things for sale.

The advert that I responded to, brought me a copy of

"THING"

an amateur version of Exchange and Mart,

for comic book collectors.

This was in late 1973 or early 1974 and I remember the Cover

had a King Kull illustration on it.

For a long time, I had the belief that it was an unauthorized 

reprinting of the work of the late, great, John Severin

but I have begun to wonder if it wasn't by

the talented Alan Hunter,

an artist who contributed to many early Fanzines in England.

Who knows?  It is very difficult to unearth any images of those old issues these days.

The Cover, when folded in half

and below, when opened out.

This is as close as I have come and this is issue #22 from 1976!

Continued in the next thrilling instalment!

Collecting Comic Books, A Personal History.

I will try and keep this relatively simple

but it does travel back over a number of years

and several countries, so here goes.

In the beginning, I believe that it all began with a gift.

My mother's youngest sister and her husband, for reasons 

that are still unclear, got myself and my cousin subscriptions to 

Terrific and Fantastic, two new titles from Odhams Press.

This would be 1967 and I was 10 years old.

It was the first time that I had read a Marvel Comic story 

and I was captivated, so much so, that when we returned to Kenya, 

in East Africa, I cajoled my father into continuing my supply 

through a local newsagent.

We were living in Nakuru, Kenya, at the time and I had 

begun a phase of my life that continues to this day. 

This is the cover of my first taste of Marvel Superheroes!

Power Comics' Terrific #1.

I'm sorry about the size of the image but it's the only one that I could find.  I left the original behind, when I left England in 1980.

After returning to England, in 1968, I was living in Liverpool and 

I followed the Power Comics brand, even after they merged the them all together, right up to the end.  

Which was sometime in 1969.

During this time, I discovered the four-colour American comics at a seedy second-hand store, opposite the Walton Hospital on Rice Lane.  I still remember an issue of Dial-H-for Hero that I bought there but I have no memory of any of the

 Marvel titles being in the mix.

In the summer of 1970, we moved to Birmingham, also in England and a new phase of my comic book collecting was about to begin.

At my new school, Sharman's Cross School for Boys, the girls school was a block away, over on Solihull Road, I met a guy who was into collecting Spider-man in the four-colour editions.

His true name was Steve Rogers, I kid you not and he was astonished that I could recite the origin of the Fantastic Four from memory!  Not that we were ever destined to be great friends, he was far too much of a jock for that but we would talk comics together, from time to time.

It would only be for two years, by then, at 15, he had discovered girls and sold out his collection to me because he didn't want

any prospective girlfriend to discover that he read comics!

The Amazing Spider-Man #27,

if memory serves, was the earliest issue that Steve sold me

and I paid him Three Pounds for the 60 issues he owned.

That was in 1972 and by then I also had a fair collection of my own, of the Fantastic Four.

In very short order, I bought two other classmates of their collections too.  Steve Walker, who collected Daredevil and Andrew Morton, who collected The Avengers.  Andy Morton, also had one more claim to fame, he was the one who had discovered a second-hand bookshop, down in Digbeth, near the Coach Station, where we all found the earliest issues we had ever seen!

More next time.