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.