Kev the comic fan

I’ve tried to think back to when it all started for me. Nothing specific comes to mind. I kind of feel like comics have always been there. I never had a big discovery moment. Over the years I have read and listened to, many interviews with creators and fans and most of them can point to a specific moment in time, or a particular comic itself, of when they discovered comic books. It sounds as if they never knew comics existed and needed to ‘discover’ them for the first time. But I don’t have any of that. We had books, we had magazines, we had comic books. Comic books were always a ‘thing’.

So, what comic books were I reading at that time? What was available to me? Not that much actually. There were a few ranges of comics that were always available: the Harvey Comics titles, such as Casper The Friendly Ghost and Richie Rich, as well as Archie Comics Digest Magazines. I guess these were wholesome, kid-friendly titles that any age could read. You grow out of them pretty quickly though.

And that’s where the Franco-Belgian comics of Asterix and Tintin take over. We always had a few volumes of each of these. Asterix was my favourite of the two. I loved the fun, humorous adventure stories and the artwork drew me in. This is probably the first time that I really ‘looked’ at the artwork in a comic. Tintin seemed to be more serious where as Asterix was pure joyous fun.

Superhero comics were not that readily available where I was. I knew about them and was always looking for them but couldn’t easily find them. Convenience stores would have spinner racks with random issues of various titles, mostly DC Comics. I would still buy these but as I was unable to follow a storyline I didn’t do it too often. One of my earliest memories of desperately wanting superhero comics were tiny 16-page reprints that Kellogg’s inserted in boxes of cereal. You had to buy various cereals to get different titles so needless to say I only got one or two of them, and they probably weren’t the titles I really wanted.

These images were found on a great blog I only just discovered, ‘South African Comic Books’. They cover all of the comics that were either published or reprinted in South Africa. Very interesting indeed.

Other ranges of comics that we had at home were The War Picture Library Digest, Beano, Dandy and a few other British titles. My serious comic collecting would come later when I was in high school. From that point on it was no turning back.

One of the major things that I have realised about all of this was that I got a pretty good ‘education’ on comics. Throughout my life, I have always been open to trying new and different comic books and that has probably been due to the variety I grew up with. Franco-Belgian, British and American comics are all different in various ways. I read full-colour as well as black-and-white comics. At some point in my early life, I knew of Japanese manga as well so it never came as a surprise to me when I was able to get my hands on some of it. I wanted to explore it and never had to be encouraged to ‘try’ it. I was probably more open and receptive to anything to do with comics than anybody else around me was when I was growing up and that is why I took all of that information in. For some reason, comics have always fascinated me, not only from a reading and fan point of view but also as a creator. I knew artists and writers created these things and I wanted to do that as well.

Kev