INTERVIEWS

Fat Kid Flashing

I would have been about ten years old when my teacher stood me in front of the class and told them I was a bastard. He chalked the word on the blackboard, so they all knew how to spell it properly.

I'd already written my first novel by then, of course. In red biro, in a spiral-bound notebook, a chapter a page. It could have been the clunky, derivative plot that doomed it - it was about a bunch of kids and a flying saucer - or the shallow characterisation. But really it was too influenced by comics.

I don’t know when I first became aware of comics. Real comics that is, not The Beezer, Dandy or Beano, but American comic books, with their slick action and costumed heroes. I do know the first character I fixated on was The Flash. Sucking a mouthful of energy-boosting Refreshers, I'd pound the streets seeking wrongdoers, imagining myself a blur. The Crimson Avenger. A sweating fat kid, waddling about in hand-me-down, white plastic plimsolls two sizes too big.

Only later did I see how natural it was for me to identify with somebody who could run fast. That teacher's description had been strictly accurate, and illegitimacy wasn’t exactly all the rage in those far off days. Imagine the kind of time I had in the playground after his little announcement.

I was born, and spent over forty years of my life, in a very posh area of North London. The funny thing was that we weren't posh at all when I was a child. We were cold water, tin bath, outside lav, hide in the coal cellar from the rent man, pig poor. My family was in this chic borough because decades before, my great-grandmother exploited a market niche. Knowing that all the swank houses in St Johns Wood had cats to keep the rats down, she opened a cats' meat shop there. Long after Warfarin did for the business we were still hanging on in a little terrace with other servants descendants; a miniature working class ghetto amid the conspicuous wealth. Our version of Rotwang's house in Metropolis.

So I grew up in the heart of the city. That meant places to buy comics, when I could get the money. A short walk around the back of Primrose Hill - through the very spot where H.G. Wells set the climax of War of the Worlds - brought me to a railway bridge. On its approach stood a tiny, sort of semi-prefab shop, a newsagents, now long gone. It was run by a wizened old man who smelt of pipe tobacco. Its one of the first places I remember buying comics. (In my teens I found a copy of the British edition of Mad magazine number one there, and saw something else comics could do.) Comics were also on sale in what would now be called a convenience store - a grocery shop with a couple of spinner racks, and my peers preferred shoplifting venue. But the best place for comics was Church Street market, off the Edgware Road, which had several bookstalls. They'd peg up the juicier looking stuff, Yankee comics mixed in with copies of Hot Rod Magazine and Parade. There were rows of orange boxes lined with white butchers paper, full of comics to flip.

In my mind's eye I can still see a page from The Flash where he was trapped with a hissing canister of poison gas. He dispersed the fumes by waving his hands about super fast. One of the stories I grew up with was about an uncle I never met, who came out of the army and got a job labouring for the Ministry of War, as it then was. Along with four other young men, he was set to shifting oil drums in a shed at Catterick army camp. For security reasons they were locked in while doing it. The drums contained some variant of mustard gas, and one of them burst. My uncle and his mates were found piled up in front of the door, having fought to get out. All of them dead.

The Flash may have made me believe I could survive a gas attack, but my affections were fickle. I took up with Green Lantern. That costume, that ring, the cod interstellar mysticism - all very cool. I wasn't so fond of Superman, probably for the very reason I liked Green Lantern. Superman was invulnerable and consequently a bit boring. I could see why they had to introduce kryptonite, but even as a kid I recognised it as a pretty obvious plot device. Whereas Green Lantern had to regularly recharge his powers. He wasn’t indestructible and that made him interesting. I became a Batman reader for similar reasons, but never took to Robin. The youthful sidekicks felt patronising. Green Arrow and Aquaman were OK, but I hated Speedy and Aqualad.

DC comics of that period were actually quite cosy. Sort of comic strip soap operas. Was Lois Lane going to discover Clark Kent’s secret identity? Hell, all the superheroes were trying to protect their secret identities, with occasional time out to fight giant robots in warehouses owned by companies called Acme. There was definitely a comfort factor. But it wasn’t just DCs that swelled the pile behind the shabby sofa in our front room. I never went for war, western or sports comics, but I was attracted to the spooky ones. Some of them, including Charltons, were bona fide American imports with the legendary smudged TP (Thorpe & Porter) price stamp. Most were black and white reprint compilations like Mysteries From Other Worlds and Eerie. I was too late for the EC comics, had I known it then, but favoured this thinner gruel well enough. In my circle, Eagle was thought a bit poncy and middle class; except perhaps for Dan Dare. I loved the look of Tarzan Adventures, but they were hard to come by.

Then I started noticing Marvel comics. In fact, it was the pre-superhero stories in the likes of Journey Into Mystery and Strange Tales that grabbed me, when every issue featured a different, bigger monster. When they started reviving superheroes, and inventing new ones - Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Daredevil, etc - it was a revelation. Shielding alter-egos gave way to anxiety about Aunt May's latest heart attack and Peter Parker's acne. But the Marvel comics ripped it up too, in a way the comparatively staid DCs never did, and for the first time we knew who the artists were. Marvel under Stan Lee was innovating and exciting. Yet it seems in retrospect that about the time they started putting that little "Pop Art" logo on their covers they lost the innocence and naivety that gave the earlier efforts their appeal. By the '70s they were just endless wrestling matches in multicoloured underwear.

Long before that, my taste had fragmented. The grocery shop began selling Famous Monsters of Filmland, Spacemen and Mad Monsters, sparking fresh interests. Copies of Astounding, Fantastic, New Worlds and Fantasy & Science Fiction appeared on the market stalls. A kid at school was selling me American sf paperbacks with garish covers; stolen to order, though I pretended not to know that. I carried on liking comics, but much more selectively. I still think Will Eisner's a god, and I'll read anything with Dave Gibbons or Frank Miller artwork. I've even written a few strips myself, and been an adapter for graphic novels, which made me realise how hard and particular a discipline it is. These days, making my way as a writer, I can't deny the part comics played in piquing my early imagination, and the lessons they taught me about storytelling.

And maybe I now have a better idea of who the real bastards are.