Stephen Walsh (32) is a scriptwriter and comic collector.
The first notion I ever had of collecting was when I was about four years old. The Beano was 2p, plus 1/2p tax. I got it one week, then the next, so after I had about two I felt I was a collector. I remember not really being able to read, but something set fire to my imagination. I'd see my older cousins' comics in their houses, and I was looking at giant this and flying that, wondering what the hell was going on. I remember, later, going into the newsagent. You'd get this electric thrill going up your arm when you touched your new comic!
At the moment I've a couple of thousand comics, but in my heyday I'd have had about three times that amount. One day my room would have been packed with the Beano, then maybe 2000 AD came along, and next thing the Beanos were all gone. Some of the English comics were good. The stories were all "working-class hero in grubby runners beats posh chap" sort of thing. But it was the American comics, like Spiderman, that had the taste of forbidden fruit about them. You couldn't really get them here, and your parents were suspicious of them, so there was a certain thrill sneaking them into the house. I remember when Action first came out. At the time most comics were along the lines of Billy Bunter, when everyone ended up at the tuck shop. But in Action the lead character could end up with his legs cut off, or dead. It wasn't a very reassuring comic - it undermined all my childhood illusions! But it was very revolutionary, all about people dropping out of school because it was boring. I still buy comics, but I find myself bying re-prints of old 1950s' Batmans, and that sort of thing. It's not a great indication of where today's comics are at if you're buying stuff that's 40-odd years old. But today's comics are very much production-line stuff, a lot of surface excitment, all noise and no content. There's a crisis of creativity in mainstream comics nowadays. There are more and more gimmicks to buy with the comic and it's got to the point where it's become all about inventing some novelty value instead of being about the stories. There are small publishers around doing good things. Fantagraphics, for instance, did Love and Rockets, which was the alternative hip comic for about seven years. They also do 8 Ball, which is probably the best regularly published at the moment.
Flaming Carrot is an American comic which is really excellent; the stories are more weird then most, and really personal. But they are on a low budget so it only comes out now and again. There's a good side to those irregular comics: finding a comic you aren't expecting is all part of the thrill of reading comics. It's a wonderful discovery. The various comic shops around are a great idea, but it isn't the same as walking into your local newsagent and finding a bunch of great comics on the floor. Yes, I did put a comic together with a friend of mine, Kellie Strom, called The Acid Bath Case. It was a paranoid detective story set in the US in the 1950s, about a downat-heel detective investigating murders which might or might not be done by President Eisenhower, told in a way that you never know what to believe. Comics are not just something I do in spare time. I write film and television scripts and I find the whole comic thing creeps in at the weirdest of times. You can't bury the way it influences you - it comes back to life all the time!
In an interview with Jackie Bourke
next week
Bill Clinton
What can the media's feeding frenzy about the US President's sex scandal, and then the rapid retreat from the story, teach us about news values in the Nineties?
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