The unspoken question in Rik Hoskin's article on Captain Britain touched a chord with me. Was it the postmodernist deconstruction of the superhero as an icon of masculinity that first attracted me to Captain Britain? Or was it the free boomerang and the big stick? Well, it's so hard to choose... This brought back to my mind a fundamental disquiet about the way comics are going, which I want to share with you now via a personal history.

Let's face it, most if not all of the so-called "adult" comics just managed to scupper what was good about comics in the first place, and ended up plummeting between stools faster than their own sales figures. It just gets to be embarrassing trying to marshal your argument for Comics as an Adult Medium when you realise you daren't speak a single name from the list without wincing.

Their problem was that they forgot that it's the FORM of comics that attracts - or more precisely what that form suggests about their relationship to the reader. In an era of mass communications, comics are the last language of intimacy left, and lend themselves to cults and secret societies more than discussions on The Late Show.

In short, it's my theory that comics bear an unusually close relationship to a childs play. Books, TV shows and films could have adventures and be exciting but were somehow above the school desk - they were too public, too open to adult view. Comics were more part of the real, unofficial school rules of playground games and not being allowed to tell teacher - with pictures that were diagrams of private meanings. I still get that sense from the best of the comics I read today.

And that's where I think the truth lies. How many years will it be before virtual reality blows all other artforms away? Well we've got that long to try and figure out just what's so special about comics anyway. I maintain we can only do this by digging deep into our memories to when we drew our first comic on the kitchen table when we should have been doing our homework, not our first trial sample for Vertigo or some such bollocks.

So I'm going to start my campaign to save comics by telling the stories of what comics meant to me as a child to see how they correspond to other people's. I hope this will encourage others to do the same, so we can get all touchy-feely and stuff. To regress to this primal part of my memory I spent a week researching - playing with my old Action Man and the SPG vehicle whose treads always came off if you used it on the carpet, and going to bed at 7 o'clock. I may sound somewhat eccentric - no actually, I'm going to sound like a complete nutter. But that's all part of the plan, okay?

Two basic facts about my childhood may help to clarify things. One - I was an only child. My best friend had an elder sister who liked Pop Music and talked through 'Dr. Who'. But there were no half-way points between me and the adult world. Two - I was bought up in an ordinary kind of town. Some roadsigns referred to it as Rugby, others just called it an ordinary kind of town. Sometimes there were exciting trips to nearby big towns like Leicester or Coventry where there were Toy Shops (i.e. an adult place given over to a child purpose, and therefore magical). But there was no such thing as a Comic Shop in the country.

The first comics I read were the two-colour British funnies - I remember 'Knockout', 'The Beezer', 'Sparky' and 'The Beano'. But I never read 'The Dandy' because it had proper writing like books under the pictures and this was an obvious cheap attempt to creep books in that I wasn't about to fall for. I was aware that I didn't live like Dennis or Ginger, my knees didn't knock and my Mum wouldn't let me out to just loiter the streets, and I felt vaguely as though I should.

Comics were associated with Saturdays and summer holidays (I'd change which comic I bought each summer); in short a precariously balanced pitch of negotiation between adult and child; image and word; rebel and slipper. The adult after all was the one who paid for them, giving them the right of inspection and power of veto.

There was a clear and direct line of ascent from funny comics to serious comics like 'Victor' and 'Hotspur' and 'Wizard', then out of comics into young adulthood and exams. My father would buy me the occasional copy of 'World of Wonder' or 'Look and Learn' as a surprise, drops of the hard stuff hoping to addict me to adulthood as early as he could in life. The glossy full colour pages, pictures of Great Inventors and other Important People, cutaway drawing of machines with all the gears showing, writing that took up sometimes most of the page - the lustre of paternal respect. I'd soak up male bonding through my fingers as I thumbed past these unread articles to get to 'The Trigan Empire'.

I came off this road of surety and inevitability on two counts. First, I became of the age where I could have my pocket money. Carefully pitched to be of symbolic value of course (I'm not accusing my parents of negligence or anything), but nevertheless a symbolism enough to carry with it new tastes.

Secondly, it was perhaps inevitable that I came across American comics through the school playground. I remember clearly the Fantastic Four fighting the Hulk in 'Smash', with the cutaway panel with the two in parallel tunnels without knowing it. I remember the Hulk, Fantastic Four and Daredevil in 'Mighty World of Marvel'. A new world opened - panels of leaping heroes swinging from soaring skyscrapers, powerful villains and, above all, FIGHTING flashed before my eyes.

I sent my mum on a mission to the local newsagents to get me a comic called 'Marvellous' with the writing getting smaller towards the end - but she wasn't up to the task. Someone threw one in a bin at school because he's spilt milk on it and me and my friend raced for it but he got there first by elbowing me out of the way. It seemed an eternity before I got my hands on an actual copy. (Perhaps it was a couple of weeks or something.) And then I was disappointed.

The comic was two-coloured green to fit the Hulk and had a logo where the World sprouting hands read a Marvel comic. These were of course good things. But they had cut out Daredevil by then so, while the comic had the same number of pages as I was used to, instead of the plethora of page length pun twisters it had only two stories. I'd try to do the maths to work out exactly how I'd been cheated, but it was too difficult.

The Hulk was midway through a battle with the Mandarin in which they didn't even meet, let alone the scheming oriental get a green fist and a giant sound effect for his misdeeds. The concept of a cliffhanger disturbed me. My attention then went to the Bullpen Mailbag, full of letters asking for Daredevil to be reinstated. I returned to class loudly voicing the opinion that Marvel was no good since they took Daredevil out. This deep rooted affection for the character led me (years later, after abandoning comics for a while) to give them another try by picking up an early Miller Daredevil.

It was finding the full-colour American Marvels in the centre of Rugby that finally hooked me. They had the whiff of exotica. The adverts, deserving of as much close scrutiny as the stories, were heralds of the strangeness of a foreign land, the checklist of other (almost impossible to obtain) titles like points of new constellations erupting in the sky. It all added to a world the garish colour of it's comics, composed of either exciting skyscrapers or boulder-strewn deserts, not only characters bedecked in striking costumes you didn't even seen in Leicester but sea monkeys and X-Ray Specs!

Best of all, my new habit earnt the disapproval of my parents. They saw the world-reading logo as a sinister symbol from an alien culture. I can remember finding the word "charade" in a comic and asking my Dad what it meant - he said it was a stupid American word that didn't mean anything in English. Better still was when I told my Mum I wanted to live in America and change my name to Fred. She put on her serious voice to tell me how people in American got shot by the police when running for a bus. This exciting image I immediately projected over a nation, and in my mind every day on every street corner on block after block a cop was about to shoot an innocent man and Spider-Man was swinging down to save him only to have his heroic action misunderstood on the cover of the Daily Bugle while meanwhile...

I soon learned that each story would have some talking stuff setting up the big fight at the end. So when purchasing I would count the pages of fighting backwards from the end and buy the one with the most. You could do this with comics. But Peter Hibbard next door used to like watching fighting programmes on TV, and would boast how he'd watch any programme with fighting in it. I quizzed him - suppose there were two programmes with fighting on them at the same time. He thought about this for a long while, then said tentatively he'd watch the one with the most fighting on it. But you wouldn't necessarily know in advance, you see.

The other thing I learnt was that British comics were crap. The Hulk could lick Iron Teacher just by stamping hard, Spiderman could tie up Red Star Robinson in a web and sell the photos to J. Jonah Jameson afterwards. There was clearly not a single person in Britain who could write or draw. British Marvels were okay providing they reprinted American material, but should not try to sneak in continuity pages of their own. (When Captain Britain first started they explained how Claremont and Trimpe had been chosen because one of them had relatives in Britain, and the other came over here on holiday a lot. This seemed entirely acceptable to me at the time.)

But the really great thing about comics was that you could do your own. In the haze of childhood, stories you'd read in comics would mix with stories you told or were told, and then, as soon as said, solidify into irrefutable fact. Doing comics went like this. I'd put an American Marvel before me, then fold sheets of paper to the same number as it, then staple them. Then I'd draw the cover, faking the Comics Code Authority box. Since you could only ever get odd issues of American Marvels my stories always started in the middle, and ended a little way after the middle. When thinking up an issue number I'd always think of a round number, say 70, then feel this was too obvious and add a one (making 71) to disguise it. So all my comics ended in a one.

I'd turn pages simultaneously of the proper comic and mine. When the supervillain appeared so would mine. When the story broke for ads I'd divide the page into boxes of gadgets for sale, or do a strip selling fruit pies. The final fighting scene would last the same number of pages in both, but always the biggest number I'd managed to find.

(Interestingly, Rik Hoskin reports on how he'd do comics featuring Captain Britain. But I'd always do my own carbon copies. If Captain Britain was before me I'd do Mr. England or UK Man or something. My version of The Avengers were called The PollMen. These could team up with the originators, such as the PollMen / Avengers team-up comic where they journeyed to a parallel dimension where the Poll Tax had been brought in fifteen years early and used their powers to not pay it... oh alright, I made that last bit up. Also, I rarely if ever copied British humour comics. It was an American phenomenon, this drawing*)

I still have a soft spot today for "Mass - The Man Who Always Knew Where To Go", whose special power was a fleet of pointy arrows that always showed him where to go.

By the time we moved house I was a publishing empire, with a team of heroes and crossovers and everything. (But always in the middle of stories, as I've explained.) I started holding court with a regular Comics Club in the Dining Room at Vicarage St. These were to be taken seriously. I would explain that superhero cartoons weren't to be watched, and 'Warlord' and 'Action' not to be read. DC Comics were a bit more ambiguous, they were harder to find than Marvels and so more fun to hunt down. But they were not really in the elect either. Kids would ask my advice about different pieces of continuity. "Number the panels", I would say definitively. This junior home version of the Kubert School did throw up some winners. I still have a soft spot today for "Mass - The Man Who Always Knew Where To Go", whose special power was a fleet of pointy arrows that always showed him where to go. The unofficial rule was you always did your own comic - whenever we tried collaborations we'd always end up fighting.

The next step was visiting Forbidden Planet in Denmark Street. London allowed an unfettered frenzy in a town not your own, with buildings nearly as big as the comics which lured you there (a day in Bedford gave you a portion of the same). At this time there was the first wave of Independents - Pacific, First and others. I considered them - more expensive a throw than the Marvels, a habit I could barely afford alone. My solution was to hate them all and denounce them as crap, and it was only much later when I got to actually see them I realised that they were.

Over the next few years I would do a complete turnabout. I would not be for Marvel or DC but for Creators against Corporate Publishers, for Art against Restrictive Publishing Practices. (I'm sure that if I was ever asked about the above at that time I lied vehemently, but maybe the way I see it now is just my current lie.) I was a Comics Critic, and most of the humour of that era comes from my odd belief that this was a thing that mattered in some unspecified way. I denounced Marvel. Actually privately I still (and I still do this now) go back to the era when I'd count the pages of fighting backwards and never look at the writers credits, and I pick up a 'Daredevil' or 'Spider-Man' or 'Fantastic Four' expecting it to be the same. And when it isn't I feel quite sad, like a long lost friend fallen on hard times.

When, for example, Bauhaus covered Ziggy Stardust I was incensed at the affront. But it wasn't the same Ziggy they'd got their hands on, just an ersatz copy. Comics are comics, you see.

© Gav Burrows