I Have No Secrets From Cows

In the dream the comic book comes in a shrink wrapped plastic cover and there’s something bright at the centre of the superhero’s head. It looks like a third eye or a miniature sun emanating from the forehead. The comic has to be incredibly rare. A one-off perhaps. Collectibles are a good meal ticket. You pitied the hoarders and the kids who kept their toys unopened in their original packaging, but now those kids are all grown up and sitting on a small fortune.

Anyway, it’s not a third eye or a tiny sun. It’s just a yellow price sticker. If you peel it off you’ll probably tear the cover. Of a comic book that has no rarity value. Of a comic book you don’t even own, because this is just a dream.

Comics and comic books are not the same thing. Comics for me, as a young child, were Knockout (launched in 1971) and then Whizzer and Chips (into which Knockout was merged in 1973). Daft story lines. Terrible (but great) jokes. Characters that repeatedly got into the same scrapes every week. I loved them. I got them reserved for me at the newsagents near to us. The same newsagents I ended up working for once I’d turned thirteen.

Every summer, during the school holidays, they would publish what was categorised as a ‘summer special’. These had more pages than the standard weekly comic. More colour pages. Perhaps printed on a higher, glossier grade of paper. I’d carry it around with me on holiday – Devon or the Peak District or wherever we’d gone that year – and even read it in the backseat of the car, although reading made me car sick.

The jokes were no better than in the normal comic, but I guess there were more of them.

“Look, it’s a herd of cows.”

“Heard of cows? Of course I’ve heard of cows.”

“No. A cow herd.”

“A cow heard? That’s okay, I have no secrets from cows.”

At some point you grow too old for comics like Whizzer and Chips. (I hadn’t, but maybe I felt I had to conform to that sense of growing up.) I progressed first to Roy of the Rovers – football, sports, every young boys dream, right? – and then 2000AD which I suppose was the first serious UK rival to the American comic books of Marvel and DC.

Science Fiction and comic books were close cousins and if you were into one then logically you’d often be into the other. So it went. But I never really got comic books. I used to buy Rom Spaceknight (a now obscure Marvel superhero based on a toy). I tried to get into Thor, with its epic retelling of Norse myths. I was a brief disciple of Moon Knight (another Marvel creation, a sort of hipper version of Batman) famed in its early days for artwork by Bill Sienkiewicz. The sketchier and more indistinct the artwork became, the greater the reputation of the artist grew. I suppose it had a unique style and I was no appreciator of art, but I couldn’t see it myself.

Moon Knight was a cool comic book though, well written, and I was in from the start. If I’d kept those comics, pristine and shrink wrapped, doubtless they’d be worth something now. But I was never close to being a real comic book fan. Look under my teenage bed and all you’d find was an ever growing stack of back copies of the NME.

These were my collectibles. I bought the NME every Thursday from about the age of sixteen. The ink would stain your fingers. Over time the paper would turn yellow if too exposed to the sun. I’d never keep these in a protective wrapping. They were like a library that I constantly referred to. When I discovered a new band to obsess over, I’d pour through back issues looking for any previous mentions of this band, any chance to glean facts about their music or earlier career.

It seems crazy in the modern age, where most things are a search engine click away, where Wikipedia offers access to a million discographies, but often digging out old copies of the NME was all I had if I wanted to track down facts about bands and albums and whole music scenes. Over the years the bed I slept on wore out, but it was like a comfort blanket to me and I didn’t want it replaced. And if the mattress and the springs sagged, the ever growing pile of music papers would prop them up.

Eventually they had to be disposed of, I guess when I left home for good. I wasn’t sad for them as collectibles (which they weren’t), but I mourned the loss of all that contained information. For the articles I’d treasured, but equally for the reviews I’d disparaged or the opinions I’d disagreed with. It was okay though, a much more efficient and dust free knowledge base was on its way. I just didn’t know it back then.

Thirty, forty years on now, minimalist me holds on to little. I sleep in a different bed, in a different part of the country and one day I dream of a comic book, shrink wrapped, of a superhero with something bright and yellow in the centre of their forehead. A third eye or perhaps a miniature sun. It could be rare. A collectable. Worth something.

Or it might just be a dream.