Oddities #20191101

A somewhat personal oddity this time, though I guess it’s not necessarily all that odd… This is the bag I was given in Forbidden Planet in Denmark St., London, on Tuesday May 25th, 1982. It was my first ever visit to an actual comic-book store, so naturally I kept the bag because I was a big nerd. Plus I was a huge fan of Brian Bolland’s work… look how gorgeous this is!

Young me wasn’t smart enough to properly store the bag: for years I just kept it in one of my comic boxes, but I really should have folded it a little smaller so that the fold didn’t protrude above the comics and get all grubby. 😦

These days I can’t imagine someone allowing a sixteen-year-old to travel to another country unaccompanied. But then, the past is also a different country: I’d left school a couple of months earlier and was working full-time, earning my keep. This was my first visit to London, first flight on a plane… But none of that was as exciting as navigating my way across the city in search of 23 Denmark Street!

I remember quite a lot about that visit to FP… The store wasn’t as shiny and polished as comic-book stores are these days. And the staff were a little paranoid, too: in the entrance, customers had to hand over their backpacks in exchange for a ticket — presumably shoplifting was a big problem. The guy at the door was a proper London punk with piercings and, as far as I recall, a mohawk hairstyle, but thankfully he wasn’t as terrifying as he looked.

The store was packed with desirable items, but I didn’t have a huge amount of money — as I’ve mentioned, I’d only started working full-time less than two months previously. Judging by the receipt (which of course I kept) the item I bought was 2000AD-related and it cost £3.25, so it was almost certainly the first Judge Dredd album published by Titan Books. Unfortunately, I can’t check the cover-price because I lent my copy — along with the two Titan Books’ Cursed Earth volumes — to someone many years ago, but the person to whom I thought I’d lent them insisted that the copies he had on his shelves were his own, and that he’d never borrowed them from me. I am still annoyed about that!

But here’s a bonus: I picked up a couple of A5 flyers while I was in the store, and of course I kept them, too…

This was probably the first time I ever heard of Frank Miller…

… but I definitely did know who most of the people on this flyer were! Over the intervening thirty-seven years I’ve managed to meet almost most of the twelve creators listed here (in other words, I’ve met six of them). Younger me would have been very chuffed about that!