i got the first issue in the newsagents in a backward country town, so this would have been a couple of months after direct-release, actually around october itself. i must have been just over sixteeni was all but grown out of comics by this point, shaping my 'maturity' instead with charity shop clothes and music no-one else liked. the night before had been 'college disco'!!!! where a few coachloads of adolescents from small-town somerset go to slightly larger-town somerset and take over a nightclub for an evening of undiscerning proto-copulation and vomiting. so, it was several pints (alright, three) of dry blackthorn cider and - i believe this may have been the kicker - two of those half bottles of bright orange (or was it luminous green?) MaDDoG 20/20 - words you've not heard for a while i bet. of the fourhundred shouting puking youngins in the club that night, most of the vomit came from me.
so the overhang was quite oppressive, and i didn't have much gossip to share as, needless to say i didn't pull the night before. (the eventual moral of the story, by the way, is 'who needs girls when you've got comics?') feeling rather crap and crappy, i shuffled from the college common-room past the pub to the newasgents, and, being all but finished with comics, looked at the small pile of US imports. in post-booze fragility, i yearned for the feelings of happiness and immortality that so many comics had given my younger self, so i stooped to look and noticed that guy's name, the one from those scary, overblown batbooks and zenith, and the interviews in the comic press where he was always deliberately obnoxious and self-aggrandizing. and the other guy's name from zenith as well. and the pink cover. sold.
back in the common room, i read it with the kind of inattention that you reserve for something that you know is going to be kept within easy reach for years to come. today, the bits that stick in my mind from that first reading are the bottle crashing through the window (acid manga mental!), the face-front view of the astra as they drive it to the school, and the bit where the lacky with the syringe has his face unpeeled in what remains one of my favourite ever comic panels.
and that kind of changed me really. the hangover afternoon (lessons finish at lunchtime on a wednesday. oop, look at that, i remembered it was a wednesday) turned into an exhumation of comics from the loft and the corners of my bedroom. a few weeks later i happened across a robert anton wilson book down-town, and the dominant interests of my adult life so far were all kind of well established. i've still never been as impressed, as excited, as changed by a work of art as i was by that one comic. it was the time, i was the age, and it all fit together. i fucking love that comic me. |
