Warning: If this rambles, it’s because I have no quality control…

I sold virtually every comic I’ve ever owned, at least twice. In 1980, for just £1,000, after months of nagging from my old man, I sold a collection that many dealers would have killed for. The deal was the guy buying them off me would give me £750 for the lot and a further £250 inside 6 months. I never saw the other £250.

Don’t get me wrong, £750 in 1980 was pretty good money – it was 6 weeks work for me and I had a reasonably well paid job – and I wasn’t complaining about the deal, although I was slightly aggrieved when I never saw the remainder of the money, but not enough to make a big issue out of it. I liked the guy who bought them off of me – I took over his fanzine from him in 1977, he took over my hobby as a part time dealer.

I had 7 happy comic-less years, except for one minuscule slip in, I think it was probably 1984, when I saw a stack of Marvel comics in the local WH Smith and thought. ‘ooh, I’ll have a look’. It was that anathema Assistant Editors Month, so it wasn’t unexpected (but slightly unfortunate) when I figured that I hadn’t missed much since dropping out.

At this time, I’d met and was going steady with the woman who would become my wife, as my own family was stretched out all over the country, at the time, I used to spend a fair amount of time round her house and I built up good relationships with her twin brothers. One of the twins, Neil, was about 9 or 10 when he discovered Spider-Man and it wasn’t long before he started to discover the other heroes in Marvel’s bag. As an observer, who was trying desperately to keep my mouth shut, it was fascinating watching – in glimpses – him go through the same things as I did when I first discovered comics. Eventually, he discovered my own interests in comics and we forged a bond that was frankly unhealthy, but has stayed with us ever since.

Neil found a comics shop in Northampton, so one Saturday morning we drove down there and we discovered a new world. For Neil it was an oasis of Spider-Man, Avengers and X-Men; for me it was just incredible. Sitting alongside the Marvels and DCs were companies such as Pacific, Comico and Dark Horse; publishers I could have had no inkling of when I crashed out of comics in 1980. Formats had changed as well, paper quality had improved and there were these deluxe comics, such as Batman: The Killing Joke, which was like nothing I’d ever seen before. There were some brilliant series floating about at the time, Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, Camelot 3000, Grendel, to name just a few. It was a good time to be reintroduced to comics.

Unfortunately, this was 1987 and I wasn’t exactly the most over-employed person in the world at the time; I also had a healthy pot habit which took precedent over everything except my new wife and our livelihood – getting back into comics was not an option. No, of course it wasn’t.

One of my less prestigious claims to fame was teaching my 10 year old brother-in-law how to lie; he was a sweet and innocent kid, but by the time I’d finished with him he could have lied his way out of anything. I was spending three times as much as I’d budgeted, but I was stashing half the comics at my mother-in-law’s and then swapping over halfway through before returning to the shop the next week for another hit. Neil was my cover and to be fair he never had to lie for me because my wife never quite cottoned on and by the time she did, I was man enough to admit to it. Oddly enough, that rare argument between us led to me opening my comic shop.

That first visit to the comic shop called Blitz I returned with Kraven’s Last Hunt, the six-part Spider-Man story, The Fish Police Special and some oddities and curiosity buys. By the time I’d been going there a month, the owner must have been watching the clock on a Saturday, hoping that I hadn’t found another, better stocked shop, or been run over in desperation to come and spend another 50 quid. To be fair to the guy who ran my first LCS, he was never over-priced and he gave me a fair amount of discount (even when I cleared him out of back issue stock to help stock my own shop, 10 miles from him).

The crazy thing was, I’d ventured back into comics just at the time when Batman had been released and there was a certain amount of interest in old fans returning to buy up the blasts from their pasts. It wasn’t the beginning of the speculator market, but it was the biggest move in the comics back issue market since the cult interest in Man-Thing and Howard the Duck in the mid 1970s. Batman comics were now hot property and the biggest Batman fan in Britain, Duncan McAlpine decided the time was right to resurrect Alan Austin’s Comic Book Price Guide, because he saw the market taking off. He opened his co-owned shop in the same year as more comic shops opened in the United Kingdom than ever before (so I got in a year before everyone else!) With Batman having added a certain amount of cool, comics stopped being quite as derided as they’d always been, because cool people wanted to be seen wearing Bat symbol T-shirts and have copies of The Dark Knight Returns on their bookshelves or coffee tables. There’s a certain irony that the industry grew up because of the second oldest superhero’s new found success.

It was McAlpine’s price guide, the amount of paying customers I saw every weekend in Blitz, my own knowledge of comics and my sniffer dog instincts at being able to find the most elusive buggers that made my mind up about opening a shop. My eldest brother, Ron, who is even today still a comics and trading card dealer in the North West of the country, was down from Liverpool for the weekend and had paid me and the wife a visit. I’d seen this advert in the local paper of a box full of old comics for sale, but they were out towards the middle of nowhere on the now renamed A45. Ron offered to drive me out and we arrived at this old farm house. It was April 1989. The box of comics was a mix of Marvels and DCs – all circa 1967. According to the price guide there was well over £200 worth of comics in the box and the woman was looking for £25, because she figured comics were worth something now. I negotiated her down to £20 and managed to contain myself until I got into Ron’s car. I’m sorry to say that it was my ebullience that gave him the bug to follow me into comics dealing – something he proved to be a damned sight better at than me.

Over the next couple of weeks, adverts I’d placed had responses and I started to accrue a sizeable number of Silver Age comics as well as boxes of stuff from 1975 to the late 1980s and all the while comics were going up in price, comic marts became resurgent and more of them started to spring up around the country – not just in London and very occasionally Birmingham. After almost an entire decade of being a bit stale, comics got a shot in the arm that obviously ended up having disastrous effects on a lot of people, but at the time getting back into comics was really exciting. In 1989, people on the fringes, such as I, felt real electricity, like this was the best time to be back into it. I started to look for suitable premises and did all the wrong things, because I wasn’t prepared to be patient. I ended up opening Squonk!! in the October of 1989, had I been sensible and looked for the right place, I might still be running it today, but I didn’t, I’m not and I wouldn’t have had the pretty incredible journey I’ve had since that fateful day in October 1989 – nearly 20 years ago now; in many ways it seems too close to have been that long, but in others it feels even further away.

In 2007, after my own personal annus horribilis and a need for some instant cash, I sold my comics collection again. Well, I sold what was left of it, because over the last 10 years I’ve been pruning it down whenever I’ve fancied a bit of extra personal cash, so what was left really was a mixture of sentimental and X-Men. The man who bought my collection offered me a similar deal to the one I took in 1980, except this time he paid up in full. It would have been difficult for him not to have done so, as it was my brother Ron. My comics paid for a replacement central heating boiler, a couple of dog funerals and there’s still a teensy bit left over, so while I didn’t get anywhere near what they were worth (but got more than I would from some professional comics dealer), I got something tangible as a replacement. I remember the outrage from some sections of fandom when Dez Skinn sold a stack of his Silver Age books to finance a jaunt to Singapore. How he must have laughed while drinking cocktails in one of the tallest buildings in the world, experiencing something real, rather than some fantasy.

The thing was, this time I knew that this was it. If I sell all my comics again, there would be no going back. I wouldn’t suddenly get a pang in my 50s and think I need to read comics again. When I sold them all in 1980, it was to please my dad, but I still loved comics, when I sold them in 2007, it was because I was sick of the sight of them and they’d turned my loft into a fire hazard and subsequently I found it very easy to get rid of things I believed would remain with me until I died. I’d told my brother that I was going to keep some things, so he knew upfront that I wasn’t keeping valuable items back (even though some of them were valuable). He was fine with this. The toughest decision I had to make was over Swamp Thing #1. The copy I owned in 2007 was the same one that I’d bought in 1971, despite me having sold it in 1980, I managed to re-acquire it and how did I know it was the same? I’d pencilled my name in one of the adverts inside. I, instead, decided to keep the trade paperback of the first 10 issues rather than the comic; I also figured that a £50 comic made the deal a bit sweeter than a £5 trade paperback. I knew that any deep rooted sentiments I had for comics were just about gone.

I’ve believed for years that I’m an addict. It was obvious by the rush I got from seeing a stack of Marvels in a newsagent back in 1984, even if I was ultimately disappointed. It was the surge of adrenaline I got when I discovered my first local comic shop and the subsequent massive overspends were shrugged off more casually than you could possibly believe. The need to open my own comics shop; the conscious decision to remain a comics dealer after Squonk’s demise, because I would have rather struggled to make ends meet and be in comics than be comfortable and be without them. Which was why working at Comics International was like a dream come true – even if it was a nightmare for one week in four; which was why Borderline even existed at all and why you’re reading my words today. It’s in the blood. I can do everything to rid myself of its evils, but I’m an addict and just like a smoker or drinker cannot have a beer or a fag. I can’t get too immersed in comics because it takes over my life. Heroin addicts become aggressive not when they run out of smack, but when the smack starts to have lesser effect on them they have to take more and more or they become unstable; nicotine addicts spend the first three days without a cigarette having some of the worst thoughts imaginable about just about everyone in their field of vision; and alcoholics become verbally aggressive when they start to suffer withdrawal; well, I keep getting drawn back to this addiction, but my problem is I just get irascible and obnoxious the longer I spend with comics fans. I can’t blame any dalliances I’ve had with drugs throughout my life for this slightly psychotic eccentricity; I was 9 when I bought my first US comic.

A hopefully mildly amusing aside to the above. I grew up in Canada. My folks and my two brothers emigrated there in 1964, just before my 2^nd birthday and we stayed there until I was 6½. I might have been responsible for turning my eldest brother into a comics dealer, but he was into comics long before I was, especially living in Canada where there was a considerably greater abundance of Marvels and DCs there than in the UK at the time. Ron had been a little bit like me and had found a stack of comics at a flea market in a town called Brampton, in Ontario, which he kept, even when my dad said he couldn’t bring any of his comics back with him, I suppose they were his sentimental box, but he soon grew bored with them and in 1970 he gave me the box because I was just starting to get into comics – my mother was buying me Whizzer and Chips every week.

The box had about 10 US comics, which I’d seen but never owned, there was a couple of Marvels, a Superman and a couple of comics that I didn’t really understand, one had the Human Torch in but he wasn’t… right…

My mother had got friendly with the woman at the end of our block, who had two children both a little younger than me. My mum thought it would be a good idea if I befriended these kids and I got the impression my mum had a soft spot for the family because they had very little in the way of anything – they seemed very poor. What they were was a bunch of thieving scumbags, but we wouldn’t find that out for a couple of years, or at least it wouldn’t get proved until my tortoise disappeared and miraculously the family at the end obtained one, which they claimed they’d had for years, the fact the name CHARLIE had been painted over with black emulsion seemed to give the game away, but I never saw Charlie again. My parents were not big on neighbour disputes and this was to be the final kick in the teeth that scummy family dealt me. Months before Charlie’s theft, my mum had asked me to sort out a few comics for Andrew, the eldest of the brats at the end of the street. I’d agreed in the way you completely forget about as commitment in the next millisecond, so I was the architect of my own downfall. My mum, bless her soul, thought the stack of comics I’d left on the seat by the wardrobe were the ones I’d put to one side for her and promptly gave Andrew my most precious stash and I couldn’t tell my mum they were the ones that Ron had brought back from Canada with him because he’d made me promise not to tell because he would have got into trouble. I tried to negotiate the return of the comics, offering a considerable chunk of Whizzer & Chips, but Andrew was a devious little shit and he knew that I wanted them badly; he wasn’t going to part with one of them. This might have been the catalyst for the tortoise theft, who can say; I certainly can’t remember if I called him a selfish little cunt; I probably didn’t know that word existed in 1970.

Anyhow, mucho water under the bridge, I forgot all about those comics apart from one of them, the one that had the Human Torch in, and as I got older, it made even less sense because there were no other members of the Fantastic Four in that comic. I figured it might be a Strange Tales, but none of them … right. Then I saw my very first Overstreet Comics Price Guide and the mystery comic’s cover was reprinted inside. Flipping through the colour plates of the old, old comics, I saw Red Raven #1. This was the mystery comic. A bit more investigating and I discovered at the time it was worth well over $5,000. Now, it wasn’t in mint condition, probably no better than very good, but that’s really not the point. The little fuckwit who finally owned it probably drew boobs on all the woman and knobs on all the men before using it to wipe his stinky little shit-encrusted arse with. But I’m not bitter, no, not me. I hope the little fuck got AIDS and died.

In fact, there’s no better person to illustrate how addictive comics can become than my former business partner, Ian. He used to shit and stamp in it if he missed something comicsy he wanted to be at. I remember sitting in my transit van, fully loaded and heading for a Sheffield comics mart in February 1991. The weather was fine until we hit Leicester and then the south’s mild winter turned ferocious and by the time we were no more than a couple of miles north of Leicester, we hit a wall of traffic and blizzard conditions. There was no way we were going any further north and most cars were being sent back south. Ian argued with the policemen and then when we did turn around, he demanded we get off the motorway at the next exit and head north via an A or a B road. I refused, we almost argued and eventually he relented, only when I assured him that if the weather was that bad between Leicester and Nottingham, it was going to be much worse further north. He was not happy about it and was on the phone when we got back to the shop trying to find out if the Sheffield mart went on as planned. It had, but with only about a third of the dealers and barely any pundits – Ian was still pissed off for the next two weeks – he claimed it was because we could have made a killing, but the real reason was because he wanted to be there.

Comics, if they get under your skin, stay there. Which is, of course, the reason why fandom created itself in the first place, because if there weren’t people for whom comics become a life choice I wouldn’t be telling you about it now.

My love affair with comics has really finally ended; not because I say so, because I came to a conclusion in my life. One that probably happens to many others. I woke up one morning and saw the futility of collecting. As simple as that. I have no children and if I did there would be no point in them having my collection of comics, records, Stephen King first editions or women’s underwear; there’s a good chance they might not be the slightest bit interested in them and would probably sell them anyhow. So what possible good would a load of comics in the loft be? What’s the point of getting DVDs when the film is either easily downloadable or will be on telly in a year? What’s the point of buying an expensive first edition of the new King book when he’s having a good over shit ratio of 1:10? (Although I can’t recommend Duma Key enough). I still buy records; but I download a lot of shit first; but at least the music industry gets something from me; none of the other buggers do. I see no point, none at all, in collecting something if there’s no one to appreciate it in the future. So if I don’t like something, why bother to sit on it when I know it has no real worth – not in such a deceitful world that tells you your comics is worth so much, but is actually really only worth a tenth of its for sale price. Especially if I’m never going to read it again, and hold that thought, we’re concluding on it.

So what did I keep for sentimental reasons? Oddly enough, I didn’t exclusively save the comics that meant the most to me. Because I’m one of those people who like sets of things, I couldn’t just have a single run of issues, I had to go for the entire portfolio, which is why I have every British Captain Britain comic and related story. I kept the crappy Chris Claremont issues and the vaguely CB-related Black Knight story in Hulk Comic because… well, because I’m an addict. I kept the run essentially for the Moore and Davis Jasper’s Warp story, which I believe might be the finest superhero story Marvel has ever produced. Along with Wein & Wrightson’s Swamp Thing collection, there’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, A Tale of One Bad Rat and The Death of Captain Marvel. An entire run of Steve Moncuse’s Fish Police, a couple of odds and sods, such as a Munden’s Bar Annual, a Dave Stevens portfolio and two Arthur Adams drawn Gumby comics, which I once believed were the funniest things I’d ever seen in print. The six-issue mini-series of The Griffin and my single favourite comics story of all time Amazing Adventures #34. If there’s anything else, it isn’t worth mentioning.

I’ve since read a number of these issues (while being off work with a bad back there’s fuck all else you can do). I went for the ones I believed were there on merit. The two Arthur Adams’ Gumby comics are not the funniest things ever seen in print; Munden’s Bar was a complete enigma; I think it must have slipped in by mistake. Fish Police feels like a Spandau Ballet hit sounds – dated. The Death of Captain Marvel still has some impact, but I couldn’t help pick holes in the plot. I’m scared to sit down and read the others. I borrowed Watchmen off the admirable Jay Eales (admirable because he lent me a comic knowing what contempt I hold for them and I read them on the bog) to assess this ‘modern masterpiece’. I’m stuck at the end of Chapter Two… but there might be a column in there somewhere, so we’ll move on. The comics I’ve kept strike me as being nothing more than a drinker having a bottle stashed somewhere secret, just in case the going gets tough. I could quite easily have gone through the rest of my life without reading them again; so there was no real point in keeping these either, was there?

… Next week Controversial Column Numero Uno. Those bastards at TCV won’t let me run my big exposé, so next week we have cunnilingus, massive penises, defecating Japs and more tits than you can shake a proud cock at (a hen will do at a push). And by the end of it women will be shouting my name from the rooftops and men will be accusing me of being a lesbian feminist single-parent sperm whale.

Phil Hall