Sleeping Behind Memories Are Beasts

I was going to skip posting today but then I read Paeroka on her first experience of Guild Wars in response to the Promptapalooza prompt Syp was given:

“What is your earliest memory related to one of your core fandoms?”

And I thought "Hey, I can knock that out in a hot minute" so here I am, knocking it out.

I began reading American comic books before I could read, if that makes sense. Comics famously have a lot of pictures to help carry the narative, after all. It's always been kind of their USP, even if no-one had learned to call it a "USP" back then. Happy times!

Pictures were all very well, but even at five years old I knew those funny marks in the bubbles told you what the heroes were saying, so I made my mother read them out loud for me. She loved that, as you might imagine.

It would certainly have been easier for her to teach me to read them for myself and I was keen enough to learn but she was equally keen that I shouldn't. She had a theory that it would cause me problems if I arrived at school already knowing how to do the main thing the rest of the class would be spending much of their time on for the rest of the year.

She may even have been right. Hard to tell. No-one in my class could read when I started school, so there wasn't a sucker subject available to test the theory. Maybe it was how every parent thought back then. Anyway, since she was determined to make me wait, she was hardly in a position to complain.

My funds at the age of five were limited to absolutely nothing, naturally, so she also had to buy the comics for me. Sometimes my grandad would buy me a few but mostly the responsibilty fell to my mother. She must have bought me quite a few because I had a fair stack of them before I was old enough to start buying my own, but the first one I remember was Challengers of the Unknown #35: War Against the Moonbeast.

I remember it for two reasons. Firstly, where I was when she gave it to me and secondly what happened when I read it.

We'd gone away for the weekend, which was something we almost never did. We'd driven down to Devon, which was somewhere we never went. It was me, my mother and my Auntie Mary, who wasn't an aunt at all but my mother's best friend.

We were in a room in a hotel (or more probably a guest house or a bed and breakfast, I imagine) in Ilfracombe (possibly) when my mother produced that comic from her case and handed it to me.

I have a strangely vivid memory of her giving me the comic but no real memory of reading it immediately or on the holiday. I don't remember anything much about the holiday itself, either.

Like most memories, it all starts to fall apart when you look at it closely. The only things I'm certain of are that it was that specific comic - I still have it - and that I got it on that trip. 

I'm also positive it gave me nightmares. That's the other reason I remember it.

I was an imaginative child. Over-imaginative. Quite a lot of things gave me vivid dreams, most of them the traditional kind of entertainments about which grandparents loved to say, with relish, "He shouldn't be reading/watching/doing that. It'll give him nightmares".

I don't recall the comic giving me any bad dreams on that holiday but it certainly gave me a few when I got home. At one point I seem to remember having to get out of bed, find it and turn it over so the cover wasn't showing, because just knowing the Moon Beast might be watching me was enough to keep me awake.

It was the cover that did it, of course. I mean, just look at it. That bizarre creature with the gaping maw and that evil, knowing glare in its eye. Bob Brown, the regular Challengers artist of the time, knew perfectly well that cover would give kids nightmares. He clearly meant it to

We weren't far past the horror comics scare of the fifties at that point. The industry was still recovering from the panic that had taken comics as far as a televised U.S.Senate hearing. The Comics Code was extant and in force. Comics were, supposedly, safe for kids to read once again.

Yeah, right. Like it takes a full-on EC Comics barrage of injury-to-eye motifs, hypodermic needles and zombies to scare a five-year old. You don't think a bloody great flying monster with jagged fangs and a lolling, red tongue is going to do it? Thanks Bob!

Did it put me off comics? The hell it did! No sooner had I stopped annoying adults around me by begging them to read the speech bubbles than they had to get used to bodily dragging me out of newsagents when they found me sitting on the floor, reading them for myself.

I could happily spend all afternoon spinning the display, looking at every comic in turn, over and over, as I tried to decide which one would best reward the shilling in my grubby paw. The older I got, the more comics I bought and the more time I spent reading them.

I took a brief break in my teens, when I crazily believed for a handful of years that I was "too old for comics" but that insane notion soon proved itself to be the nonsense I always secretly knew it was.

If I had any lingering doubts, they were crushed to oblivion when my new girlfriend (later to become my first wife), visiting my room for the first time, spotted a large stack of Superman comics I'd failed to hide as well as I thought I had. Rather than pointing, laughing and leaving, as anyone might reasonably have predicted, instead she asked if she could borrow the whole lot. No wonder we got married, I guess, although sadly a mutual love of comics isn't always enough to guarantee a happy lifetime together.

Video games, on the other hand...