write.as/jonbeckett

Although I can remember reading comic books as a child, they tended to be the throw-away cheap comics sold at the newsagent in the UK alongside the daily newspapers – printed on the same cheap paper, with four colour printing if you were lucky. I remember buying the “The Beano”, “The Dandy”, “Whizzer and Chips”, and various others. The Beano had characters such as “Dennis the Menace”, and “The Bash Street Kids” – a middle school comic strip starring such memorable characters as “Fatso”, “Pie Face”, and “Plug”.

To a nine or ten year old boy, the Beano was brilliant. You could read it several times over the weekend, and it even taught you about capitalism – I vividly remember the price going up for a while, in return for having free rubbish stuck to the front of the comic. Of course eventually the free rubbish vanished, but the price remained. I remember the outrage in the playground at school like it was yesterday – all threatening to never buy it again – we were dead serious about it too.

Eventually I grew out of buying comics, and moved on to magazines about aeroplanes, UFOs, movies, music, and girls. By the time I reached college everybody seemed to have an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of movie starlets, female musicians, or magazine cover girls. It's funny how that works.

Throughout my adolescence I was of course aware that there were “other” comics, but I never really saw them. Superman was Christopher Reeve. Spiderman was the slightly rubbish late 1970s TV show. Batman was Adam West, and he somehow managed to drive the Batmobile through a hedge several times each week without scratching it once. I never did figure that out. It never really occurred to me that they were based on comic books either – or that the books might be better than the TV shows and movies.

Everything changed one day in my early 20s when I went shopping in Oxford with an old college friend, and the idea got into our head to visit the comic book store to buy some posters. I'm not really sure how we knew there was a comic book store – this was in the days before the internet remember. After a mile or so walk out of town we found ourselves stood in an Aladdin's cave, filled with boxes and boxes of comics, books, posters, and various collectible toys. We had never seen anything like it before.

While my friend looked at the posters, I started digging through the various boxes of comics, and couldn't believe the artwork I was seeing. The comics we grew up with were nothing like this. It wasn't just kids stuff either – the stories were dark, macabre even. There were graphic novels too – I remember being blown away by “Watchmen”. After standing goggle eyed for quite some time, a couple of comics stood out – “Gen 13”, and “Tank Girl”. Of course in later years I would realise I had discovered Adam Hughes, and Jamie Hewlett – two of the most famous comic book artists in the industry. It was no surprise that their work stood out.

Over the next several years I occasionally bought more comics – more Tank Girl, more Gen-13, but didn't really know what I was doing. I wasn't really interested in the stories – more in the artwork. I became interested in Alex Ross, and his large format books such as “Kingdom Come”. The wider world of DC and Marvel stories seemed almost impenetrable – they still do.

The more I read about comics, the more I realised how little I knew. I recently started watching the TV show “Comic Book Men”, based on “Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash” – the comic book store set up by Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes following their success with the Clerks movies – and the impenetrable wall just seems to grow taller and taller.

People that have been reading comics for years talk of multiple story arcs – of universe reboots, multiverses, parallel universes, and all manner of interconnected plot lines. Finding a toe-hold to begin reading any of the numerous character's back-stories seems impossible. Impossible, yet intriguing – which explains the book I got for my birthday from my in-laws.

It's called “Year Zero”, and tells the back-story of a number of the minor DC Comics characters that cross into the Batman stories. I'm guessing that if I read this book, along with the various “New 52” books (a reinvention/reboot of the entire DC cannon), I might have half a chance to begin from somewhere at last.

Of course, in order to begin reading these comic books, I need to actually read, instead of gazing at the spectacular artwork. Every time I begin, I end up googling artists, and spending hours collecting panels and covers into Pinterest. I don't even know why I'm doing it...