Super Jesus A special pin-up of your favourite Nazarene webslinger

< Woman Line

April/May 1980

Pin-Up:

Doctor Doom

Grobschnitt’s Page Meet Grobschnitt, the dome-headed Harbinger of Mischief

Apeth (from Ota Sbees) Ritern ov thu perpal geriller

Exploring the Underworld Eight boys go exploring in a dangerous cave

TERM 3 1980 continues with the embassy siege and The Empire Strikes Back

Lazer Lash >

Another attempt at drawing a Marvel superhero character - this time The Fantastic Four’s arch- nemesis Doctor Doom. I don’t remember whether I especially liked him, but I clearly put in the effort here. It’s hardly Rembrandt but I’ve definitely tried very hard to get the shadows and folds right. Not a bad picture for an eight year old. It’s not something I think about often but it’s obvious I thought of myself as an artist just as much as a writer. I’ve spent most of my life imitating things I like in one way or another, so I tend to view all this stuff through that lens. I liked reading comics, so obviously I wanted to make comics of my own. Just like later on I’d write stories about Star Wars or Doctor Who or whatever else I was into at the time. When I grew up, it was comedy and music. When I was eight, it was comics. But it felt like much more than that. Pretty soon, we’ll start seeing evidence of me fantasising about having my own business empire that made not just comics and books but toys too. I clearly had ambition. But I doubt I really wanted to be Richard Branson. I think I just saw creativity as a core part of my identity - an identity I was still building and being encouraged to experiment with in my Topic books - and artwork was a core part of that creativity. At some point, I stopped drawing. Some time around the age of 14 or 15. I don’t know why - maybe Art GCSE clashed with something else on the timetable. Maybe I realised I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. Maybe I just stopped reading comics. But at some point it slowly faded out of my life, so it’s strange to look back and see how much time and effort I put into doing this stuff. Sometimes I regret letting it go. But I probably took it as far as I was able. As for the ‘amusing’ bit at the top - “Number Five of Four Pin-Ups” - it’s true, this is the fifth full-page picture in the book, so I guess that’s partly what I meant. But obviously there weren’t originally meant to be just four - I was just trying to be funny. I’ve copied the style of the joke from a magazine I liked called Frantic, without fully understanding it. The front cover of Frantic No 2 (published March 1980) proudly boasts it’s “NUMBER TWO (in a field of one)”. I loved the absurdity of that and obviously wanted to reproduce it here, but hadn’t realised it really meant “This comic is rubbish”. So it just comes across as goofy and doesn’t make much sense. Watch out for more of that as the books roll on…

Lazer Lash An exciting criminal spy adventure in a world made of lasers!

Woman Line Which of these five squiggly lines leads to the woman?