Absolutely pointless nostalgia: all my childhood comics

I always loved reading. Here are all the comics and magazines I can remember having as a child, in chronological order, because you never know when knowing this might be important.

My dad binned the hoard in 1995 (the precious Sonics were safe in folders), so I'm going off memories from almost a quarter of a century ago at least. Hopefully the rest that stubbornly stuck around have ended up on a fire to be of some use in the decades since.

All this pleasurable reading was financed by generous parents or grandparents. Thanks!

Ranking The Damned albums and side projects

Punk was my first musical love. On childhood car journeys we'd always look forward to Jilted John coming around on our dad's 70s tape, culminating in me and my brother performing a cover version in a Haven Holidays version of The X Factor and scandalising the judges by forgetting to censor some of the rude words. Later came silly 90s punk and horror punk, but the limited horizons of the genre meant it fell by the wayside after a while, especially as I got more into antithetical things like prog.

So I was pretty happy to exhume The Damned a few years back, who at their best combine nostalgic punk fun with the gothic gloom that turned out to be more fitting to my personality all along. Here are my The Top 21 Damned Studio Albums & Etc.

Ranking Mr. Bean

I'm not sure when I started unfairly begrudging Mr. Bean his phenomenal success. You'd think I could be content merely declaring that Blackadder was better and enjoy both, especially since clips of Rowan Atkinson's Beanesque stand-up and Not the Nine O'Clock News tomfoolery have been in my YouTube rotation for years.

On the bright side, this childish aversion means I can now enjoy these largely forgotten childish delights as if they were brand new again. Some of them are. Here are my Top 15 Beans ('Best Bits' disqualified for cheating).

Alrightreads: Black Books

Yes, I shall need to get the black out.

Susan Hill, The Woman in Black

1983 / Audiobook / 192 pages / UK

*****

Such a perfect pastiche of the best Gothic novels that it comes out definitive, without the serialised padding that puts me off bothering with most of the authentic classics. If you can't tell your story in under 200 pages, not interested.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

2007 / Audiobook / 400 pages / Lebanon

**

A thought-provoking essay padded out to book proportions because that sells better, the takeaways are to expect the unexpected and not trust experts. Apart from this expert who can't get over how maverick he's being.

Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier

2007 / Ebook / 208 pages / UK

****

I'm not sure why I skipped over this integral installment in the League timeline before. Maybe I took a peek and was intimidated. Taking its cues from vintage annuals, this patchwork of comic, prose, play and metatextual miscellany is overwhelmingly dense even by Alan Moore standards, catching up on half a century's worth of literary and pop culture references and cameos and reverentially adopting styles from Shakespeare to Wodehouse to porn with much more attention to detail than was strictly necessary. It's extremely heavy-going, but you're allowed to skip bits.

Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom

2016 / Audiobook / 149 pages / USA

***

Salvaging one of Lovecraft's most infamous stories to make the daft racist spin in his grave is all in good fun, but while this ends up being a decently horrific tale in the Clive Barker mould, it doesn't touch Alan Moore's Providence.

The more things change

I was hoping all those geographically isolated phases of life and international adjustments since becoming an adult would break this rickety system and make me impossible to pigeonhole (I don't call dinner 'tea' any more), but this ended up being alarmingly spot-on regardless. I'm not that stuck in my ways, am I?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/upshot/british-irish-dialect-quiz.html