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!
Slimer! (November 1989)
Like many TV tie-ins, I tried out one issue (#2) and decided it wasn't for me, despite being a big Ghostbusters fan for what looks in retrospect like quite a brief and expensive period around the age of 4 (in-between Batman and Turtles Christmases in the materialistic chronology). But it seems this Slimer spin-off only managed to wangle a limited licence that didn't allow them to use other established characters aside from the blob, so they had to invent their own ensemble.It was uncanny and unnerving, I didn't know what was going on. I remember finding the advert for Fiendish Feet yoghurts more interesting than the comic. Never had one though.
Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles Adventures (July 1990 – December 1991)Turtle Power. The British Turtles comic was a mismatched hybrid of the properly good and surreal US Archie comic and bland and boring home-grown strips so Fleetway could release it fortnightly rather than monthly. I only had a handful of scattered issues (between #14 and #49) and specials, which were a mix of both, but it was the weird American stuff with flying cow head spaceships, genuinely evil baddies and Lovecraft parodies that sparked my imagination and unsettled me in a good way around the time I started school.
I ruined those childhood memories by reading them all as an adult. Never do that.
A less successful cartoon tie-in released around this time, before the second 1991 series where the character designs inexplicably changed. The only trace of its existence I could find is this image.
Not sure why I never put the big poster up on my wall. Maybe the story or reference materials to long-forgotten characters were too high quality to want to cover up.
Garfield annuals (December 1990 – December 1993)
Not a fortnightly comic, but rather annuals of comic strips (padded out with less entertaining prose) that always seemed to be on hand at any time of year to provide Christmas stocking filler or a tempting reward at the end of a holiday if I put in the effort and let my dad teach me to swim. I did, and he delivered.We had tons of annuals, as interests or imagined interests came and went, but Garfield was the most regular and dependable. These were the proper Jim Davis newspaper strips, so the world-weary sarcasm and vocabulary occasionally went over my head as a Key Stage 1 reader. My mum would read them to me if I was sick, or pretending to be sick so I could have Garfield read to me.
The main thing I remember about this is the monster gallery section that provided the name and rough appearance (unrelated characters) for my own "classic" childhood character, Dr. Disguise. As that series carried on, my plagiaristic guilt bubbled up until I confessed it on a fake "readers' art" page, where a fictional reader sent in their own drawing of Flaphead or whatever his name was, as if they'd caught me, and Dr. Disguise commented "hey, you read Count Duckula comic too!"
I suppose I was a bit of a strange child.
Thunderbirds: The Comic (October 1991 – April 1992)
Decades-old Thunderbirds repeats did well for the BBC in the early '90s. We didn't know or care that the series was ancient, nor that the comic was similarly reprinting vintage stories between the cross-section diagrams. I preferred that technical side, since I was put off by the realistic art style of the comics, but I still really looked forward to this every fortnight through most of Year 1. Until I arbitrarily didn't any more. Kids.I didn't have any Thunderbirds toys or a DIY Tracy Island, I'd mercifully stopped caring about toys by this point. I was satisfied with my flighty comic crazes being indulged.
I had a few Beanos here and there when feeling unimaginative, but I remember sitting in my room being impressed by this comparatively prestigious full-colour format that gave the stories a chance to breathe, like they were cartoons on the telly. This was pre-Beano Video.
I had a couple of Dennis ones (#1 & #5), didn't like anyone else enough to bother with theirs.
Most people seem to remember this short-lived cartoon for its action figure range, but I was over toys by this point. As a nascent sci-fi fan, I enjoyed what it was doing, but didn't feel compelled to collect past the first comic.
Maybe I was put off by things not looking and feeling quite right, what with this being a reprint of the original comic the series was based on (not that I knew that). Maybe I wasn't interested in adaptations of episodes I'd already seen. Maybe they stopped sweetening the deal with free chew bars. A replacement would be along soon anyway.
Toxic Crusaders (May – September 1992)
Unlike TMHT Adventures, I preferred Fleetway's sanitised UK content this time around. Richard Elson's character art was more on-model, and the American story where a giant custard monster enthusiastically force-feeds itself to everyone was a bit disturbing.
I never think to list SuperTed among my early obsessions, but with a cuddly toy and various books and comics, it must have been pretty intense. That childish fluff was all in the past since I'd grown to prefer gross radioactive mutants, but we picked up this free tourism industry tie-in when passing through Weston Super Mare at some point, and it was surely one of the strangest things in my childhood library. Up there with the Super Safe with SuperTed road safety guide.
They say you get more conservative as you get older, and my tastes went more traditional and domestic when I hit seven. Moving on from brash American action figure cartoons, I embraced this traditional anthology comic, which beat out the likes of The Beano and The Dandy by being all-colour (I wasn't that old-school).
I don't remember if I had favourite strips or even what made it so appealing. It looks like a load of crap now.
Jurassic Park was one of the defining cinematic experiences of my life, and this educational mag strategically came out at exactly the right time to cash in on dino fever. Unlike the Thunderbirds comic, there were no trivial stories distracting from the dino facts and impressive art (some in 3D), but there was a collectable T-rex skeleton.
Most people didn't stick around for the body shell that came after. We went all the way to pointless index issue #104, long after dino fever had abated, just to have the collection. Thanks, Mum.
Sonic the Comic (March 1994 – February 1998)
Back to trendy franchise cash-ins, the UK's Official Sega Comic was one of many titles I dipped into occasionally through '94 (#21, #37, #42), before my brother got a Mega Drive for Christmas and I noticed how authentically Nigel Kitching and Richard Elson were capturing those games in print. From the start of '95, I never missed an issue of the exciting junior sci-fi saga again until it went full reprint.When I got into proper sci-fi at the end of primary school, my interest in anthropomorphic mammals gradually waned, but I was grateful to my youngest brother for taking over the newsagent subscription so I still got to read it through most of the decline. Now I binge it once or twice a decade when I feel like escaping into more care-free times.
Amiga Action / Amiga Power (April / May 1994)
We got our Amiga 1200 in Christmas '93. Dad subscribed to the general-purpose Amiga Format magazine all the way through its slimming decline, but I only liked the games sections and cover disks.I took it upon myself to request these friendlier games-oriented magazines in the Saturday Sonic slot a couple of times, hopefully spreading the increased cost over several weekends like my brother with his Goosebumps books.
Amiga game comics (1994/95)
In our early years of computing, before Dad started buying cheap second-hand Amigas with boxes full of pirated disks, we used to buy games fair and square, and I really appreciated it when companies went above and beyond on the extras.I'm sure some other game started it, but Bubba 'n' Stix brilliantly presented the game's backstory in fake comic form, while a reproduced Spidey comic in The Amazing Spider-man was the only thing approaching a traditional superhero comic we had in the house, as you'll no doubt have noticed.
Beavis and Butt-head / The Ren & Stimpy Show (August / October 1994)
My brother ended up buying the last Ren & Stimpy issue, which reprinted one of the same stories, and we picked up a £1 Beavis and Butt-head annual from a bargain bin a couple of years later, which provided some good-value laughs.
Clarks Shoes Mega Gaga promotional comic (1995)
An adaptation of the TV ad promoting Clarks' 'Mega Wear' trainers range, I picked this up in the shop while being fitted for significantly less cool footwear. I think we've found the apotheosis of absolutely pointless nostalgia right here.
I wasn't a huge Rugrats fan, and was deep into STC at the time, but I bought this for the price. When Nana gave us all our routine sweets fund to spend in Dillons newsagent (30p or thereabouts), I noticed that it would cover the reduced price of this inaugural issue, and the lasting satisfaction of stories easily won out over sugar.
With no collectable glow-in-the-dark baby skeleton to sucker me into persevering, our relationship ended at issue 1. My youngest brother got them for a while, the copycat.
The Adventures of Yorrik (1996)
Too obscure for a cover image to exist, the cover of a skull riding a rollerskate attracted me to this compendium of amateur comic strips written for local radio, however that works. They were as good as I've made it sound. Contained the words "git" and "knackered," which seemed wickedly adult at the time.
After Jurassic Park, Star Trek: First Contact was another influential cinema experience that radicalised me into a Trekkie just in time to persuade my mum to invest several hundred pounds into this seemingly nonstop partwork over the next few years. I devoured every dry page of this pretend encyclopaedia more eagerly than anything useful I've ever read, until compulsively catching up on months' worth of boring index pages I'd been putting off became tiresome 100+ issues in. Kids have free Wikis nowadays.
Going on holiday excused this extracurricular comic (a fat and expensive glossy one at that). It was pretty good (#2), and I would have liked to have kept going, but it wasn't worth sacrificing Sonic (Nana mag, WH Smith folder 32) or the Fact Files (Mum mag, WH Smith folder 52), so I accepted that like a mature 11-year-old.
The big Bartman / Itchy & Scratchy poster was on my wall for years. I always wondered if it was designed to join up with a poster from the previous issue – just confirmed that it was.
Star Trek comics (Early 1997 – 2000)
At their best, they were so bad they were good. The early Gold Key comics from the 60s and DC's The Next Generation, Vol. 1 tickled me for being so out of character, written as they were before anyone had actually seen the series.
Rez and Sparky (Early 1998)
Aaron Holt's interactive children's comic gave us lots of ironic laughs when we found it on some Amiga PD collection or other (without sound, that video really fails to showcase the appeal). It inspired my brother to draw his own twisted parody comic. He was nine.I copied him by doing one too, which got out of hand and eventually became a 50-part eschatological scatological sci-fi saga with liberal borrowings from Sonic the Comic, Rex the Runt, Histor's Eye and Mark Lamarr's Leaving the 20th Century. I was older than nine.
Star Trek Monthly (March 1998 – February 2001)
It seems odd that it took over a year for me to be interested in keeping up with what was happening in my favourite franchise, but there was 30 years' worth of existing material to catch up on first. I eventually asked my Nana to please swap the fortnightly Sonic the Comic reservation in Smiths for this glossy monthly mag, embarrassingly/conveniently in time to catch an exploitative Seven of Nine cover and Terry Farrell cleavage poster (#37).Maybe I should have gone for a broader sci-fi or geek culture mag to expand my range, but Trek was king and I always found this enjoyable, especially when they randomly gave away a free book. It went downhill after Deep Space Nine ended and there was only the more shallow Voyager propping up the franchise, but that wasn't their fault.
Spawn (Early 1999)
I borrowed a few "graphic novels" from the library as a teenager (The Mask, Asterix, The X-Files), but not nearly enough and never the right ones (I'd get to Alan Moore and the rest of the British Invasion belatedly as a student). This was my only concerted effort to get into a mature comic book series as an adolescent, because I liked hellish things generally and thought the covers looked cool.It didn't help that the earliest collected volume Crewe Library had in the saga was #7. Like the Slimer! comic years earlier, I didn't really know what to make of it and mainly skipped around the books, pointing out any amusingly violent scenes to my brother on car journeys. We had a good laugh at the advertisements for a comic series called 'Preacher.' Who'd want to read about that? Ha ha ha! (I got around to it a decade later. So much better than Spawn).
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace graphic novel (Summer 1999)
"I" (i.e. Mum's credit card) signed up to the Fantasy & SF Book Club when tempted by their promotional offer of choosing five normally expensive Trek and X-Files books for 50p–£2. I fully intended to cancel after the minimum contractual requirement of buying three or four further full-priced books over the next few months (minimum RRP £9.99), which we did, but if I'd just asked for The Art of Star Trek full price to begin with, I could have avoided situations like this one.In my defence, I hadn't seen the film yet (wouldn't until we rented the video, then never again, naturally) and Phantomania was everywhere. I remember being thrown by the line "there's always a bigger fish," trying to work out if it was supposed to be a joke, philosophical rumination or just zoological observation.
Red Dwarf Smegazine (1999/2000)An unusual anomaly, I wasn't aware of this mag at the time ('92-'93, a.k.a. Toxic Crusaders / Buster era), since I didn't see Red Dwarf until '94, by which time it had finished. But as a teenager who liked Red Dwarf even more than he liked Star Trek, I was amazed to discover an almost-complete set at the local comic shop.
Even just five or six years on, they already felt like artefacts from an impossibly distant age, and I saved up school dinner money to collect them sparingly until I decided I probably had enough. They weren't that good.
I don't know how I made it through school with all the self-imposed malnutrition for merchandise's sake. Stairs were sometimes a challenge, let's not even get into PE.
We've reached the dregs now. Getting obsessed with loud music at 15, I switched subscriptions again to what seemed like the best of the metal mags for balancing the mainstream gateway stuff I liked and new recommendations, and which more importantly gave away a free CD every month. Bought a couple of Kerrang!s with dinner money when they gave away freebies.
Unlike the cosy Trek mag, this new world was brash and alienating, and when Nana got sick, and keeping up with our monthly magazines and comics became less of a priority, I was done.
Sorry, that was such a downbeat ending.
"All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realised the real problem with stories—if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death" – Neil Gaiman, The Sandman (a good comic)
Other childhood comics I couldn't specifically track down online
Rainbow (1987?) – the oldest comic I remember seeing in the pile before they were culled, but I don't remember reading it, or more likely having it read to me. It made me feel nostalgic even at five.
Cookie(?) (1988?) – I think that's what it was called, a collection of TV tie-in tales for young children presented by a cat wearing a crown. I think Family-Ness was one of the strips, or maybe Penny Crayon. Or both. I can remember being the appropriate age to read this, and associate it with watching Early Bird in the kitchen while Mum baked a cake.
SuperTed (1990/91) – specifically an edutaining issue where Superted and Spottyman lob boulders at each other on a planet with low gravity.
The Beano / The Dandy – taken as read. Can't remember any specifics, just being surprised that TV star Bananaman was in it.
Tom and Jerry (1992/93) – probably early-'90s reprints of the '70s weekly comic where they talked too much, and which used that economical inkdot printing technique that I tried to imitate in one of my own "annuals," despite it being unnecessary and time-consuming.
Bugs Bunny (1994) – perhaps due to limited options in the newsagent, I randomly chose a comic with Bugs Bunny holding the World Cup on the cover, despite not being a huge Bugs fan and hating football. Why didn't I just stick with Sonic?
Besides Garfield, other comic-strip-based annuals I had included a Buster Book (1992), Beano Book (1996), Dandy Book (1996), Count Duckula (1989), Dennis (US, 1989), Edd the Duck (1990), The Flintstones and Friends (1989), Ghostbusters (1989 & 1990), Popeye (1990), SuperTed (1990), Turtles (1990) and more I've forgotten. Things like Rupert and Sooty were more prose with panels.
