I Blame The Beano by John Read

Some of my happiest childhood memories are of Saturday mornings sprawled across the living room carpet surrounded by comics and magazines.

Saturday is when my mom came home from shopping which always included comics for me and my three sisters. 

They got Bunty, Judy and Mandy or Valentine when they were older.

Like millions of kids back then I started with the Dandy, Beano, Topper & Beezer.  These progressed to The Valiant, Hotspur, The Eagle, Tiger & Hurricane, or less often, The Victor (too wordy.)

Later still I would get those trashy pulp American magazines of horror stories or noir detective series.  I even devoured the silly adverts on the back page for things like X-Ray specs or itching powder.

Occasionally I’d get Superman comics too.  For some reason, I never liked Batman.

Unknown to me at the time, those hundreds of hours sprawled on my living room carpet, lost inside all of these stories, seeds were being planted into a fertile young mind.   (Especially the horror stories.)

As I got older, the seeds grew into the urge to join this magical world of writers who created such wonder that kept minds, young and old, entranced in escapism, untouched by the more mundane real world.

As all writers know, once that bug starts wriggling inside you, it has to come out. It is impossible to ignore it.

And so I started writing. It began with teenage poetry which was toe curlingly bad.  Song lyrics were more successful with album tracks and singles that nobody ever heard.  Better luck came with comedy sketches on TV and radio.

e.g.  The Grumbleweeds, The News Huddlines.

This led to writing six episodes of a sitcom which came close but no cigar, but which still lingers on the back burner.  One day! Isn’t that what we all keep saying?

But the big one for me is short stories.  Strangely, full blown novels have never grabbed me.   It must be all those self contained magazine stories I read as a kid.  I love reading short stories and I love writing them.  And they usually, but not always, lean towards horror or the mystical & supernatural.  It must be those pulp magazines again.  And so I discovered the Twisted 50 series.   

What a godsend for writers like me who love a thrill  (cough !)  I know it has provided an inspiration and an outlet for many of us.  Reading many of the other stories is a pleasure and an education.    It’s always interesting to see how other writers approach the same subject that you write about yourself.   I’ve read some on here that are way out there in the left field, which is brilliant for inspiration.  But everything we read, good or bad, is an education in how to do it better or, sometimes, how not to do it.

So keep reading.  Keep writing.  And thank you to the Dandy and Beano which started it all off for me.