Poetry Bus Day, and today our experienced driver is Rachel Fox, who has More About The Song and rambles here, where you'll find the rest of the poems too:
http://crowd-pleasers.blogspot.com/2010/09/driving-poetry-bus-first-stop-memory.htmlShe set us a challenge on childhood - a poem about a character we remember from a book, film, story etc.
And thus unwittingly grew what is an increasing
bete noir for me into a full-bodied black demon of rage. A culture is dying and no one is doing anything about it.
You can tell what follows is a rant, because it begins with the words. "When I was a child..."
When I was child I read comics. As I was a very lucky child, I read lots of comics. Due to, I can only assume, my mother never having to stop doing things all day, it seems that once something had been requested at the newsagents from our house it never got cancelled.
As a result of having two older brothers,
The Victor,
Hotspur,
The Beano and
The Dandy came weekly to our house. I presume
Beezer,
Topper and possibly
Whizzer and Chips came because of middle brother. I started with
Twinkle, went on to
Mandy and graduated to
Jackie ("What is a French Kiss?"). The only vaguely worthy one was the
Look and Learn, but that had a comic strip in it,
The Trigan Empire (Romans! In the future! In Space!) and as soon as little brother and I were big enough to sit at the kitchen table my father read it to us every Friday night; he liked the story too. In 1977, when the ground-breaking, seminal comic
2000AD (yes, we started at
Prog 1) plopped through the door -"mind the oranges, Marlon" - I was
14, and all these still came to our house. My eldest brother was by then 27. We fought over
2000AD.
As we also took a daily paper, the weekly
Romford Recorder,
Farmer's Weekly and
The Lady the Palmer family must have been our newsagent's best friend and the paperboy's worst enemy.
Ladies and Gentlemen, ponder my choices for the two youngest sons.
The Beano. That's it - everything else is rubbish. Glossy television spin-offs that have vaguely educational quizzes in them to make the parents feel better at spending £2.50 on a weekly magazine. The
Penpont newsagent was kind enough to give me his "big book of all the things you can get hold of in the UK", and the only vaguely interesting thing I could find was
National Geographic Kids, which we get but falls into the worthy bracket. As does
Discovery Box, which I used to take for the two big ones, and have re-ordered now (you have to do this online). The boys enjoy and read these two, but nothing matches the excitement of
Beano day, because it's a real comic for children. The only one, apart from
2000AD, but they're still a bit young for that.
My, and my brothers' generation , grew up with all the marvellous comics I've listed above and it was a lot of this generation that went on to create our new Golden Age of Graphic Novels. These comics were what we read before, during, and after we graduated to all the American stuff - the DC stable
et al.
Yet there is nothing out there for our children to read now. It really is the death of a culture.
Here
endeth the rant.
Right, with the exception of
2000AD, one thing about comics, one of the things that makes children so love them, is that the same things happen to the same characters every week and no one ever grows up. Roger dodges, Dennis menaces, Minnie minxes, Dan creates misunderstood mayhem then eats a cow pie and Alf
Tupper always loses his running kit then has to borrow a set of spikes and eat a bag of chips before running against "toffs". Whom he always beats, allowing him to cry at the tape each week, "I run 'em!".
Except for one strip. Out of my vast comic experience, there was one strip that was so different, so bizarre, so
other it has haunted my memory like a cloud I once saw that was maybe a spaceship, or that night someone followed me home though I never saw them. That strip was
The Amazing Wilson.
Wilson was a man like no other. He spent most of his time naked, living in a cave on some remote moor. When he went out into the world he wore a pair of goat-hair knitted combinations. He had possibly died at some point in the past, but was alive now (or was he?) and restored his strength and energy by
bathing in a crystal's glow. He drank moss tea. He was definitely not, however, New Age. He was ineffably good, but never connected to anyone and had no friends. He appeared whenever a British or English sports team needed assistance, was a superlative athlete at everything, and when he departed, having won the game, someone always remembered a man matching his exact description appearing
50 years ago and saving the day, in a similar fashion, in a different sport. In hindsight, the whole strip was like an LSD trip except in black and white.
I can't show you a picture of Wilson, because there isn't one on the Internet. Which tells you something. However, I did find this book on Amazon, and if you flick through the pages you'll find him. Fleetingly.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sporting-Supermen-Stories-Childhood-Heroes/dp/1845131657So here's my poem, which also fulfils a separate challenge La Fox set me last week.
A ManA dead man once
dwelt in a cave
in my mind
in a cave.
I found him again.
I did not seek him out,
which is as it should be.
I win forever.
Up, up and away!
After all that delight, it was back to the grind on Monday (work and university) and Tuesday, when by chance I happened to be in 
