Hard News: Nerd Dad
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now I've got another question: when to let them near my comics?
Ditto what Giovanni said. If you're not planning on eBaying the comics, let them at 'em as soon as they can read or look like they want to read.
My older boy pretty much taught himself to read using Footrot Flats. And then discovered the ancient comic stash of a friend's dad (whose English aunty used to mail them to Connecticut every week of his childhood). Buster and Valiant -- excellent stuff, full of bellowing sergeants-major, toffs, speccy swots, spivs, flogging teachers, and all sorts of other cultural elements I hadn't expected to have to explain for years. And could barely explain.
Lately it's all Asterix, Tintin, and Calvin & Hobbes. And we hear good things about Bone.
I'm still wondering what happened to my own childhood box of Bunty, Tammy & June, Misty, my brother's Whizzer & Chips... and whether they really were all written in a castle, as the mailing address used to suggest (what was it, King's Tower or something? Probably some ghastly concrete block, but it sounded wildly romantic).
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I'm still wondering what happened to my own childhood box of Bunty, Tammy & June, Misty,my brother's Whizzer & Chips..
Oh lordy, if only I still had my original Whizzer & Chips #1, with the flip-book. I'd be rich!
I did love that comic.
and whether they really were all written in a castle, as the mailing address used to suggest (what was it, King's Tower or something? Probably some ghastly concrete block, but it sounded wildly romantic).
It would have been IPC Towers, a twin office hi-rise on the South Bank of the Thames, which is (was?) also home to NME.
Not a fairy kingdom castle, but not exactly ugly either.
Oops. I think I just shattered your childhood dreams ...
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Buster and Valiant -- excellent stuff, full of bellowing sergeants-major, toffs, speccy swots, spivs, flogging teachers, and all sorts of other cultural elements I hadn't expected to have to explain for years. And could barely explain.
As I might have observed recently in this very space, you haven't really plunged the depth of what you cannot explain until your seven year old appopriates your collection of Life in Hell.
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Ah yes, "Beano", "Cor!" and 'Look and Learn" were the stuff of my childhood.
Back in those days the local suburban shopping centre had a bookstore to go with the dairy, haberdashery, fish and chip shop, post office, local hair dresser, and chemist. They were wiped out by Rogernomics of course, but those were the days when you had a regular magazine order which we kids were dispatched to pick up from the man who ran the bookshop, and my parents paid on tick. I well remember how my brother and I at the age of 13 and 14 respectively managed - don't ask me how! - To persuade the bookstore owner my father wished to add "Playboy" to our regular order, and how and my brother and I became suddenly religiously keen to pick up the magazines. We got an entirely new perspective on things from Playboy - and it was at least six months before our Mum rumbled our little subterfuge.
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'Look and Learn" were the stuff of my childhood.
Not least for the truly bizarre fusion of Dan Dare and Gibbons that was... The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire! Another triumph of the English urge to educate the young while they weren't looking. :)
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It's always fun when your kids find your comics collection. My not-quite-any-more preschooler found our Asterix and Tintin collection, and is displaying quite a lot of interest. Mind you, the problem is that those books are in the "oversize books" section of the shelves, which also hold several books that have been the subject of obscenity trials and which have pictures that I don't want to be explaining any time soon.
I was a good boy when I was young, and read The Eagle religiously. Ah, the Mekon. Then I discovered 2000AD, and never looked back...
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It's always fun when your kids find your comics collection. My not-quite-any-more preschooler found our Asterix and Tintin collection, and is displaying quite a lot of interest. Mind you, the problem is that those books are in the "oversize books" section of the shelves, which also hold several books that have been the subject of obscenity trials and which have pictures that I don't want to be explaining any time soon.
If you don't have any pets that chew/defecate on/bury anything left at floor level for more than three seconds, and the NQAMP is up to a little curatorial responsibility, why not invest in a brightly coloured plastic crate and keep SFW Asterix & Tintin at ground level and well away from the *ahem* grown-up picture books?
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when to let them near my comics?
It's funny I never even thought about my Asterix or Tintin books. My (as yet non-existent) children can have those as soon as they want, after all I grew up on them (and my uncle's hardcover Tiger Annuals, full of football and WW2 comics).
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why not invest in a brightly coloured plastic crate and keep SFW Asterix & Tintin at ground level and well away from the *ahem* grown-up picture books?
Supernanny!
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Look, if you're not going to store contraband visibly on a high shelf, how will the offspring discover the illicit thrill of snagging forbidden literature?Surely once they have the height/engineering skills/curiosity to winkle the naughty stuff down, they're probably old enough.
/not entirely tongue in cheek
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This is a wonderful trip down memory lane. I was wondering when The Trigan Empire would get a mention. I only remember it from the Look and Learn period, but managed to learn about it's earlier incarnation and intentions...
Now I don't know about you, but Alan Moore reminds me a lot of Michael Moorcock, and I have to say among my favourite titles on my bookshelves is an almost complete run of the quarterly editions of New Worlds that ran (mostly) under his editorship. Unsigned alas.
Sad to think that of the young Turks who publised their early stories there, Barrington Bayley's dead, J. G. Ballard's dying and Brian Aldiss is an octagenerian with a pacemaker and an OBE.
Hmm, think I'll reread the Jerry Cornelius stories again soon, I feel the urge...
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Russell: Seeing you find such interesting things in basements, you should swing by our place some day. We still have boxes packed and untouched from when we went to live in Cardiff for six months in 2004. Like you, we have dirt-controlled temperatures and boxes of the stuff of childhood detritus (MCDonald's giveaways, Lego, Barbie, comics, books, comics, posters, drawings). I try to give some of it away but, generally, it defeats me.
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Booty party, report to Geoff's place for random pillaging!
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Ditto Asterix and Tintin at my house. When I worked at Whitcoulls for 6 months in my younger days and could get 50% discount, I bought new copies of all books in both series. Still tattered and sellotaped from endless reading by kids and me over last 20 years.
Slaine the movie!!! I feel a warp coming on . . .
Or Strontium Dog the movie. I want to play Midden Face McNulty. -
I read out a telegram from Tharg at my brother's (first) wedding. The bride's family thought I'd lost my mind (not saying they were wrong) but my brother, who'd turned me on to 2000AD got the joke.
Borag Thungg, Earthlets!
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Who qualifies as the younger version of Angelina Jolie and could play Halo Jones?
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Angelina Jolie could not play Halo Jones. She's a bit too sculpted. The point of Halo Jones is that she's the everywoman, not some super-hyper-wow-enhanced killing machine etc (as was unfortunately standard for most women in 2000AD). As the lecturer says at the start of Book 3 (I think, it might have been book 2), there wasn't anything special about her - and that's what's so remarkable and why she's such a compelling character.
When you think of how much of 2000AD's output was basically violence-porn, what Alan Moore managed to do with The Ballad of Halo Jones was pretty special.
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Sorry, I never analysed it that closely. I just enjoyed the story and remember her being very curvy, a la Jolie.
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Everything was curvy
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Look, if you're not going to store contraband visibly on a high shelf, how will the offspring discover the illicit thrill of snagging forbidden literature?Surely once they have the height/engineering skills/curiosity to winkle the naughty stuff down, they're probably old enough.
And a fair point, and I did the same when I was a kid. But I may have go through the contraband and bowdlerise the collection so that they only find the right sort of forbidden books. ;)
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For what value of "right"?
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Let's hear it for Asterisk. If it wasn't for Asterisk, I doubt whether my 17 year old stepson would be able to read. Dyslexic, possibly with Asperger's, hearing problems, speech impediments and a SPELD dropout, he found Asterisk at the age of about 10 or 11 and basically taught himself to read through them. The next thing he tackled was the first Harry Potter.
Strange boy. Right into technology, teaches himself all sorts of computer stuff including game programming (at a basic level), helps others at his school with their tech problems, has been known to find ways around 'difficulties' with the school computers, likes calculus, gets a blank look on his face when you try to get his attention from whatever he is doing (in fact, I suspect he isn't even really aware that someone is talking to him as that part of his brain hasn't had its switch flipped), has conversations aloud with the television and so on.
He's good though.
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Look, if you're not going to store contraband visibly on a high shelf, how will the offspring discover the illicit thrill of snagging forbidden literature?Surely once they have the height/engineering skills/curiosity to winkle the naughty stuff down, they're probably old enough.
Nope, your children are old enough for Bobby Mapplethorpe's photo essays on racist objectification of well-hung erect black men, fun things to do with your foreskin and common household tools, and alternative potty training when they are old (and rich) enough to buy their own damn copies.
Helmut Newton is also... shall we say, problematic. "Uncle Craig, why is that big naked blonde lady only wearing a pair of spike heels? Is she hurting that man? Uncle Craaaaaig..."
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why not invest in a brightly coloured plastic crate and keep SFW Asterix & Tintin at ground level and well away from the *ahem* grown-up picture books?
That would be the brightly coloured plastic crate that the littlie can climb up on and use to reach the higher shelves?
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When you think of how much of 2000AD's output was basically violence-porn, what Alan Moore managed to do with The Ballad of Halo Jones was pretty special.
For me the excellent Halo Jones is the best Moore ever did. Never could warm in the same way to Watchmen or Extraordinary Gentleman. Pedestrian artwork (Ozymandias / Adrian Veidt is a bloody awful design) and too much pretension to 'meaning', IMveryHO. As Kracklite so rightly noted, Moore picked up from Moorcock, just as Neil Gaiman picked up from Moore.
For all its violence porn, 2000AD was a quantum improvement on stuff like Valiant. Anyone remember the uber-creepy Janus Stark, a strip with, apart from a few incidentals, absolutely zero female characters?
And Asterix, charming little bugger that he is, would have to be one of the biggest xenophobes in comics. Is there an adventure where he doesn't say "How peculiar these foreigners are" at least once?
Thanks Craig for the memory jog on The Trigan Empire. I'd quite forgotten what a labour of love that strip was.
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