Jonathan Ross: The king of comics

There are times when I feel as if I have woken in a parallel universe. An alternative reality in which all the things I had dreamed I might get to see as a rather weird, socially inept boy, have miraculously and against all the odds come to be real.

Computers in every house, TV that you can watch when and where you want, and portable phones — a miracle in itself — that can also play music and games and take pictures and stop us from getting lost. Incredible. But the most mind-blowing development has taken place in and around my favourite form of popular entertainment — the comic book.

I’ve been in love with comics — American comics, mainly — since I first set eyes on them in the late Sixties. I must have been eight or nine when my oldest brother Paul brought some beaten up, dog-eared copies of Fantastic Four and DareDevil home from the local junk shop. They had a great big ugly “3” in black marker pen scrawled on the cover — that being the price, three pence each. When you’d finished reading them you could take them back and get 1p off your next purchase. Just as I’ve never met a cake I didn’t like, I never took a comic back, and still have a few of those original 3p copies in my now scarily large collection at home.

It wasn’t always easy being an American comic book fan in the UK, not least because they were a bugger to find. For a while they used to sell them in regular newsagents — oh, happy days — but then the supply dried up completely. Some would still make it — bales of them were used as a cheap ballast in the bigger cargo ships, I heard, which explained why when you did manage to find a corner shop that had a stash of something new and exotic such as Marvel Team Up, for example, it would probably be warped and creased after getting soaked on the way over.

Even in London, where we normally take stuff for granted, they weren’t that easy to find. In the Seventies there was only one shop I knew of where you could get a regular fix: the near-legendary Dark They Were and Golden Eyed in St Anne’s Court, Soho. Now that is what I call a great name for a shop, and the place itself lived up to the promise. Over two floors a gaggle of hippie sci-fi and fantasy fans had created a shrine to impossible fiction.

Lord of the Rings posters hung next to Robert Crumb’s sublimely rendered sexual fantasies while the racks that stretched from wall to wall were filled with the latest imports from America, all for about 30p each. The weekend they shut down was both deeply tragic and memorably exciting, as everything had to go. You could get your hands on the hardback collections and higher-priced items for a fraction of the regular price, and then, like something out of Harry Potter, it turned from being a place of magic into a regular dreary old restaurant for muggles.

Today we have Forbidden Planet, GOSH and Mega City and probably several more specialist shops but for a while times were hard. Actually finding the comics was only a part of the problem. Strange as it might seem today, back then it was an embarrassing thing to admit to even liking them, especially if you were, technically at least, grown up.

When I had my first job in London I decided to re-read one of my fave series of all time — Hergé’s magnificent Tintin — on the Tube to and from work. I was single at the time, and not exactly a babe-magnet, but the memory of being openly pointed out and laughed at by a couple of foxy young lady-commuters has always stayed with me. Well, Spielberg made a film out of those books! So who’s laughing now, sexy commuter-girls?

Actually, it’s probably still you, because it wasn’t as great as it might have been. But that’s not my point. My point is that what was once seen as a joke, something for those arrested in a state of permanent childhood, is not only acceptable and mainstream now but also hip. Comic books are cool, the geeks really are inheriting the earth, and the release of Avengers Assemble on April 26 is, for me, the cherry on the cake. Here’s why.

I was born — gulp — in 1960, pretty much exactly the time that comic books were recovering from the drought that they suffered through in the Fifties. Not all of the superheroes who had been so popular during the War years had gone — Batman and Superman and WonderWoman, for example, all carried on with their adventures pretty much uninterrupted. But Captain America and the Human Torch and Captain Marvel and Uncle Sam and dozens of others had fallen by the wayside, many never to reappear. Then DC comics gave superheroes another chance with the re-introduction of the Flash, followed by Hawkman and the Green Lantern and a host of others.