Ken Aldred

Silver Age classic. Doctor Fate, one of my all-time favourite characters, teams up with the Golden Age Green Lantern and Hourman against a ferocious, intimidating Solomon Grundy. Some of Murphy Anderson’s best ever artwork. An old school pick. Also, the most memorable team-up reprint from the 100 pagers back in the 70s when I started reading comics as a kid.

Transatlantic collectors need to have so much patience we could be sanctified for it.

There’s also the story I’ve heard that the pence copies were run off first and so tend to have better colours than a lot of the cent copies toward the end of that initial printing.

Also, I prefer watching with subtitles.

I’m a British collector and I’ve always liked foreign comics. Two of my favourites are a couple of obscure foreign publishers called Marvel and DC.

It’s tragic to see one of the greatest, most influential comic artists of all time deteriorate to that level. Really is.

True. I recall getting a nice box of comics through from Mile High in the 90s, by surface mail to the U.K. Ordered it in July, delivered a couple of weeks before Christmas that year.

Was the story actually finished?

I can follow it, but in a very clinical, detached manner, which lacks the vibrancy of comics.

Even back in the olden days collectors and dealers would bind together runs of comics to create hardcover collected editions. Going on right from the beginning, more or less. Any bookbinder could do it for you. One of the nicest I’ve ever seen, way back in the late 70s, was a bound edition of the Wrightson Swamp Thing run. That was tempting.

The weird thing is that I’m very good at analysis and comprehension of the written word, but actually constructing a complex, visual image of the environment itself from text, well, I’m quite appalling at it. I got a top grade in English Literature because of the strength of the former, but it hid a marked deficit in the latter, in retrospect. I recall being quite surprised, and surprising someone else, when they said to me that you’re supposed to do this with a novel. In my head there’s something grey, distant and sterile about any image I attempt to create; it’s basic, simplistic. Again, I appreciate the way comic artists can compensate for that shortcoming and bring worlds to life from a ---script.

And then combined it with the concept used in John Carter about originating from a higher gravity world providing greater strength in a lower gravity environment.

The strange thing for me is that I’m very good at analysing dialogue, motivation and symbolism in writing, the more technical side of it, but I’m extremely poor at actually visualising a scene from a text novel. A major attraction of comics for me is not just the artwork but respecting the fact that its creators are far more gifted than I will ever be at vibrantly illustrating that world and its inhabitants, and I feel quite grateful that they can do that for me so well. For me, the two worlds of comic books and text novels are not interchangeable. For me, the latter feels much colder and greyer and very poorly-defined; such is my limitation.

Further on down the line, interesting to see if we get The Magus.

They’re fascinating.

And in grading that might be classed as a permissible manufacturing defect, so you wouldn’t see much if any downgrading. ‘As manufactured’, not damage incurred afterwards.

I think it’s a great topic, and an important one to demolish the public misconception that comic book fans tend to be dateless, nerd losers.

I agree. For me it’s mainly about emotional connection, and that determines the books I’ll keep hold of. The best memories, recalling the best, most positive experiences, which isn’t often about market value. Random occurrences, and a similar unpredictability to the books associated with those.

It is brilliant.

You know me so well.

I’ll maybe settle on ‘kind of’, ‘superficially reminiscent’ rather than get too deep into the subtleties of Lego and Barbie plots. I’ll believe you.

I believe the sequel is going to be a lot darker.

So it’s basically the same underlying plot as The Lego Movie, even including Will Farrell.