As a child, I was a very precocious reader. By the age of eight I had already graduated from Robin and Swift (Roddy the Road Scout), and an unfortunate interlude with Girl, to the flagship Eagle publication. Dan Dare has made me the writer I am today, and I shall never forget his struggles with an unsavoury character called the Mekon who floated around the galaxy (I almost wrote the Web) on what looked like an upturned smoothing iron. Vora was a pretty terrifying figure as well. I can't remember a single thing about PC 49 but I do vaguely recall that Riders of the Range featured Jeff Arnold and Luke. Then there was Luck of the Legion. I think I got that name right. I'm not sure that there were any school yarns. Owl of the Remove perhaps? No, that was Billy Bunter, of whom I was no great fan. I also dipped into the Beano and the Dandy but there was always something suspiciously northern about these comics and I would not be surprised to learn that they were read by the Clitheroe Kid himself.
By about the age of twenty, I had outgrown Eagle and moved on to Classics Illustrated which I much preferred to the real thing. Seriously, the art work on, for example, The Deerslayer was quite outstanding, and the power and emotion of the images was carried over to and informed my reading of the books themselves.
The picture below could be taken straight from the pages of Glen Baxter:
But in fact it comes from my 1927 edition of Le Morte Darthur.
I got almost to the end of your entry, thinking how can you be so economical with the truth. But I see with some relief that le Morte D'Arthur at last gets a look in. I have this distant memory of you reading this at a very tender age - but perhaps you were just turning the pages?
ReplyDeleteAND you've missed out Mr. Mole's Tunnel ...........