Up up and away

I was checking through the blog archives here and I realized something quite strange; I’ve not written an entry on comic books even though at one point in my life, I was a big fan of these things. It’s not quite a hobby either, as I think I’ve been more interested in the story-telling than the form itself, otherwise I’d have to include ‘reading’ as a hobby too haha.:)

OK; how does this start? My first exposure to comics came in the form of strips that I followed on the daily newspapers. Yep, up till the late 90s, my parents subscribed to The Straits Times even though they read the Chinese dailies. The English papers were for the three sons at home, and I remembered as a primary school boy religiously following, then cutting the titles I liked (Garfield was one of them) and pasting them into art books. At about the same time I was introduced to Tintin and Asterix comics by way of my cousin.

Up till that point, comic book collection was still pretty limited, since at that point there were only about two dozen Tintin and Asterix titles each. However, in the mid 80s, I got involved with a small group of collectors that started off a local sort of comic book craze in Singapore. DC Comics and Marvel Comics were the two leading publishers of the English-based comic titles. The first shop was a comic / game hobbyist shop called Leisure Craft run by a middle-aged woman, Mrs. Wong (IIRC), and it was first located at a very small corner on the third level of the old MPH near Fort Canning. I think the amount of money a lot of us pumped into her business from that year onwards – 1985 I think – by buying so may titles encouraged her enough to move to a bigger location at Midpoint Orchard’s basement, and shortly after other shops followed, including Comics Mart at Serene Centre, which surprisingly is still around today after 20 years.

My heyday was when I was in JC1 and 2 at Anglo-Chinese Junior College, and a lot of afternoons each day was spent at a shop called Pan Comics Galleries at Thomson Plaza. All my excess pocket money went to buying comic book titles to supplement the other books I was buying, so much so that my parents were torn between happy (that I was reading) and worried (that I was doing nothing but reading). Pan Comics Galleries holds a lot of great memories since I was an assistant of sorts there, helping to inventorize and on occasion voluntarily manning the cash counter too. I got my first comic book signing there too when Mike Grell came to Singapore in 1987; he autographed my copy of his best selling title “The Longbow Hunters“. I wonder how much that’s worth now. All three of us were collectors, though by far I think I outspent both my brothers in this. Over a period of perhaps 5 years, I think we easily chalked up at least several thousand books, with a number of priceless gems in them too.

The hobby took a substantial winding down when I enlisted for National Service, and surprisingly, so did comic collection in Singapore at large too. A number of shops closed, shifted to more ulu locations to lower operating costs, or downsized their floorspace. For the next nearly 15 years, the hobby was in near dormancy kept alive with just a small handful of collectors who were still buying and collecting. That’s changed at the turn of the century though, when big book store chains like Kinokuniya started stocking huge collections of titles in compilation form. I suspect many of the old collectors still prefer to following the ongoing adventures of their favorite superheroes in monthly fashion and scorn at compilations, but I’ve moved on. I prefer to read these things in compiled form since its a lot more convenient and at lower cost too.

It’s also interesting to see how comic books have evolved over the last 23 years. Specifically, they’ve diversified with so many becoming representations of social issues and dilemmas faced in the modern world. In other words, comic books aren’t always escapisms anymore, although they’re certainly still fantastic with their inclusion of heroes larger than life in contemporary settings. Writing has substantially improved too, with heroes no longer the immortal giants and gods perfect in personalities they once were in the 60s, but very fallible and even whimsical at times. Many comic books easily rival the best fictional classics in paperback form in story telling and complexity. There’re perennial favorites like The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, and more recent ones like Identity Crisis. Yeah, I’m a DC Comics person; only because most of what I read in the last 23 years have been from this publisher, and I can only handle one publisher’s gallery of characters.:)

All that said, there’re still books I read as a primary school boy that I still return to as an adult – and it’s Asterix. The humor and satire from the band of Gaulish villlages holding out against Roman occupation centres a great deal on Euro-politics from the mid to late 20th century. There’s still a lot of little inside jokes that I only get as I advance in years and become more familiar with world history. The title is like good wine; the older it gets, the more enjoyable it becomes.:)