By the time I was around 25, I realised my plans for World Domination weren’t going to come to fruition. So I turned my attention to finishing my already overdue studies of Architecture, and my ever-evolving activities concerning the elaboration of comics.
When I was 6 or 7, I saw at the newsagent’s near my house a copy of a Marvel comic called Secret Wars sitting on the shelf. It was an English version of the American original, where instead of a monthly issue the British editors in Bayswater had decided to cut up the monthly stories into chunks and publish them weekly along with other cannibalised fragments of comics such as Zoids and Machine Man. 
But I remember being transfixed by the action on the cover, and the colour and strangeness of it all. I was no stranger to superheroes, but I’d never owned an actual comic before, having only come into contact with the genre through Adam West’s Batman and Christopher Reeve’s Superman films. I asked my mother, who I was with, to buy it for me straight away, which, thankfully, she did.
And so I was introduced to a whole new plethora of superheroes, without a Superman or a Batman in sight (the distinction between the Marvel and DC universes weren’t obvious to me at time, as can be fathomed by my youth and no knowledge of comics, but it was confusing at first), but others with which I was engrossed straight away: Iron Man, Wolverine, Thor, Captain America (and the rest of the Avengers), the X-Men and most of all, Spiderman, who’d become my favourite.
But most importantly, it marked the first time I picked up a pencil and paper and started to copy Mike Zeck’s drawings, and began to learn about how to represent people more like they were than the matchstick-men kids usually scribble. That was the moment it all began, and I quickly decided I like this sort of thing. I liked it very much. I began to scrounge my father for his discarded sheets of A4 paper containing obsolete information concerning his business and began to draw on the blank backs of them. I learned how to draw muscles and faces, shadows and perspective, proportion and expression. In one fell swoop, Secret Wars won me over by reconciling brightly-clad bringers of justice and another of my fancies, science-fiction. In the 12-part mini-series, the cream of Earth’s superheroes and supervillains are kidnapped by an omnipotent entity and set against each other on a planet created specifically for the effect. For kicks, the entity, known as The Beyonder has advanced technology and ships on the planet, and buildings to be used as bases for each faction. And so I also learned how to draw spaceships and sci-fi environments, far before learning to do actual existing sorts of backdrops (to be fair, I only learned it while training to be an architect).
My new found knowledge quickly catapulted me to the top of my class in drawing, so much that while studying Greek Mythology in Mrs. Harris’ 1st year juniors class, my rendition of Medusa’s severed head done in chalk on card, complete with fangs, reptilian eyes and purple snake hair was used as a prop of the same Gorgon’s ghastly semblance for a dramatisation of Perseus’ epic tale.
It took me many years to grow out of superheroes, which eventually happened perhaps due to my growing preference for European work over the fast-food American style of comic, or perhaps due to the decreasing quality and ever more complex and numerous titles, characters, story-arcs, questionable aesthetics and apotheosis of pathetic artists in the Marvel Universe. I will, however, remain forever indebted to the entire silliness of costumed do-gooders, and in particular to that tale of lost superheroes flung across the universe, for my skills in doodling.
Posted in Comics, Random thoughts
Tags: 1984, batman, captain america, drawing, iron man, learning, marvel, secret wars, spiderman, superheroes, superman, the avengers, thor, wolverine, x-men
