Paperboy Read Free Page A

understand that comics were the key to the world? You could always buy another loaf, but Superman comics were hard to come by.
    When the Westcombe Hill corner shop began stocking
The Man of Steel
, everything changed. On the cover of the first issue I purchased, Superman had the head of a giant red ant. It was a Red Kryptonite story, and, as was so often the case with DC Comics, the cover was a ‘fanciful’ – i.e., untruthful – version of the events depicted inside. Red Kryptonite was my favourite chunk of Superman’s home planet because the results to exposure were unguessable, and were usually part of some convoluted and ludicrous hoax to teach Lois Lane not to be nosy.
    I hated Batman, who had stupid ears and no superpowers, and I spent all of my pocket money on comic series that were doomed to failure and had zero resale value, like
The
Metal Men
(robots with the properties of the element table),
The Atom
(a shrinking man who spent most of his time climbing out of Venus flytraps or fighting spiders),
The
Flash
(who could run fast – big deal),
Strange Sports
(weird science-fiction sports matches),
Sea Devils
(boring underwater adventures) and
Challengers of the Unknown
(purple jumpsuited heroes without superpowers).
    Purbrick’s stocked comics in a rusty wire revolving rack, and I had a small window of opportunity to buy them on a Wednesday before they sold out. Certain issues became legendary, especially the tale of ‘Superman Red and Superman Blue’, although I later decided this was more about fetishizing two different versions of the Man of Steel’s costume than about the plot. One story, called ‘The Death of Superman’, was endlessly plugged across the DC range (‘Not a hoax, not a dream, but REAL!’) and I was desperate to get my hands on it. It seemed that DC had got themselves into this having-to-explain-it’s-not-a-hoax situation because they had made their hero so invincible that his powers negated most of the more dramatic storylines. 1 The writers had to resort to ever more elaborate ruses for their sensational cover gambits. Virtually every plot turned out to be a trick, a hoax or a dream.
    I therefore found myself fascinated by the Superman comics for all the wrong reasons. I wasn’t interested in heroics or battles with space aliens. I wanted to see how much more absurd Superman’s psychological gambits could become before something cracked and they all went mad.
    Mr Purbrick was behind the counter, dispensing horrible-tasting cough sweets called Hacks. The logo on their bottle featured an elderly man sneezing wetly into a vast hankie. Damn, why couldn’t the place have been shut for lunch?
    Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen comics were particularly instructive, I found, because they took the hoax-plot to a surreal level. The Man of Steel’s two sidekicks were clearly in love with him, but he didn’t love them. Lois would be humiliated, bullied, deceived and placed in danger by a man who was prepared to disguise himself under rubber masks just to ‘teach her a lesson’. Her old-maid status was endlessly mocked. She would be duped by gold-digging monocled counts who turned out to be Superman (punishing her for some perceived failure of judgement), fake superheroes who were revealed as gangsters, and handsome historical figures like Robin Hood or Julius Caesar, usually as a result of hitting her head on a rock and thinking she’d been hurled back into the past.
    I re-read these comics with an increasing sense of puzzlement. Why would a gangster pretend he had superpowers just to shut Lois Lane up?
You are a gangster, and Lois Lane is about to expose your misdeeds in the
Daily Planet
. Do you, a) shoot her in the head? Or do you, b) fly through her bedroom window on wires in tights and a cape, snog her, propose, get her into a wedding dress so she can say ‘I grew tired of waiting for you, Superman, I am marrying Astro-Lad’ and then dump her?
    In one issue Lois Lane spent the entire story