Yesterday, after twenty eight years, I finally obtained one of the original comics whose covers were reproduced and so fascinated me.
It is the comic above of course, Out of the Night # 12 dating from 1953. The latter thought is cause to pause in itself. 1953. The comic now by the side of me on the sofa is 57 years old. The imagined child who once owned it, originally bought it, will now be in his mid - late sixties.
It only cost me £5:00, ordered from 30th Century Comics in London. It isn't in very good condtion, as the front cover isn't attached to the rest of the comic. The condition of the comic isn't important to me though as long as it is intact (which it is) it is the mere fact of owning the original of an image which fascinated me in childhood.
Like finally seeing a landscape you have only previously seen in a photograph.
I remember this cover well, of thinking about it when I was with Mum, visiting someone who I can't remember, in the back roads of Forres. I found a correlation between the ramshackle graveyard pictured and its bright red sky and the air of old mystery around Forres. I remember being ill, some minor-childhood ailment,m and being off school, and poring over this cover, trying to decode the tiny reproduced words.... The eerie piping waiol of a strange old flute... and ancient graves yawned wide beneath a pallid moon! Thrill to a truly breathtaking story "Music for the Dead!"
...and where did this particular issue begin its life? At what store was it bought? How did it survive being thrown away? Was it lost in attics for years... decades even?
I'll never know of course.
Yellow, papery mysteries happily never to be solved.
