… Stand up and keep your childishness:
Read all the pedants’ screeds and strictures;
But don’t believe in anything
That can’t be told in coloured
pictures.
Chesterton would not have liked many of the
stories told in coloured pictures by American comic books, which these days
tend to dystopia and sado-eroticism – an all-too predictable reflection of the
present state of our culture. But some he would
have liked, and I dare to think I could show him my own comic collection
without (much) embarrassment.
My personal golden age of comics was in the
late 60s and 1970s, when I would roam the streets of London looking for the
latest American imports: Batman or Green Lantern, The Fantastic Four or The
Mighty Thor, and a dozen other titles, illustrated by such artists as Neal Adams, the Buscema
