Captain's Blog: Meeting the Bat

It’s been a while since I wrote anything biographical, but as the year is 2026, I realised a whole sixty years have passed since my first encounter with a character who’d pretty much come to dominate my disposable income for decades to come – and I guess he’s not done yet.

If there’s one thing people realise quickly about me, whether in person or here on my website or podcast, it’s my lifelong obsession with horror, science fiction and comic books. (That’s in no particular order.) Whether it’s what I talk about, what I read, watch, collect, what I write about or the t-shirts I wear, not to mention the room I’m writing this in. It’s undeniable. I was a geek before the term was coined.

But where did it all actually begin? What was the turning point that led me down the path to this vividly colourful and entertaining life? (I mean of course, entertaining to myself.)

Let’s set the Wayback Machine back to 1966. I can’t remember precisely the time of year, but it was definitely 1966, and it was a school day. I was six years old, and had come home for my lunch from the Infants school a short walk down a quiet residential street away. It was an unremarkable day. All I really remember about it was that lunchtime, my mother had gone to our usual corner shop, run by a sweet, elderly couple. Back then, there were no supermarkets in town, but the place was peppered with small corner shops selling all the essentials you could possibly need. There were three of them within a hundred yards of our terraced house.

During that lunchtime, my mother gave me something new. Something I had never seen before. A small flat packet, wrapped in a strange waxed paper – and it was vividly colourful. I prised the packet open to find a hard, pink slab of what pretended to be bubble gum, but to be honest, was really tough going for a six-year-old jaw.

What really (and I mean REALLY) caught my attention was what else was in the pack. There were four (or it might’ve been five, I’m not sure after all these years) cards that would change everything. No exaggeration.

One side had a picture (not a photograph – those would come later) of this weirdly dressed man fighting other equally weirdly dressed people. Okay, that was instantly intriguing to me, but sealing the deal for this little six-year-old was seeing that the cool guy in the mask and cape had a young assistant who had the same name as me.

On the reverse of the card was a box of text, telling an instalment of a story that I couldn’t really read because a) I was six, and b) I was being taught in the medium of Welsh with English being something I heard on TV. My best attempts were based on pronouncing everything phonetically, as we tend to do in Welsh.

That pack of four or five cards triggered something that would become a craze – but not in the here today, gone tomorrow way of crazes. This one would stay. (It’s now stayed for sixty years.)

I wanted more of those cards. Other kids at school had them as well so I saw some that kept eluding me. One of which showed Batman hanging on to the arm of a large clock on a tower while a masked villain in a green costume adorned with question marks looked on with menace.

Like I said, I had no idea what was going on, (not even an idea I had seen the Riddler for the first time, he became my first favourite Batman villain, but I hadn’t really seen the Joker yet. The Riddler had what I considered to be a cool costume. My fashion sense at six was a tad warped, in retrospect) I could pick out a few words of the text and sort of guess the gist of the rest but regardless, I was hooked. Too bad the cards were quickly out of stock and unavailable anywhere. Normally, that would’ve been that – but it was 1966 and I could never have guessed what would happen next.

A while later, my mother told me one day that those Batman cards I’d gone nuts for earlier in the year were back, and gave me a pack. But they were different. They weren’t the same pictures and text combo. These were photos of people dressed as Batman and the other characters. I found out there was a TV series – AND a movie. It was the summer of Batmania – a marketing blitz that swept the globe. Thanks to the TV series starring Adam West, Batman was literally everywhere – and another major, life changing discovery was on its way that summer.

I live in a seaside town, and during the summer months some of the local shops would stock American comics. These were different from British ones and (stand by for controversy) better in every way. There. I said it. For one thing, the artwork was better, more dynamic, the covers were more dramatic and enticing, the stories were longer than I was used to, a single story could take ten or twenty pages, instead of the standard one or three the UK preferred. And the characters were more colourful. My first comic book (as I learned they were called) was Batman 186 with the hero being blinded by a midget clown, while the Joker aimed a punch to the face.

I read that comic book over and over, along with my second one featuring jet packed bandits called The Rocketeer Racketeers. Here’s the debt I owe those comic books. I was so intrigued and absorbed with this character that looking at the pictures wasn’t enough – I needed to know what he and Robin were saying. Painstakingly, I taught myself to read English and pronounce the words. Context gave me the meanings of a lot of the words, and the vocabulary used in them was actually very good. It would pay off later when English became a part of the syllabus and I was way ahead. Never underestimate the determination of a stubborn six year old on a mission.

Sadly, those cards (incomplete sets though) and my precious comic books would become the collateral damage of one of my mother’s merciless ambush clear-outs of my bedroom when I’d come home from school and find the stuff I valued gone forever. That woman must’ve cost me a fortune over the years.

There was still the third element – I had yet to see the film, which in the UK preceded the series. That, I saw on a sunny Wednesday afternoon matinee during the school summer holidays. Again, I had never seen anything like it. It completely blew me away. And as we’re now in the sixtieth anniversary (and I’m listening to the soundtrack CD of that very film as I’m writing this) it occurs to me that I need to rewatch it and write a retro piece for my Cult Corner section, because if THAT’S not a cult movie, I don’t know what is.

Now, I was a Batman fan obviously, I soon learned that there were other superhero characters. The second one I discovered was Superman – and I had yet to discover that this company, DC Comics weren’t the only people publishing this type of stuff. The next year, I’d discover Marvel Comics, notably Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four. (I could never take to Thor though. His quasi-Shakespearean dialogue struck me as pretentious.)

The war between myself and my parents’ anti comic book stance would continue for years to come. (Basically, as a veteran of WWII, my father only approved of war comics, showing the British as righteously victorious against the evil Axis powers. They didn’t interest me.) In my teens, I would resort to smuggling them into the house and hide them in my room like other fourteen-year-olds might hide porn or cigarettes but it was always worth the risk. I still have those issues in my collection, some of them bearing the marks of having to be folded over twice to fit inconspicuously in a coat pocket. I consider them battle scars.

When I was sixteen, I finally succumbed to years of browbeating to grow up and leave this nonsense behind. “It was time to face the real world” and “make believe time was over” were phrases I was repeatedly told by the family elders.

Well, I tried it. For ten years I tried it, with my existing collection safely stored away – I never threw them. And by and large, I was successful – until a Sunday supplement in a newspaper had a feature about the resurgence of comic book readership among nostalgia seeking people in their mid-twenties, due to the publication of a graphic novel (a new sales tactic, collecting entire story arcs in one book a few months after the publication of the individual issues). The book was called The Dark Knight Returns.

It was 1986, I was now 26 years old. I had a proper, responsible, office job. But the Bat Signal was shining and I had to get a hold of that book.

I did.

It really was like giving an alcoholic a sip. I was hooked again. And to be honest, I’ve never looked back. I realised that Batman and superheroes in general were things that made me happy, and it needed no more justification than that. Nor would it ever.

So that’s basically the story of how I first encountered my old friend, the Bat. He taught me to read, gave me a moral compass and he has entertained me through some very dark times. Of course, the Batmania of 1966 is a part of pop culture history. I was in the right place at the right time to catch it. As I said earlier in this piece, I had no idea what would happen next. As it happened, The Dark Knight Returns sold so well that Hollywood became interested and 1989 became advertised as the Year of the Bat, as the big screen beckoned and another phase of Batmania swept the world. Predictably, it swept me along with it.

Over the years, the collection has grown to literally hundreds of books, autographed photos, original art, prop replicas, sculpts, I’ve driven a ’66 Batmobile, my own car (which is black, naturally), incidentally has a personal plate ending in BAT. What would my long-suffering parents have made of it? I can only guess. BUT what of those original cards and couple of issues that were trashed back in the day? It’s got a happy ending. After a serious medical issue a few years ago, I went on an Ebay mission and managed to get them all back in the collection.

If I could remember what the third, fourth etc were, I’d go after them too. The cards were a re-issue, but for the first time ever – I have a full set.

It’s a great life, Batman!