Kicked into the Gutters: or, 'My Dad doesn't read comics, he studies them'

Abstract

I never dreamed that I would become a comics researcher. Just about everything about me indicated against it. I didn't much read comics as a child (the odd solace of comics on holiday, plus a period of secret fascination with 'Paddy Payne, Hero of the Skies' (The Lion, late-1950s)), and didn't at all as an adult, apart from a brief period of reading 2000AD. But comics, for seventeen years or so, became a focus of my intellectual life. If there is worth in the ensuing autobiography, it is in the weird combinations of accident and necessity that can characterise real research histories.