All Slights Deserved

The difficulty of writing about a subject close to your heart is how to adequately express the wealth of memories and emotions it invokes without parylysing the critical faculty. It's one reason that I'll probably avoid re-viewing any of my favourite films for this blog. For the main part they're bound to a particular place and time, a point in my life; indirectly they become a means of revisiting that period even though the film itself might have been made many years earlier. And for me much the same applies to comics, although it's a nebulous subject. The affair started when I was five or six years old when my mum picked up a copy of the Incredible Hulk Pocket Book - a black and white British reprint of the character's origin - at a school jumble sale. It probably wasn't the first comic I'd seen but certainly the first to grab my attention; the bold Jack Kirby visuals conjuring up a dark, strange world inhabited by a sinister brute more fearsome than ...