The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

That’s the Beatles re-mastered box sets sitting on my desk. I’m not working today but mad anticipation has brought me dashing in to grab them. I’m excited to see them, although this is something I’m now buying for the ninth or tenth time. Albums, cassettes, CD’s I’ve bought them all over the years – and in many cases re-bought them after they were nicked, played to death or simply lost along the way. I think I’ve bought the Los Bros comics probably in 6 or 7 versions also by now. What can you do? If you love something you tend to want to have it all.

The only, somewhat tenuous, connection this has to comics is that Let It Be was the first album I bought at 12 years old back in 1970. It was the big fancy boxed set with the book and it was my prize possession for many years, but it cost – to a poor schoolboy like me – an arm and a leg back then. I managed to buy it by selling the comic collection I had been building under my bed since I was about 7. A big, beat-up, old, brown, leather case full of wonder. Avengers from #1 up,  X-Men too, FF’s back to the early teens, all the early Doc Strange and lots more. Bought new, or collected by way of trips to the second-hand book shop on Buccleuch street where my perseverance eventually had the somewhat grumpy owner give me access to the back room and literally thousands of old comics from here there and everywhere. By the time I came to sell my 400 odd comics, reluctantly deciding it was time to ‘grow up’, he had moved to a location near the breweries on Fountainbridge – he gave me 36/s for the lot, £1.80 today. That, added to savings from my paper round, allowed me to buy the cheapest one box record player (a BUSH from memory) and my Dad chipped in to help me buy the Beatles boxed set.

Of course by the time I was 19 or so the album had turned into something for people to roll joints on and I was in hot pursuit of trying to buy back all the comics I squandered back then. This time I didn’t have to sell anything to buy the new Beatles boxes, and whilst they may not bring the same degree of unfettered pleasure that 12 year old had, I think the next week or so may be lost to my family and friends as I slowly float upstream.

Kenny Penman