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| My copy of GL/GA 76 from 1975 - Wot! No T&P stamp??? |
You have to appreciate that growing up in Portsmouth in the 1960s and 1970s, it was still a town that bore the scars of German bombs from WW2. Memories of the last War were a frequent topic of conversation in our house, and particularly when my father got together with his sisters. Large areas of the poorer parts of the city - Landport or Somertown or Portsea or Buckland or Fratton had either undergone urban clearance by the Jerries or by well-meaning but charmless urban redevelopment programmes in the 1960s. Southsea bore fewer of the scars, but had not emerged unscathed, with new houses generally built into the gaps of bombed premises.
The view of Palmerston Rd below from the 1950s (credit A Tale of One City) is typical of much of Portsmouth well into the sixties and even seventies.
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| Palmerston Road 1950s © A Tale of One City |
Those of you familiar with the film Operation Crossbow will remember the scenes of V2 bombs destroying rows of terraced houses. In fact, the scenes of the actual destruction in the film were staged by using real explosives to demolish real terraced houses deemed either unfit for habitation and/or ready for the redevelopers’ wrecking ball.
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| Henrietta Street - frame grab from Operation Crossbow |
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| Houses awaiting being blown up for film "Operation Crossbow" © Peter Cuff posted on Memories of Bygone Portsmouth, admin JJ Marshallsay |
And so it was within these areas no longer subject to enemy fire that Nigel Brown and I cycled in the spring of 1972 through Somertown, over Somers Rd Bridge (all now gone) to a small, smelly second hand shop in Church Road, just off St John’s Rd in Landport.
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| Re-building Somers Town © Mark Henley, posted in Memories of Bygone Portsmouth, admin JJ Marshallsay |
On the wall was a scruffy copy of Green Lantern 76. As a Batman fan first and foremost, I deemed Green Lantern to be a second tier character and happily let Nigel buy the comic, while I searched for other buys. It was only a year in April 1973, after I had picked up copies of GL/GA 85 and 86 while on holiday in North Devon did I realize what an awful mistake I had made in passing up on what was to be one of the classic comics of the Bronze Age - in many people’s future view, the comic that sounded the firing pistol of the Bronze Age.
I seem to remember that after much haggling Nigel and I subsequently negotiated a package deal which involved swapping comics and cash, and the photo you see at the top of this post is the actual book, photographed by me in 1975. (I photographed a number of my comics onto slides at that time so that I could project it on a wall, and trace the image to make my own poster.)
I ended up selling the comic to Paul Hudson in Comic Showcase on August 20th 1984 as I sold the final tranche of my teenage comic collection - but I kept the slide transparency of the cover, because I had an inkling I might need it one day....
