Comics

My mother encouraged me to read whatever I wanted, including, shock horror, comics. Brave of her since her contemporaries didn’t see them as worthy fare for budding minds. Mum believed that anything that got me reading and kept me interested was good for my budding mind. I enjoyed the adventures, that the good guys always won and the illustrations.

The good guys don’t always win these days the lines have become blurred, more’s the pity. I don’t care for anti-heroes and if I wanted real life I’d pick up a newspaper.
By the time I got to adult books, the print industry had introduced paperbacks. They were and still are badly pasted together and not meant to last.

Adult hard backs used to be illustrated, copper plates, etchings, watercolour sketches and wood engravings but when the print industry moved away from hard back books we were told that illustrations were for children. And except for Penguin who colour coded their books depending on the genre the wonderful covers, the illustrations are gone. Now that we have e-readers we can forget about illustration or etchings. Not even a book cover to capture our imagination. I predict that we can kiss the print industry goodbye.

Reading comics didn’t rot my brain, they stimulated my imagination and encouraged me to increase my interests.

The worst thing about today's stories are that they are either educational or an attempt to push a particular political barrow. Finally the politically correct have found a way to improve our budding minds.