It’s a lot easier, nowadays. What with the internet, and living in London, I’m never really short of people to talk about comics with. My flatmate is an avid X-Men and Morrison fanboy, I often find myself at gatherings surrounded by other nerds, I run a website with the most comics-knowledgeable friend I’ve ever had, and I even get to hang out with creators sometimes. It’s all a far cry from when I was at high school. Aside from inheriting various comics from my Dad, it had always been much more of a solo hobby growing up. So when I found someone who shared it, and with whom I could have Proper Conversations about my growing discovery of the finer nuances of the form, it was much more of a big deal.

The first memory I have of James Harrison (I wouldn’t normally use someone’s full name at this point, but I have to distinguish him from James Hunt Of This Parish somehow) was during a Games lesson, when he seemed unnaturally amused by my impersonation of an American Gladiators commentator pronouncing the name of fellow Scouser Eunice Huthart. I don’t recall why or how we became friends after that – it was school, you just sort of drifted into these things – but it was probably around the time we discovered that my house was on his walk home, and so started walking that way together. It would have been at some point after that, meanwhile, that we each discovered that the other was a comics reader, and from that a firm friendship was inevitable.

As we hurtled towards sixth form, our comics discussion was of course largely centred around things like Sandman and Watchmen - but prior to that, we had a shared interest in superhero stories, and in a lot of the same characters. Aside from Kingdom Come, which I remember causing a fair amount of discussion at the time of publication due to the artwork (we were teenagers – Ross basically seemed like The Best Thing In The World back then) and our both liking alternate timelines and Elseworlds in general, perhaps the biggest of these shared favourites was Spider-Man. This mutual fandom was fostered by the Panini reprint title of the time – I say “of the time”, it’s actually still going (albeit on its third volume) today – Astonishing Spider-Man, which kicked off in late 1995, and which between us James and I bought pretty much every issue of for about the first couple of years of its existence. I’d picked up a couple of the earlier issues myself, but after that we basically settled into a routine where James would buy it and read it, then lend it to me, and we’d discuss what was going on during the next walk home.

And this, basically, is the reason why for all these years I’ve been forced to admit that yes, I do have quite a fondness for The Clone Saga. Because it was basically my first exposure both to reading a long-running story in serialised format as it happened (alright, time-shifted a little while from its US publication, but still), and having someone to discuss it with as it was going on. Even when the comics themselves were poor – even at the time we knew Maximum Clonage: Omega was basically the worst comic we’d ever seen, and Spidercide the single worst character concept in history – we were hooked, and in many ways the storyline was a shaping influence on my later continued Spidey fandom. And we even went back over it all over again a couple of years down the line, thanks to discovering the groundbreakingly excellent Life of Reilly articles while on the school computers.

In 2001, James and I (who by this point had also, bizarrely, become distantly related courtesy of two members of our respective families independently meeting one another and getting married) went our separate ways – after finishing our A-Levels, I took the relatively normal path of going to University, while he moved to America to start a new life, initially staying with some friends he’d met online. I’ve kept in touch with him sporadically both online and over the phone since then, but haven’t actually seen him in person for those nine years. Before he left, however, he bestowed a gift on me – something he had no intention of lugging across the pond with him, and which would simply gather dust if he left them at home: around twenty-five issues of Astonishing Spider-Man.

Since then, I’ve moved house a number of times, and my comics collection has grown from… well, from basically just those reprint issues and a handful of trades, to something that takes up an entire bookcase. On a handful of occasions I’ve wondered if it would make things more convenient to finally get rid of them – after all, despite my affection for it, I’ve had no great desire to go back and read the Clone Saga (particularly in the incomplete form offered by the issues I’ve got) for quite some time, and they take up a bit more space than regular comics due to their cardstock covers. But it took me a while after James left the country to meet somebody else with whom I could have regular, in-person conversations about comics – University was quite a lean time for that, as although I was visiting a regular comic shop for the first time, it was indie music that was the common thread between me and most of my friends; and it wasn’t until a year or so after that that I finally encountered the bloke with whom I run this here site. Getting rid of those comics (even if I weren’t a shameless hoarder anyway), though, would be to throw away a reminder of the other James H, my first ally in the world of comics fandom – so for that reason, they’ll probably always have a home on my shelf.