Sometime around 1973 or 74, when I was five or six years old, I was spinning the lower rungs of a rack of soft porn and True Detective magazines in a newsagents on the Stratford Road just outside Birmingham and an issue of Captain Marvel jumped out, the first real comic book I ever read. My Mum bought it for me. The story was obviously part of some continuing epic.

The words were complicated and hard to understand, and raised my reading age incrementally. The hero seemed strangely tortured and complex, at least compared to the firemen and the windmill owner in Trumpton. The aliens, Skrulls as I remember, were psychedelically terrifying in a way that Scooby-Doo monsters just weren’t. I was hooked, but comics was to prove, initially, a hard addiction to feed.

American comic books were junk back then, imported as ballast for ships or discounted detritus to seaside souvenir stores, Saturday morning market stands and motorway service station newspaper shops. There were no regular distribution networks, no dedicated comic stands, and H&M wasn’t carrying Iron Man underpants. In the late sixties, a strange hybrid British comic, Pow!, ran Bash Street Style humor strips alongside bought-in Spider-Man stories, cut up randomly to fit the page size.

In the early Seventies, designated British Marvel comics were filled with filleted reprints in fragmented black and white form, curiously unsatisfying to any reader who had tasted the forbidden fruit of the original four-colour formats.

Soon, dedicated mail order companies would provide monthly packages of original American comics for a price, if a big city with an actual comic shop was too far away, and your pocket money would stretch to it. God bless my Mother for tolerating my dependence.

The lure of Marvel comics, specifically Marvel comics, was the Marvel Universe, a fully functioning alternate reality populated with thousands of characters whose adventures all appeared to overlap.

The borderline autistic tendencies of the genius child were snagged by this tantalizing world, surely impossible to know in its totality, however diligently one might plug the numbered gaps in hard to find runs. Spotting a cross-reference flattered the fans, and Marvel’s editor-in-chief Stan Lee encouraged our sense of belonging.

In his monthly soapbox columns, we were his ‘true believers’, his ‘merry Marvel marching society’, scornful of DC comics, the ‘Distinguished Competition’.

And in the Seventies, Marvel’s stories had the edge on the distinguished competition. There was just enough adult content, character development, and contemporary political and social relevance to make the pubescent reader feel like he was reading something he perhaps shouldn’t be. Steve Gerber’s scabrous Howard The Duck appeared to be some kind of satire of something.

Roy Thomas’ visceral Conan was adapted from actual books which I then read, their lurid covers incurring my grandparents’ disapproval. Rich Buckler’s brutal and nihilistic Deathlok appeared to have something to say about totalitarianism and war.

And the galactic sweep of Jim Starlin’s Warlock was prepping me secretly for Milton’s Paradise Lost and the cosmic works of William Blake all along.

I made mine Marvel. DC was just guys dressed as bats and birds fighting. Marvel was guys dressed as spiders and tin men fighting.

But the spider guy had acne and the iron guy was a functioning alcoholic.

To paraphrase Alan Moore’s unsparing analysis of Stan Lee era, where previously comics had been populated by one dimensional characters, Marvel offered fully fledged two dimensional characters.

And despite their failings, to the bewildered boy in search of guidance and something to believe in, what maxim could be more applicable, universally, than Spider-man’s mantra, “With great power comes great responsibility.”? What more do you need to know? Well, lots apparently.

I shrugged off comics around the age of twelve or thirteen, for punk rock, girls, the French existentialists, and Alternative Comedy, which seemed to meet my emotional needs more immediately.

But by the age of nineteen or so, in the shadow of culturally significant comics like Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and Moore’s Watchmen, I was back, like a dog to its own vomit, and happy.

While I’d been away, lots had changed.

British writers had taken American source material and re-fried it through the prismatic lens of their own nostalgic relationship with the characters they grew up with. Alan Moore messed ecologically and mystically with Swamp Thing specifically, and all comics generally with Watchmen. Neil Gaiman made The Sandman into a conduit for an epic fantasy.

Grant Morrison took the DC back-catalogue obscurity Animal Man and made a post-modern statement. The trickle down effect saw American writers too raise their game.

Doubtless, comics had been revitalized creatively and I felt like they were addressing me, directly.

Both I, as an adult, and these revisionist writers, seemed to be maintaining a similarly conflicted, and sometimes sentimental, relationship with the characters, trailing their now decades long tailwinds of continuity, and the comic book genre itself. Was this a good thing?

I felt flattered again, just like I did as a kid, by comic book in-jokes that touched the fan boy completist in me, or lushly painted works, like Marvels of Astro City, by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, which viewed iconIC characters and superhero archetypes with a sense of awe you’d probably only have if you’d been reading about them for decades.

Alan Moore, typically, had it both ways, with the likes of Supreme and Tom Strong absorbing the tradition so completely as to be both completely accessible and utterly arcane.

And if pesky kids were being frozen out of the readership, what did I care? I had a good twenty years out of this new affair with comics, with too many highlights to mention; Garth Ennis’ religious western, Preacher, and his anarchically ludicrous Punisher run; Brian Bendis’ dirty-realist Daredevil and high-school sassy Ultimate Spider-man; Peter David’s multi-faceted Hulk run; Mike Mignola’s gothic love-letter Hellboy; and the seemingly indestructible Hellblazer, a mighty work of many hands.

I was in my late thirties and still up to speed on the Marvel Universe, but the titles published by my favorite House Of Ideas were now even more torturously interlinked than ever before, with annual cross-title events tying dozens of comic books together into vast storylines that unraveled established premises I’d now invested in, emotionally, over decades.

I survived 2005’s multi-title mutant cross-over House of M with my grasp of the Marvel Universe intact. I even enjoyed your editor Mark Millar’s audacious 2006 Civil War ‘event’, which over-turned many of the certainties of the Marvel universe. But then suddenly, there was 2007’s Secret Invasion, another whole inter-title thing where it turned out loads of characters I’d liked for forty years were Skrulls all along.

Had I wasted my life? I had a kid, and no free time, and I couldn’t keep up any more. Who had I been reading about all these years exactly? Even I was lost. Skrulls was where I came in to the Marvel Universe. And Skrulls was where I went out, as I finally caved in under the weight of the demands of the complex continuity that had first suckered me in.

Millar says his aim for Clint is to fill the magazine with comics which, while acknowledging the stylistic advances in the genre of the last fifty years, don’t require the reader to have a vast knowledge of historical comics tropes. A part of me, the fan part, is uncertain about this scorched earth policy.

My stand-up, for example, is almost self-consciously created for people who know their way around the art form. I’m narcissistically drawn to knowing art. But I concede, comics need new blood.

I’ve been failing to write for comics for a few years now, getting as far as having a pitch pushed back by Marvel in 2006. Mark Millar stripped the Marvel fan-boy in-jokes from my original script for the piece I submitted to this month’s issue, The Property, and, I admit, improved it.

The Property is in some ways a love letter to comics, the sort of self-aware thing you have to work out of your system when you first engage with any art form.

Now that I am purged, at your expense, I wonder if I could ever write anything that would grab a precocious kid browsing a newsagent’s rack, just like Captain Marvel grabbed me, nearly forty years ago.