They Won't Let You Live Past 30

This week I'm thinking a lot about June 1977 because of my "Crypto Kid" - still not figured out why my name had to change in print - article in Fortean Times (#250). If you're on the same continent as a W H Smith or other major magazine retail outlet I crassly exhort you to spend your hard-earned cash on it (while you still can). In the article I make reference to the fact that my eleven year old alter-ego found Scotland a much better country than England because of the easy availability of Marvel Comics and so scanned in here is one of the comics that made him feel that way. Superheroes were slightly (and very unusally for me) out of vogue at the time. I was strongly attracted to Logan's Run because it was a comic of an 'adult' science fiction movie. This film had a 'AA' admission certificate (fourteen years and above) so realistically there was no way that I was going to get to see it in the foreseeable future. Issue 6 is an epilogue to the events in the film but it does recap the events around pages 6&7 making them look very exciting indeed. What you can see here is a Jim Steranko cover - really stood out from the morass of other comcis on the Inverness newsagent wall rack where I saw it. I really enjoyed this issue - John Warner's script is great - not sure what else he wrote, I'll have to check. And Terry Austin's inking could probably make even my pencilling look good (and an artist I ain't). The euthanasia at 30 concept in Logan's Run never struck me as a problem at the time. Even when I was 18 I remember thinking people who were 24 were positively ancient. How did they get to be so old?

The picture is me at Lower Foyers - monster hunter Frank Searle's base of operations. Taken a few minutes after he gave my question about sightings of the monster on land short shrift. So yeah, probably went home and read the Logan's Run comic to console myself. In the back is a Thanos solo story - which was cool - and allows dealers even now to ramp up the price of the issue.

See you in the the funny papers, my people.