My Comicy Saturday, in the mid to late seventies, was a Friday. In those dark, dim medieval days in Wales, when a man's labour was actually rewarded in hard cash, my Father, a scaffolder, got paid on a Thursday. In other words, Mum would be skint on a Wednesday, but flush on Thursday nights. I can still smell the curry and chips, washed down with a Mars Bar, that was the hedonistic highlight of Thursday nights in our house. Friday then would be pay the newsagent for the papers day and I'd get home from school to perus my regular order of Mighty World of Marvel and whatever incarnation it was that week of Spider-Man Weekly. The joy of reaching the weekend and starting it with my comics is something I wish I could have bottled and drawn on in my older, more time-worn years. In fact, I wonder if a lot of modern man's depression and lack of joy is down to the fact that we have assumed a monthly cycle for life-pay, comics, bills, leaving us without the additional three emotional highs we used to get in the seventies. Our mood just can't survive an entire month.
    I digress. Because Papas golden goose had dropped its weekly golden egg, I was in funds to raid the local market, held on a Friday. I had to gallop home from school for lunch, gobble that down and then leg it down to the Market with it's combined smell of veg, old clothes, old books, old dears and bacon. Within these hallowed halls lurked and old boy with a second hand books and comics stall and the unbridled joy at riffling through stacks of old Marvel weeklies and filling in gaps in my collection was, well unbridled. I recall one potentially tragic day when a run of early Spider-Mans was outwith my funds and I couldn't negotiate the tight-fisted old git down. I left, distraught (why is it the comics you have actually bought are no consolation for the comics you missed out on) when a blessed apparition appeared before me in all his majestic glory. There, in his 'just been paid' glow, was my father, having taken a half day to get plastered, on his way to the pub opposite the Market because, being market day, that pub didn't close like the others in town. My father was well oiled, indeed, I judged, oiled enough to be tapped and not remember it. A surgical piece of scrounging later, I returned triumphant to the Market to claim the balance of the Spidey stash. Happy days.
Pocket money day, theoretically Saturday, but always Friday, also allowed myself and my younger brother, Martin, to buy our postal orders to send off for back issues of the US monthlies. I was a devout Marvel fundamentalist whilst my brother had been seduced by the forces of darkness and followed DC. We used to pool funds to save buying two postal orders and our purveyors were Derek and Sandie of Sussex Comics, Peacehaven (where are they now?). On two very fractious occasions, our 'alternatives' list left me with an entire parcel of Marvels and Martin with an entire parcel of DCs. Thereafter, we were very careful to mark all orders 'Please do not mix Marvel and DC alternatives'. That sort of thing can strain brotherly love to the limit.
    And then, somehow, I slid into the monthly cycle, not knowing what I was losing. I had my regular monthly order with Derek and Sandie for the core Marvel titles, which seemed to make the UK Weeklies superfluous which, in turn, meant the Market held less attraction for me. Weekly pocket money was stockpiled for monthly orders and the grim, power cut, strike ridden but joyous seventies gradually gave way to the aspirational, materialistic and soulless eighties. Magazines about how comics were made and telling us about the latest spat with Shooter somebody had had took away some of the innocence of my comics. Spider-Man's black costume arrived and I gave up, not reading another comic for ten years.
    I still look back misty eyed on the seventies and my day early Comicy Saturdays. Without my comics, I'm sure they would have seemed grimmer and far more depressing. But with them, I had the never repeated pure innocent joy of anticipation and imagination. The surge of nostalgia I still get on seeing a familiar late seventies cover from MWOM and Spidey, with their garish colours but superb graphic impact, is an emotional well of joy I return to often.

Why, oh why, do we have to grow up?