A few weeks ago, director Duncan Jones tweeted some tantalising tidbit about his planned Rogue Trooper adaptation. Within seconds I was throwing my details at 2000AD's subscription page and just like that, comics have fallen back into my life. I can go months or years without reading any, and then all it takes is a nudge in the right direction and I find myself surrounded by piles of the bloody things.
So now I get a delivery of science fiction through the door every week, and it's wonderful. Half the appeal is the predictable slowness – I could make comics appear on my iPad in an instant, binge my way through all the cliffhangers in one sitting, but where would be the fun in that? The anticipation of getting the next instalment of a story in the post is one of life's little pleasures. I may be a very-late-thirtysomething, but I still get excited when I hear the midday clatter of letterbox, the sound of adventures being fed into the house.
Despite all the explosions and chaos and dystopia, but sinking into the latest issue of 2000AD is strangely calming. Sitting back to read a pulpy sci-fi serial is a great way to untether from the demands of the screen. For a few precious pages, emails don't exist, deadlines don't exist, overdue invoices don't exist. But it's more than escapism.
Growing up, comics were dismissed by school and parents alike as rather frivolous; fantasy nonsense that was unwelcome in the classroom. Time was better spent focussing on Proper Books and, in another classroom way down the hallway, lest there be some unthinkable syllabus overlap, Proper Art. Of course, the snobbery levelled at this forbidden fruit only made it all the more enticing, so I spent long hours devouring everything I could lay my hands on: Tintin; Oink!; Eagle; Warlord; Asterix; Whizzer and Chips; The Transformers; Fungus the Bogeyman (Special mention to the librarian who shelved Raymond Briggs' When The Wind Blows with the other children's funny-stories; like dropping a random episode of Chernobyl into CBeebies' bedtime hour.)
I still have some tatty old issues of 2000AD from then, back when the title suggested a distant future. I often return to is Peter Milligan and James McCarthy's The Full English Breakfast from 1990. Just six pages long, it's the horrific tale of a possessed national dish hellbent on killing socialists (it's fair to say the subtext flew way over my head at the time; I simply enjoyed the surreality of exorcism-by-croissant). It's not just the story I love – imagine a Poll Tax-era Black Mirror written by Keith Floyd – it's the craft. Efficient and elegant and bizarre, more than the sum of its parts.
Comics like this were as important to me as anything else in the curriculum. And now, any time I get a bit stuck, need inspiration or completely forget how to do my job (it happens), comics remind me of all the wonderful ways words and pictures and rectangles can fit together.
It's heartening to see that, while I’m stockpiling all these new issues and finally recognising their true value, my boy is discovering comics for himself. Spurred on by the recent Netflix cartoon – things don’t exist unless Netflix says so – he’s got into Luke Jennings’ exceptional Hilda books. As well as the moral substance of the stories themselves, Pearson’s books are teaching him about composition, colour, type, hand-lettering, storytelling, humour, horror, branding, folklore and, most importantly, Scandinavian vernacular architecture. He doesn’t realise it yet, and I'm certainly not going to tell him in case it scares him off, but the boy is learning about design.
And he's listening out for the letterbox.