LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY...

Seller's photo.  Copyright D.C. Thomson & Co., Ltd

Today (Wednesday as I type, though it'll be Thursday by the time this post is published) I finally got around to finishing something I started over 40 years ago.  Back at the end of 1982, I decided to buy, every week through 1983, each new issue of The Dandy, The Beano, The Topper, and The Beezer so that I'd have a full year's run of all four comics for posterity.  After around four months my family moved to another house and neighbourhood, yet I continued with my weekly quest to obtain each new issue of all four comics.  (Incidentally, at this time The Topper and Beezer were no longer tabloid size, but the same dimensions as The Dandy and Beano.)

Through no fault of my own I missed three issues of The Dandy and one of The Beezer, though I managed to buy every one of The Topper and, I think, The Beano.  I say 'I think' in the case of the latter, because when I made a note of the missing comics at the end of that year, I also included the Christmas Beano for 1983, though I suspect I may've just wanted a spare, due to the fact that I regarded and stored my Christmas issues as a 'separate' collection.

True, this was mainly down to me usually buying only the yuletide numbers anyway (free gift issues aside), and I likely wanted another one to include with the year's run, though why I simply didn't buy two issues at the time, I'm not quite sure - maybe it just didn't occur to me until afterwards.  Anyway, as regular readers know, four years after flitting to that new house, we returned to our old one and all my comics (new and old) accompanied me.  Over the years, however, it always rankled me (when I remembered) that I didn't have a full set of two of the four weeklies, but I always intended to get around to completing them "before too long".

Well, the decades passed, but today I finally ordered the absent issues from eBay and they should arrive within the week with any luck.  (If not, hopefully by the start of next.)  Then I'll venture into the loft and dig out my boxed collection of all four titles and insert the previously missing numbers into their respective spaces.  So it may have taken me 40 years to complete my collection of these four D.C. Thomson weekly comics, but I still feel a sense of accomplishment now that I'm at the end of that particular journey.

It really shouldn't have taken me so long, but it was a case of 'out-of-sight, out-of-mind' - until I'd rediscover my list of absent issues and say to myself "I really should track them down".  Way back then I'd originally intended to order the required back numbers from DCT themselves, but you know how it is; once I put that list down, my determination to obtain them swiftly dissipated until the next time.  There were quite a few 'next times', but I finally got around to it in the end.

Regular readers will be used to me saying, in regard to long-ago events, that it only seems like yesterday, or last week, or a couple of years at most, but cliched though it is, it certainly doesn't seem anywhere near as long as 40 years.  I must confess to having a feeling of satisfaction that I completed those respective collections in the house where they began all that time ago, but I'm probably the only person in existence to see some strange kind of significance in that fact.

Are there missing gaps in any of your collections yet to fill, and just how long have they been 'incomplete'?  Comments welcome. 

Posted in: Cartoons