I was maybe twelve when I stopped believing in Santa Claus. At around the same time, Superman died. I was devastated because up until that point they had both been huge figures in my life. To me, Santa was the embodiment of the selfless ideal; a kindly person - Santa is a woman in some folktales - who worked hard all year round to make nice people happy. Superman was the guy who made the bad things, like Lex Luthor and cancer go away; I vividly remember an anti-smoking campaign that pitted Superman against the evil Nick-O-Teen. Both of them wore red and I thought the two together were a big part of what made the world so good. Without them things seemed pretty bleak. That was before, when Santa was real and Superman was alive and I was different.
My parents brought me up in a pretty secular environment. I don’t think that they didn’t believe in god, or a god, but they certainly didn’t push me in one particular direction. I guess they would be considered kind of hippy-ish in their way. I was encouraged to grow, to explore, to be myself. I think they wanted me to be some kind of artistic butterfly that would bring beauty to the world and in turn, joy, to them. They were probably a little disappointed when I shunned paintbrushes and pencils and dancing and singing and instead immersed myself in the world of boys - pretend guns and running around; shrieking or terrorizing the neighbourhood on our bicycles; throwing stones at walls or anything else that made a good target. And comic books. The boys I hung out with couldn’t get enough of them and so neither could I. We read about the Flash, the Green Goblin, Captain America, Wolverine and of course, Superman.
When I say we were into comic books, I don’t mean that we bought them religiously every week, carefully lowering them into almost airtight polythene wallets before storing them in a dark, padlocked chest where they would be venerated out of sight. I mean we read them. We rolled them up and stuffed them into our back pockets, we sullied them with cola and spit and god knows what else went into and came from our dirty mouths. We even - god help us! - read them outdoors, in the sunlight, where they would age prematurely and wilt and fade and one day, many years later, die and return to the earth. We weren’t collectors, we were consumers; absorbers, imbibers of those alternate universes where, despite the ubiquity of Technicolor, everything was black and white. Batman was Good; the Joker was Bad. There were shades but there were no shades. Sure, there might be times when Captain America or Spiderman or whoever had a crisis of conscience, where they paused, dramatically, to examine the world around them, but those moments were isolated incidents, designed to show us that superheroes could sometimes be as human as us. This served only to make us idolise them and want to be them even more.
Late November 1992. Superman #75 made into the local store - we had to wait a few weeks for them to arrive from America where, at the time it seemed, all the really good stuff came from. We went there as a gang every week to play with merchandise we couldn’t afford, gaze at the locked displays in windows and cabinets and to flick through countless comics until we could all agree on what to spend our pooled assets on. We were all aged between nine and thirteen so the news held no interest for us. We hadn’t seen the front pages of the papers (all words, no pictures), hadn’t caught the TV shows where they discussed the End of an Icon. In 1992 the internet wasn’t what it is now. To us a computer was something that grown ups had to use at work and why would we want to know about stuff like that? The morning of the 28th November 1992 wasn’t special, wasn’t unique - yet - it was just another day where we would do all the things we always did on a weekend.
I was the first one to see it. A bigger edition than usual, and no striking display on the cover, no image of Superman battling whatever evil was attacking the people of Metropolis that day. Just a black background with a red ‘S’ oozing down the page like a bad paint job. I held it as everyone else gathered round. We never opened our purchases until we got back home. We’d gather in the back room of someone’s house where we would all hunch up together on the floor while someone carefully turned each page once everyone had finished reading. We waited that day too although I didn’t feel good on the way home and we were all inexplicably subdued on the bus. When we paid for everything at the counter the long-haired shop assistant looked as all in a funny way that made me feel a bit sick. Like he was glad he wasn’t us. I think about him and that look a lot, even now. The strangest thoughts are the ones that return to us the most.
When we finally got round to opening it, we discovered that the front cover was actually the bag itself; the real front page looked an awful lot like a tombstone with that famous ‘S’ again above the words Here Lies The World‘s Greatest Hero. I’ve since discovered that an unopened #75 can sell for as much as £200. Sometimes I think I’d pay several times that amount for the damn thing not to have been made. It took us maybe an hour or so to get through the whole thing. We read silently, understanding and yet not understanding what was happening. I turned the pages this time and my fingers and palms were clammy with dirty sweat. Afterwards we sat around for a bit, not saying or doing much of anything until one of us said they had to get back home and everyone else said they probably should get going as well. Normally we left our comics at whichever house we were at but when I asked if I could take #75 with me for a few days no-one objected.
There was nobody home when I got back. It wasn’t unusual. I sat in the front room in the huge armchair that was officially where my dad sat after work but was fair game for anyone when he was out. Feeling dwarfed by the sides and the looming back my arms seemed to have to stretch out further than they normally did to hold open the pages while my feet dangled inches away from the floor. By the following summer I would be sitting in the same chair quite comfortably, feet on the ground, eyes fixed on the telly thinking about school and boys, hot days, strange new smells and foreign feelings, but that day I felt younger than I was, struggling to sit upright as I slowly peeled each page back, right to left, until I came to the same inconceivable ending that had confronted us earlier.
I stood up, dropping the comic carelessly on the floor and ran the cold tap so I could get a drink of water. The house was hot, even with the cold weather outside and I went upstairs to lie on my parents’ bed, spreading my growing body out on the huge king size surface, so much more space to stretch out on than my own tiny bed. I must have dozed off a little because the next thing I remembered was the front door slamming and my name being called. I didn’t answer as I was a little dazed and instead listened to the sound of two people slowly climbing the stairs, talking indistinctly against a background of crumpling and rustling. I sat up just as my parents walked into the room laden with armfuls of shopping; huge plastic and paper bags bulging out, with rolls of brightly coloured paper protruding out from some of them. My dad stumbled in surprise and dropped one handful on the bed at my feet where its contents spilled. He started shouting something about giving him a fright and what was I doing in their room anyway but I just jumped up and ran into my own room where I lay face down on my bed for some time, trying to block out the sound of them unpacking and rattling their purchases and pretending not to hear the heavy roll of the hidden drawers in their bed sliding out then in again. Later on after I got called down for tea the three of us pretended like nothing had happened.
Sometimes the big questions are answered without any words being spoken. My parents and I never talked about that afternoon ever. The following week as our little gang gathered at the bus stop again no-one mentioned the death of the world’s greatest hero and by the end of the day we were all running around the dark streets pretending to be the Justice League. A few weeks later on Christmas morning not a single one of my gifts were labelled ‘from Santa’ and I for one didn’t question it. In the end Superman came back to life, but by then I wasn’t reading comics and anyway, it didn’t matter because the damage had already been done.
