“It’s All Come Flooding Back”: Memories of Childhood Comics

This chapter explores how memories of childhood comics in Britain are interwoven with ones about places, families and friendships and constructions of both comics and childhood. It draws on over 200 interviews with male and female readers who were children from the early 1950s to the late 1990s. The chapter consequently looks at cultural practices around comics such as collecting, buying and exchanging titles; the comic as object; and how relationships related to reading. It also offers some initial thoughts on gender and nostalgia and on the way some dominant discourses around childhood are disrupted by accounts of comic reading, making forgotten aspects of childhood experience visible.