This would be a simple question for my grand-children to answer, but for me the question never arose in my childhood. I simply did not know who super-heros were supposed to be. Before I started school at the age of five, I did not know that there were such things as comics, with pictures. My only knowledge of television came from the age of four when my grandfather passed on his first TV, bought to watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. It was a black & white model that could only get the one channel from the BBC. Colour TV’s only came in when I started at secondary school. More to the point, it was only when I started at primary school that I discovered that new TV’s could also receive a channel from ITV which not only had adverts but also showed cartoons of the likes of Popeye!
My parents did not approve of comic books, which probably explains why it took me so long to learn to read. They would not take me to the Saturday morning cinema which showed all sorts of exciting things (mainly American). I think that they were basically snobbish! It was only in 1962, when I was nine, that a magazine was published that they approved of and which I was allowed to spend my pocket money on. Look and Learn was a British weekly educational magazine for children published by Fleetway Publications Ltd from 1962 until 1982. It contained educational text articles that covered a wide variety of topics from volcanoes to the Loch Ness Monster. It did not have super-heros, though one edition did have a piece on Prince Charles…
