Sam had his picture printed in Match of the Day magazine last week. It's the third photo he's sent them for inclusion on their Reader's Page, and this is the first time he's been successful.
Despite trying so hard to get in there, he felt a little strange when he saw his own face staring out at him from the magazine, an odd kind of embarrassment which isn't like him. There's often a disconnect between how we imagine something will be and the reality of it actually happening.
To help him feel not quite so weird, I told him about all the letters I wrote to Marvel and DC comics back when I was kid. I was a regular feature of the letters pages in the late 80s and early 90s, and I made quite a few friends as a result. Back then, they'd print your full home address along with your letter, so regular letterhacks would often write to each other as well as to the comics themselves. Nobody thought there was anything strange or worrying about this, and I'm still in touch with quite a few of the comic fans I met through letter writing. Back in the pre-internet days, this was the only way to talk to people who shared your interests, and it was through writing those letters that I became a part of the larger comics community,
The phone rang one night when I was about 16 or 17 and my mum told me that there was a man called Malcolm on the line. "He said he wants to talk to you about comics." I still remember standing there (the phone was still on the wall back then) talking to a man I'd never met before whose name I was only familiar with because he was in even more letters pages than I was. He'd got my number through directory enquiries and he wanted to know if I was interested in joining his APA. I had no idea what an APA was. But I'll talk about that more tomorrow...
The thing is, all these other comic fans I wrote to - and in some cases ended up meeting in person - were real, genuine people who shared my love of the medium. None of my school or university friends were into comics, so the only way to connect with other fans was through writing letters. In the internet age, that seems pretty archaic... but also pretty dangerous. Back then though, nobody worried about aging predators using the letters pages to groom young victims, and there weren't any letters page trolls ready to tear you apart for liking different comics than they did. I'm glad MOTD magazine only printed Sam's first name and no address - if there'd been a possibility of them printing more, I probably wouldn't have let him send that picture in at all. Old man shakes his fist at the sky...
