For the longest time part of my Saturday ritual was going to some comic shops, hanging out and chatting to likeminded folk about how good comics were, and where we thought some storylines would go, that and buy some comics as well.
My two main choices were Aka Books and Comics,
And what a comic shop, some of the greats have did signings there, Dillon, Ennis, Morrison, Grant, there were too many to list. The placed seemed to be run by dudes called John McShane, Pete Root and Steve Montgomery, he was as likely to recommend Dutch hand drawn porn as he was to show you the latest Batman. I remember spending hours in there in the 10 pence boxes looking for gems!
As I say Saturday would usually find me heading down to see what was what and if anyone was about to have a chat with.
My other shop of choice was Futureshock, at the time it was in Byres Road in the West End of Glasgow, I was a bit conflicted about Futureshock if I am honest, the place was a disorganised tip, but if you were lucky you could find a back issue and most likely it was a good bit cheaper than normal.
Sadly, the only sign that the shop was ever on Byres road was on this old picture I found on Google.
This was in the days before Forbidden Planet, I like comics but I have always found the Forbidden Planet in Glasgow a bit irritating, don’t like the way the shop is set out, never found the staff to be that friendly. But hey ho and all that.
Futureshock was run by a guy called Neil Craig,
If I am honest he slightly weirded me out being so friendly, once you got used to him he was actually okay, but we always had a running joke about him offering to put items on order for you.
AKA Books and Comics has long since bit the dust, the building it was in was deemed unsafe and the shop shut in 1998 when the Galleries were closed, it eventually moved to Parnie Street and became known as A1 books and comics,
It never really had the same atmosphere to it that the old AKA Books and Comics did, and I found myself drifting to the impersonal and business like Forbidden Planet.
Futureshock itself moved from Byres Road up to Woodlands road, there was some talk of Neil and a business partner falling out with each other, and if you thought the shop on Byres Road was chaos then you should have seen the one in Woodlands road, it was a like a comic form of Jenga with teetering piles of comics shoved here there and everywhere.
I did notice that Neil didn’t seem as friendly as he had been, but then I would just shrug my shoulders, buy what I was looking for and go on my way.
This was the interior of the new shop,
Neil sat at the back next to the till and waited for you to buy something.
As with all things in our lives I stopped going, or stopped noticing the shop, other things took precedence in my life and to be honest I forgot about the place for a number of years, it was one of those places you went to and then didn’t think about for a while. Till last week, I happened to be driving by and thought, hang on, that can’t be right, it looks closed.
I was off work today for a public holiday and thought, I’ll nip over, maybe the place was being renovated or something.
This is what greeted me,
The place was almost empty, but it was like someone had left in a hurry, there was still some books lying about and I could see the till at the back, it felt like a bit of a mystery, and I was intrigued. I checked on google and found this,
Mark Millar of Kickass fame who had been a regular in AKA and the comic scene in Glasgow had announced Neil passing in 2014, to say I was bummed for the rest of the day was a major understatement.
A piece of Glasgow and its rich comic community history has passed and this line sums it up in a beautiful melancholy way,
It’s strange, you get up and go to work, and you come home, and you do whatever you do when you aren’t working and you stop thinking about certain places or people till something jogs your memory and you remember a different time in your life when you did other things or had different priorities to the ones you have now and you realise all of a sudden how much time has passed between then and now.
It’s like islands, you sit on the one you are on and you think I have always been here and the view has always been the same and I have always thought the same way, but then you realise where you are now is only one of many islands and many views on your life, I’m not 100% sure why I felt so affected by seeing Neil’s passing, maybe it’s the fact it took me three years to notice what had been such a major part of my life was gone, covered in dust and ready to be re-opened as a sandwich shop or something, or that something so important to me at the time had faded into almost obscurity in my head, or maybe just that some poor guy died and I didn’t know about it till three years later.
Most likely it’s the passing of so many years in between and that looking at me back then and now that I feel like two different people.
Anyway, a real part of Glasgow has gone, a cool shop is closed and we get ever closer to the day when shops are no more and the only place to buy things are Amazon and eBay, and that’s not a day I look forward to.
I used to love wandering from cool shop to cool shop when I was younger, you met some really interesting characters, and could browse some cool stuff, but places like that are fading and vanishing, like Rutger Hauer said in Bladerunner,
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