Stephen Holland runs Page 45, a comic shop in Nottingham, England, with Mark Simpson and Tom Rosin. He has a monthly column in Comics International, and appears perennially as a small Japanese Maple in West Bridgford.
Who is... Alan Donald?
In his dreams Alan Donald is a multi-award winning writer of comic books, animation, theme park shows and rides, children’s books, novels, television, internet animation and more.
In real life Alan writes this column, which has been described as more than a lifestyle than a weekly column. He used to write SBC's All The Rage.
Once upon a time there was a married couple named Alan and Dawn. They loved each other very much and because of this they gave birth to a comic book shop…this is their story.
Ok, I’ll be honest here and wear my heart completely on my sleeve. The following tale is true, most of the names have been changed and a few events have been very slightly tweaked but it is only minor.
This is a true story.
As a true story I can tell you how it ends, I can take you to any part of it I want and I can decide what you get to hear about. There is pain, there are tears but there are also happy times, lots of them. Bear with me it is a hell of a ride!
Before we begin, please don’t judge us, we’re crap and we know it. Hind sight is 20:20 as they say and we know our mistakes.
This is the story of the birth, rise, fall, rise again and eventual death of a comic book shop. The shop was open for about 2 and a half years but our tale covers over 10 years of real time (though it focuses mainly on a span of about 5). You’ll be taken through our thoughts, our decisions, some of the actions that lead us to make our decisions and some of the fall out… like loosing our house…
BUT that is all in the future! This is a comic book story and as such we need an origin tale, two in fact!
Comic book origins are normally grim and full of pain and one of ours follows that trend very nicely. The other is a radioactive spider bite without the uncle’s death.
Enough meandering…take my hand (ug, for God’s sake dry your hands after washing them! What? You didn’t wash them…for pities sake you filthy animal, find your own bloody way through the mists of time!) as we journey back through the mists of time…
Our tale starts with a 3 year old boy being given a Batman annual (oversized card cover collection of reprints that used to be a feature of life in the UK) for Christmas. The boy could read and the exciting stories fired his imagination and made him wonder about the world of comic books that the editor’s captions hinted at (‘see Detective comics # xyz, helpful Denny!’). Flash forward a year and the boy is getting the Victor every week and would later read his brothers Roy of the Rovers when the little runt was big enough to get the comic. Further forward still and we see him first encounter 2000AD at a late age but thanks to ‘The Best of’ collections he manages to catch up pretty well. Our young man then encounters comics at newsstands and fleeting comic book shops voraciously gorging himself upon them wherever he can.
Then he went to university.
The university shop didn’t have 2000AD so he went into town and hit the lodestone. ACE Comics! Perhaps the greatest comic book shop of its type ever! He had struck gold… or rather ACE had. For 4 years our lad survived on pasta and chilli powder, scrounging tobacco from friends because all his money went on comic books.
We could plunge back in time to meet our young lady’s first comic book encounters but that is a hell of a long way to go back (quit hitting me woman, it is my story!). She read some dross and then secretly read her brother’s 2000AD when he wasn’t looking if you really need to know. We pick up her story not long after she started to date a toy boy ten years her junior.
Whenever she could our lady would travel across the country to visit her man at uni’. It is a boring time waiting in a lonely room for his lectures to end so she started to read the comic books that covered virtually every surface.
She was hooked.
Unfortunately our origin story needs its tragedy, I’ll make it as quick and painless as I can.
Dawn worked as a manager in a burger bar. It had been an evening job but then the management post came along. Alan had worked there for a while during holidays which is how they met. They’d known each other a while but it was a coincidence that the management job came along not long after they started to go out…thus they couldn’t work together anymore.
It was 6pm on a summer’s day during the university holidays. Alan was working across town whereas Dawn was running the shop in the centre. There was just Dawn and another girl.
To cut a long and drawn out story short:
A man jumped over the 4 foot counter for no reason (drugs? Drink? Nobody knows), kicked her in the head in one swift motion and then tried to twist her head off whilst simultaneously trying to dunk her face into a vat of boiling oil. Somehow he failed.
I’ll save you most of the details but Dawn wore a neck brace for 3 years, she still has neck, shoulder and back pain a decade later and then there were the mental scars. Post traumatic stress, fugue states and more. Not pleasant at all and I wasn’t even the one going through it.
Why share this little detail with you?
Because it lets you know a little about how brave Dawn is (in light of the tale to come) and it is also integral to the shop’s origin.
You can’t open a shop without capital! Eventually Dawn received a payment from the Criminal Injuries people, I won’t say how much, it took an age but it came. We had money, now what the hell were we going to do with it?
Tune in next time, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel to find out.
