Posters all over the wall

My bedroom walls used to be covered in movie and music and comic posters, to a veritably unhealthy degree. Every square centimeter was full and there wasn't a space bigger than a trading card anywhere, and it was like this for more than a decade before it became too much work.

Just as I was really figuring out what I really like in life, I wasn't allowed posters on the wall, right through my teenage years. Not ever since I taped a bunch of 2000ad pin-ups to the wall with sticky tape, which ripped the shit out of the wallpaper when I took them down and I got in so much trouble.

After that, I wasn't permitted to put anything up on my walls, and all I had was the creepy framed pictures of angels that had been in our family for decades.

But as I got older, and with some sincere promises, I was allowed to put up some posters - an absolutely wicked Freddy Kruger poster and the Joe Jusko painting of Mary Jane from one of those dubious Marvel Swimsuit Editions.

And when I got out of home and got my own rooms in places where I paid my own goddamn rent and could do what I liked, I lost my fucking mind and covered every bit of space with pop culture bullshit.

Movie posters took up the big space, and I would haunt the local video stores to get that sweet Fearless poster with Jeff Bridges arms outstretched on the edge of the building. There was the ubiquitous Pulp Fiction and Star Wars things, and a gorgeous painted thing for the Bela Lugosi Dracula.

Then there were a lot of A3 sized comic posters. For a while, every issue of the Exploits of Spider-Man - a British reprint thing that somehow showed up at the Readers Book Exchange in Timaru for $4.50 every two weeks - came with an A3 poster of classic Marvel covers, genius pieces of pop art that I hung on the wall for years.(It genuinely blows my mind that my mate Kyle has many of the actual issues that I had on the wall, due to the unlocking of silver age collections in the past decade.)

There would be things taken from the middle of anniversary issues and that came free with the weekly 2000ad. And then I would put trading cards in the final spaces, tiny bits of Legion of Super-Heroes or Spider-Man to give life to the whole room.

It was a fucking shitload of work, but it lasted all the way through my flatting life, with a dozen rooms in a dozen houses getting this kind of treatment. Most of the posters peeled away after I got married, and now we have tasteful and extremely targeted art and fancy pictures of the family on the wall.

But sometimes, I still look around the room, and wonder what it would look like if it had a giant poster of Worf from Star Trek staring back at me. And if I could fit a bunch of the tall Vertigo trading cards in the space above the bookcase.