School Fun really was top of the class

Even as a little kid, I was all about the action comics when it came to the British weeklies, and I was up and running with 2000ad from a very young age. But I still had a soft spot for the kids humour publications, even if I was never a regular reader.

While I really didn't dig The Beano or Dandy, which were always just a bit too patronizing, I was most definitely a Whizz-kid and would read the odd Buster or Krazy. But there was only ever one of those comics that I was ever really attached to, and it was the short-lived School Fun.

It came out when I was eight, and I was on board with first issue, because school is everything at this age, and it didn't seem condescending at all to have comics set in the world of blackboards and detentions. All the one-page joke strips got up to all sorts of educational hi-jinks, and the drama came in a short serial based around the lovable Grange Hill TV show.

It was awesome, and the first time I remember getting a the first issue of a brand new comic, and vowing to collect the remainder for the rest of time, and then I never, ever saw #2.

It was the first real hole I felt in collecting comic books, the first absence. I was used to there being dozens and dozens of X-Men or Batman comics published before I was born, and 2000ad was more than 160 issues into it before I went for it.  But this was something I had the chance to get right from the start and that plan lasted a whole week or so. 

I ached for it, I still remember having dreams when I was that age, of finding that issue, and the joy I felt in that dream, only for it to burst upon awakening. 

My mate Kyle somehow got that second issue of School Fun a couple of years back. Bit late now, really.

It would be years later before I ever managed to collect the first 12 issues of something, and when it happened, it was fucking X-Force.

I still have that first issue of School Fun that I bought off the shelves all those years ago, although it is barely holding together after all those childhood re-reads. I went through it again recently, and it is still fun. Great art that I never appreciated as a kid, and cracking gags about bangers and mash. 

And I had another one of those nightmares where I was starting school but didn't have my timetable sorted just the other night, so there is still a part of me that still lives in my school days, and still loves comics about it.