ClanDestine and the unlocked uncertainty of a comic from years ago

When you spend your entire damn life collecting and reading comic books, you're going to imprint strange, unknowable emotions on the things - on both the physical object and the stories and art they contain. And they can linger there for years, ready to leap out at you from the most unlikely places, and reduce you to a mild emotional wreck without warning.

It happened to me recently with the ClanDestine, a Marvel UK comic created, written and drawn by the mighty Alan Davis. As a Davis fan from the start, I collected every issue published with these characters that the artist produced (Davis has pointedly ignored the later issues of the original run, with some very early Bryan Hitch art, so I can safely ignore them too.)

There should be hundreds of issues of the ClanDestine, but there are only a handful. After the initial eight-issue run, there were a couple of short miniseries, and a surprise appearance in some 2012 annuals, and that's about it.

There are several reasons why it never really caught on with audiences - it came just as the market imploded (and Marvel UK was almost completely wiped out); it had a concept that might have been just a bit too complex for its own good; and maybe comic book readers are just fucking idiots who don't know a good thing when it falls right into their lap.

In the end, it's a slightly weird and absolutely gorgeous superhero comic, inhabiting an infinitesimal corner of the Marvel Universe. But it also came out exactly at the time I was leaving home, and reading them again recently unlocked all that uncertainty about that time of my life again.

I remember reading the second issue on one of the first nights in my first flat, when I was unemployed and alone and far from home. I didn't know what I was doing or where I was going or how I was going to get there, but I did have a shiny new Alan Davis comic to keep me company, and that was something.

And reading it now, knowing that it isn't long for the world, that same comic feels tentative in its first steps, unsure of how it's going to be received, and how much of that is me imprinting myself onto it? 

ClanDestine isn't my favourite Alan Davis work (although it might squeak into the top five), but I ain't ever getting rid of these comics. They were there, 30 years ago, when I really needed them, and I only have to crack them open again to feel all that youthful uncertainty and possibility flow back. That's worth hanging onto.