Comics

Limited first edition. Slim 8vo. [16 pp]. Publisher's mustard yellow decorative boards, sans dustwrapper, as issued. With full colour illustrations by Annie Newnham. #98/499 copies printed on Rivoli paper and bound by Chris Hicks, this is one of 149 copies signed by both the poet and the artist on the limitation page. One of eighteen volumes in the Prospero Poets series (1994–97). As New.

Towards the end of his life, Hughes used several illustrated small press publications to revisit key parts of his childhood, as in this poem where his mother's fears of the influence of American popular culture on her boys are vividly portrayed.

"From the age of about eight or nine I read just about every comic book available in England. At that time, my parents owned a newsagent's shop. I took the comics from the shop, read them, and put them back. That went on until I was twelve or thirteen." Appropriately, his first published poem, printed in his school magazine, related the ballad of a fictional western sharp-shooter named "Carson McReared".

[Keith Sagar, Ted Hughes: A Bibliographical Supplement 1996–2013, A118; Drue Heinz, "Ted Hughes, The Art of Poetry No. 71," in The Paris Review 134 (Spring 1995)]