I think it’s a common assumption that kids read comics and most of them grow out of it. For me it has been the other way round.

Sure, I’d read a few copies of the Beano and the Dandy, but I wasn’t really into the superhero comics at all. I liked the idea of superheroes, but didn’t care much for their pulpy exploits. As a teenager I enjoyed Tim Burton’s Batman films, but only in the same way I enjoyed Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction – they didn’t encourage me to go out and buy comics any more than the other two made me want to shoot people and overdose on drugs.

But as I’ve grown up I have grown more inclined to read about these characters in funny costumes. I don’t know whether that’s because I can now intellectualise them and therefore read the guilt free, or because having lost any sense of religion I crave some sort of mythology.

The truth is though, whenever I get introduced to people for the first time, I’m often introduced as ‘Adam… he does a comic’. People assume that I know stuff about superheroes and I always find it difficult to do the whole, ‘not those sort of comics… well, more like observations with pictures… I suppose a bit like Gary Larson…’ conversation.

So, I’ve been slowly catching up. Some of my local comic-book friends have really helped. The stuff they know is unbelievable… a level of geekery that forces me to stand in awe. Not only do they know the characters, the issue numbers, the plots and the continuity quirks (all real geekdom is about continuity quirks), but they know all about the technical aspects too… the writers, inkers, pencillers, publishers… the history, the full story.

They taught me about such terms as ‘trauma genesis’ – the horrible event that creates the hero and defines his purpose… for Spiderman it’s being bitten by a Radio-active (or in the films, genetically modified) spider and the death of a loved one… for Superman, it’s coming to Earth and losing his family and planet…

I realise I’ve been a bit misleading, talking about superheroes since really they’re not what interest me. It’s the villains that I like. The heroes are just vigilantes getting kicks on revenge, and by and large they tend to spend at least some of their time living ‘normal’ lives. Now, the villains on the other hand are usually following a greater calling, a passion, from which they must not deviate. They live and breathe their work… and they find it near impossible to live normal lives because they have become physically mutated reflections of their work and their personalities.

Far more interesting… and always so doomed to failure.

You think that one day they’d be self-aware enough to realise that they’re not going to get away with it (this time) and that they won’t end up conquering X (this time) and that the one person that is going to defeat them is the same person that pretty much always defeats them (every time). You think that they’d spot the pattern.

But what sort of a super-villain would that be? I think they probably realised that a long time ago, but what else can they do? Dr Doom as a taxi driver… Magneto serving at McDonald’s… The Joker doing kid’s parties…

It’s one of the reasons that I’m tempted to go and see the new Iron Man film (should I?) – I know that he’s a borderline character. far closer to the rest of us in many ways. Sure, he starts out bad, and then he gets good… but I know that it gets murkier than that a bit further down the line.

I’m pretty sure we’ve covered ‘what are your superhero powers/names’, so this time, it’s super-villains – I want names, evil plans and nemisees… nemisi… nemisises…

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