BATMAN'S WORLD OF ADVENTURE - NO PARACHUTES INVOLVED...

Art by Walter Howarth

Here's a nice little item I picked up in Gosport (perhaps) when I was living down in Southsea in Portsmouth back in 1981. Thirty-one years later, I'm reminded that I probably had my original copy for only a few weeks when I first bought it back in the faraway '60s. Looking at it today, I remember having quite a few issues of this run, and I also seem to recall a SUPER-MAN companion series. (Even 'though there isn't one listed on the back-page ad, below. Could be wrong 'though.)

If memory is correct, I purchased all four of these titles in my sadly-missed local WOOLWORTHS, and - on the day I bought them - I recall standing in line for a visiting fairground's 'parachute jump' (slipping into a harness and jumping off a ledge - no actual parachute involved) situated in the rear car-park of the tenpin bowling alley in the main shopping precinct of my home town. As I waited, some ned kept asking me to let him read my new acquisitions while the queue wound its way along. I refused of course, because even at that tender age, I was smart enough to realise that he'd be off the moment I handed them over, never to be seen again.

Never even got my parachute jump that day - the queue was moving so slowly that my parents, who were hovering in the background, got fed up waiting and summoned me and my brother back over to the car. Ah well, at least I had my BATMAN and U.N.C.L.E. World Adventure Libraries to console me.

A SAINSBURY'S supermarket has been built on the site of the long-gone bowling alley, and an ICELAND shop now occupies the premises that once belonged to Woolworths, but - somewhere in the back of my mind and in surviving black and white photos of the period - the way things used to be still exist whenever I feel compelled to reconnect with my past. And who knows? Maybe one day I'll even make that abandoned 'parachute jump'.