The fashion industry and its blame for my super-hero addiction.

As I lurk behind the rear exits of the Sheffield University Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, hoping to be bombarded by stray nuclear rays, people often say to me, "But, Steve, given that Britain had a flourishing and honourable comic book tradition of its own, just why did you start reading American comics?"

Well, I could lie and say it's because, at the age of eight, I was attracted by the Nietzschean overtones of the super-hero genre, mixed with a need to contemplate just what the effect would be upon any society that is suddenly exposed to the emergence of a new breed of super-men, but the truth is it was because I liked the bright and colourful costumes.

I know this because my main memory of every single super-hero comic that I encountered during that initial spell of reading them, in the summer of 1972, is what I thought of the costumes.

The first super-hero comic I can remember owning was Amazing Spider-Man Annual #6 and the thing that had made me want to have it was the sheer red and blue webbiness of Spider-Man's outfit.

Shortly after that, I picked up my first issue of Batman whose main appeal was down to his bat ears, the arches at the base of his cape and the bendy spikes sticking out of his gloves.

Around the same time, I got an issue of The Flash. His predominant allure to me was that he had lightning sticking out of his boots, wings sticking out of his head and he somehow managed to store his costume in a ring on his finger.

The appeal of Captain America in my first exposure to him was not the fact that he was fighting a talking gorilla but that he was wearing the American flag and had wings sticking out of his head.

The appeal of Superman was the big "S" on his chest, and his boots.

The first issue of The X-Men that I ever read impressed me by featuring the Angel vs Red Raven. I could claim to have been gripped by the pulse-pounding drama of such a meeting but the reality is that what most gripped me was that the Angel's costume was yellow with red bits and Red Raven's costume was red with yellow bits, meaning that they, to some degree, mirrored each other.

Likewise, my first ever issue of Teen Titans impressed me mostly because Kid Flash had a costume whose colours partially reversed those worn by adult Flash.

I suppose I should also acknowledge that wings featured a fair amount in the physical appearance of a whole bunch of these characters. Whether that was coincidence or whether a subconscious desire to fly meant I was drawn to winged characters, I could not say.

Interestingly, only weeks after this comic-buying splurge began, I got my first issue of Mighty World of Marvel. Of the three strips printed in it, only one - Spider-Man - featured a costumed hero. The Hulk just ran around in his trousers, while the Fantastic Four were, at this stage, still operating in their normal everyday clothes. What gripped me about those tales was that they dealt with alien invaders and thus created a sense of a world in permanent danger.

It seems that, in mere weeks, I had evolved from liking super-heroes purely because of their costumes to liking them for how dark and menacing their world was.

Interestingly, I don't think that, at this point, I had any great interest in their powers.

The one exception to that was Mr Fantastic. That issue's Spider-Man tale featured the wondrous wall-crawler's early, failed, attempt to join the Fantastic Four and, while the Invisible Girl, Human Torch and Thing's powers didn't mean anything much to me, I do remember being highly impressed by the visual strangeness of Reed Richard's stretching prowess.

So, there you have it; if you ever want to create a comic that's irresistible to eight year olds, start off by giving everyone brightly coloured costumes with wings, then, after two issues, switch to doing "B" movie sci-fi plots involving alien invasion and, from then on, fill every issue with men who can stretch like elastic. My experience as an eight year old suggests that, for a child, this is an unbeatable chain of events.