His appreciation of the artwork of Jack Kirby, he says, only materialised much later "through the eyes of a seasoned professional." He did however enjoy UK comics, including newspaper strips such as " Syd Jordan's Jeff Hawke David Wright's Carol Day", and Valiant which featured " Eric Bradbury's Mytek the Mighty and Jesus Blasco's Steel Claw". round some of the more remote backstreet newsagents" for comics to store on an overflowing "bookcase I'd made in school woodwork especially." Īs early as 1962, aged 11, Bolland remembers thinking that " Carmine Infantino's work on the Flash and Gil Kane's on Green Lantern and the Atom had a sophistication about it that I hadn't seen." He would later cite Kane and Alex Toth as "pinnacle of excellence," alongside " Curt Swan, Murphy Anderson, Sid Greene, Joe Kubert, Ross Andru, Mike Esposito, Nick Cardy and the under-rated Bruno Premiani," whose influences showed in his "early crude stabs at drawing comics." The young Bolland did not rate Marvel Comics as highly as DC, feeling the covers cluttered and the paper quality crude. " Soon, family outings to Skegness became an excuse for the future artist to "trawl. Comics including Turok, Son of Stone and DC Comics' Tomahawk soon followed, and it was this burgeoning comics collection that would help inspire the young Bolland to draw his own comics around the age of ten with ideas such as "Insect League." He recalls that "uperheroes crept into my life by stealth," as he actively sought out covers featuring "any big creature that looked vaguely dinosaur-like, trampling puny humans." These adolescent criteria led from Dinosaurus! and Turok via House of Mystery to " Batman and Robin were being harassed by big weird things, as were Superman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman.
When American comics began to be imported into England, c.1959, Bolland says that it "took a little while for me to discover them," but by 1960 he was intrigued by Dell Comics' Dinosaurus!, which fed into a childhood interest in dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes. He spent his "first 18 years" living "in a small village near Boston in the fens of Lincolnshire, England," but has "no memory of comics" much before the age of ten. 2.2 2000 AD, Judge Death and Walter the Wobotīrian Bolland was born in Butterwick, Lincolnshire, to parents Albert "A.J." John, a fenland farmer, and Lillie Bolland.