When I was a kid reading comics, it was mostly The Beano, which was at a high point in the early-mid 90's; few reprints, full colour (not that that makes things automatically better, but it's more appealing to a kid), just the right amount of new characters coming and going and art which, while distinct from the 50's abd 60's debuts of the classic characters, was still done with dedication and craft, not just "oh well, its for kids…" phoned-in shit. My Brother got The Dandy, which was on a similar high, before 2010-2012 saw it plummet to an abysmal low abd get cancelled. 75 years of history discarded largely thanks to one artist, Jamie Smart, who naturally doubled down and blamed his critics and "Tory austerity" for killing the comic instead.
There was also Sonic The Comic, which, while being licensed advertainment shit (like 99% of the British comics "industry" today), at least had semi-decent adventure strips which took up a majority of the page count. With a childhood like that, you kind of assume things are only going to go on improving in future.
In the late 90's, I was "edgy". But, aside from my cringeworthy politics, "edgy" in the age of "edgy" actually meant I was strait-laced. I hated shit like Freakazoid, The Tick and other comedy superheroes, I wanted good superheroes who kicked baddie ass. I did watch the contemporary Batman, Spider Man and X Men toons too (my brother also got the Panini Spider Man comic for like 3 issues - with silver age reprints! My first glimpse at superhero greatness), but I thought those took themselves too seriously, by comparison. Also I wondered why Storm didn't just tornado the fuck out of everything.
In the 2000's I was getting 2000AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, the latter filled with pozzed-out articles about the goings-on in "geekdom". I lost faith when they ignored the cult hit Life on Mars in favour of gushing about Lost, the show the normiest of norms had all seen. Anyway, in 2005 they ran an article about Sexton Blake, a "pulp" (story paper) character who was at his best between the world wars. My comic reading interest went back, WAY back, mostly to before World War 1. After a brief phase of wanting to create an "up to date", "ironic" "penny dreadful" with a black Tinker (Sexton Blake's "Robin") and a story about a psycho going on a rampage in a Social Services office, I actually read some old Sexton Blake and boarding school stories (I still feel ashamed at how I was giving a cultural marxism-laced critique of the illustrations to my brother on the bus, after finding a book of them in Cambridge), and decided my calling in life was to create more of them. I also got into more "modern" British adventure comics like Eagle, Victor, Valiant etc, the last of which had died when I was only just able to read.
My love of traditional adventure can probably be traced back to books and TV, though. 90's satellite TV in the UK was awash with the likes of the original Johnny Quest, the 60's barely animated Marvel toons, The Avengers (as in, Steed & Peel) and The Champions (as in, the three spies with "peak human" abilities). And as for books, my parents gave me the stuff they had liked as kids (in some cases, the actual books they had kept), such as The Famous Five. The likes of Blackman and Wynn-Jones passed me by entirely, and my only awareness of Harry Potter was a poster in the English room at school.