This week in 1971: COUNTDOWN No.38

Here are a few pages from the issue of Countdown that kids were reading this week in 1971. There's nothing significant about this issue, but the truth is every issue of Countdown was special because the artistic quality was so high so I thought you'd like to see an issue chosen at random.

As mentioned in previous posts a while ago, Countdown was published by Polystyle Publications and edited by Dennis Hooper, who had been the original art editor on Countdown's rival, TV Century 21. By 1971, TV21 had abandoned the license to publish strips based on Gerry Anderson TV shows so Countdown nipped in and took over. In essence, Countdown was a new version of TV21 in all but name. It also carried features on space exploration, as had TV21. 

Countdown's initial main selling points had been UFO and Doctor Who. Both still featured in this issue (No.38) but by this time the regular cover stars were The Persuaders, the new high profile ITC show starring Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. The art was by Harry Lindfield and continued inside...

Doctor Who was involved in an adventure set in the American Civil War, with artwork by Frank Langford...

The Doctor also featured in an advert for Sugar Smacks cereal, which in 1971 had a free Dr.Who badge in every pack. What better incentive to eat more sugary food and rot your teeth?

Gerry Anderson's TV series were represented with the first part of a new UFO serial running to six pages. Art by Gerry Haylock. Reprints of Stingray and Fireball XL5 also featured in the issue, which had previously appeared only six years earlier in TV21.

Countdown was also the title of the ongoing strip saga of the same name illustrated by John Burns. An original strip, but using spacecraft designs from 2001: A Space Odyssey. This serial definitely deserves to be collected in a reprint edition but the rights surrounding the 2001 designs seem to be a setback. 

One of the regular articles in the comic at this time were photographs taken from Apollo 15, the ninth manned space mission. I was 12 years old at the time and anything regarding space exploration was exciting as far as I was concerned. An actual close up photo of the Moon, on the back of a comic! I'm afraid that rival comics such as Hornet or Tiger couldn't top that with relatively mundane photos of footballers! 

Countdown was a great comic, although perhaps most kids preferred its competitor, Look-In, because a few months later Countdown underwent a big revamp to become TV Action with a focus on more grounded shows such as Hawaii Five-O and The Protectors. It still retained a high quality of art though, and issues are worth seeking out. 

Credit where credit's due

There's a bit of a myth that pops up now and then with some people claiming that British comics never featured creator credits until 2000AD broke the taboo in the late 1970s. While it's true that forced anonymity was generally the rule, there were comics long before 2000AD appeared that published credits. Some comics allowed signatures, even if the writers remained anonymous, but in the case of the original Eagle in the 1950s, and its "sister" publication Girl, writer and artist credits appeared alongside most strips. At least for a while. Odhams put paid to that when they took over Eagle in the early 1960s, but from the evidence here, they still allowed writer/artist credits in Girl up to 1962 at least. 

Like Eagle, Girl was a tabliod-sized glossy publication and its photogravure print quality allowed artists to produce painted strips in colour or grey wash. The standard of artistry was extremely high. Let's take a look... 

Belle of the Ballet, written by George Beardmore, drawn by Harry Lindfield. The artist would later illustrate strips for Polystyle's Countdown comic...

The Family Storey, written by Judy Sanders, drawn by Gerry Haylock, another artist destined to find work in Countdown in 1971. (Countdown, and the comic it was renamed as, TV Action, also ran artist credits on their strips, - but not for writers.)

Send for Sally! written by Peggy Stuart, art by Roland Davies. More about the artist here: https://bearalley.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/lesser-known-art-of-roland-davies.html

Calling Nurse Abbott! written by Frank Redpath, drawn by Philip Townsend and Leo Davy. 

Curiously, the only strip uncredited is the solo humour strip Lettice Leefe, which was by Captain Pugwash creator John Ryan...

All of these strips deserve reprinting as book collections but unfortunately it's highly unlikely they ever will be. While it's admirable that Rebellion are now honouring the legacy of post-1970 comics, they don't own the rights to earlier material which is sadly becoming ever-more forgotten.

All the strips here are scanned from Girl Vol.11, No.43, dated 27th October 1962. Click the pages to see them full size.

British Star Trek strips to be reprinted in 2016

Just a heads up for any of you who may have missed the news on Down The Tubes last week. Next year, American publisher IDW is to publish collections of the UK Star Trek strips that appeared in British comics almost 50 years ago.

Volume 1 of Star Trek: The Classic UK Comics will contain all of the Star Trek stories that appeared in Joe 90 Top Secret in 1969 and the strips that appeared in the merged TV21 and Joe 90 in 1969 to 1970. (Volume 2 will presumably reprint the strips from Valiant and TV21 from 1971 to 1973.) 

The first UK Star Trek strip from JOE 90 No.1 (1969).

A number of top British artists worked on the strip, including Harry Lindfield, Mike Noble, and Harold Johns. IDW have a great reputation for producing books of high quality so I'm sure we'll be in for a treat. 

Readers need to bear in mind that the the storylines and dialogue of the UK Star Trek strips are very much in the tradition of British adventure comics of the time. For example, Mr.Spock tends to be far more hot-headed in the strips, and the characters don't always 'sound' like their TV versions. The first two episodes (from Joe 90 Nos.1 and 2) even call the lead character Captain Kurt! It'll be interesting to see how American readers react to these stories but hopefully they'll accept them as the fast-paced fun strips they were intended to be. 

To read more about the project, see John Freeman's Down the Tubes website here:

http://downthetubes.net/?p=27194

(All the scans above are from my collection, not from the book.)

This week in 1971: COUNTDOWN No.32

It's been a while since I did one of these flashback features so here's a few pages from the issue of a comic that went on sale this weekend 44 years ago. It's Countdown No.32, dated September 25th 1971, which would have been published on Saturday Sept.18th 1971. (Click on images to see them larger.)

Countdown was a glossy 24 page weekly published by Polystyle, which featured strips based on the sci-fi adventure TV shows of the day. The comic tried to be a replacement for the glory days of TV21, to the extent that it had gained the licence to do strips of Gerry Anderson shows after TV21 had dropped them. (By the time this issue of Countdown was published, the ailing TV21 had merged into Valiant.)

The cover of this issue kicks off a new UFO serial illustrated by Gerry Haylock. One of the great things about Countdown was that it credited the artists; something most British comics didn't do back then.

The centrespread of the comic featured Doctor Who. The fantastic artist Harry Lindfield does a fine job of illustrating a very busy script but there's a lot going on to pack into two pages and it does feel like it would have benefited from spreading it over another page or two.

Eight of Countdown's 24 pages were in full colour, and although the content would vary over the comic's run, the Countdown strip itself had its two pages of 
colour every week. This was an originated strip not based on any TV show but it 
did feature spacecraft designs from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. (No spacecraft in this episode though.) Artwork by the always-astounding John Burns. 

Countdown ran a different complete 7 page story every week, and this week it was the turn of Captain Scarlet. Connecting with continuity with the movie Thunderbirds Are Go, the strip saw the return of the Martian Rock Snakes, - this time on Earth as part of a Mysteron plot. A daft story but great art by Keith Watson...

Having the licence for Gerry Anderson strips meant that Polystyle could reprint old strips from TV21, which came in handy when the budget was reduced. Although originally published in full colour, some Stingray and Fireball XL5 strips were reprinted in greyscale. Furthermore, the Fireball strips were reduced and turned at 90 degrees. However, personally speaking this didn't bother me one bit and as a 12 year old I was only too glad to revisit those classic strips I'd read when I was six. 

As you might have guessed from the competition to win a weather station, Countdown liked to mix science alongside science fiction. The back page of this issue featured a cutaway of the Apollo Lunar Module (reprinted from a book called Manned Spacecraft). 

I thought Countdown was an excellent comic, just up my street. No sports or war stories; just science fiction and fact (plus the occasional feature about UFO sightings). Sadly it seems most kids didn't take to it and with issue 59 it changed its title to TV Action, expanding its content to include TV shows such as Hawaii Five-O, and Cannon. Later, it'd incorporate pop pin-ups to compete with Look-In, but it still remained a good TV adventure comic up until its merger with TV Comic in 1973. 

Joe 90: Top Secret (1969)

Cover by Frank Bellamy.

I had this comic as a child but sold them long ago. However I recently purchased several issues in excellent condition at fairly reasonable prices so it's time to give the publication some long-overdue coverage starting with the earliest issues. 

There's always been some disagreement about the actual title of the comic. Since childhood, some of us have always thought it was called Joe 90: Top Secret due to the ever-present 'stamp' on the logo. However, in the actual comics, letters pages, etc it's only referred to as Joe 90. To add to the confusion, the one annual that the comic spawned was definitely advertised as Joe 90/Top Secret Annual but that may be because the ad was produced by a different department. However I still prefer the longer title and to my mind it'll always be Joe 90: Top Secret but for the sake of brevity I'll just refer to it as Joe 90 for the rest of this post.  

Published by City Magazines in co-operation with Century 21 it was launched on 15th January 1969. Joe 90 was a companion paper to TV21 and followed the same format of having 20 tabloid sized pages, printed in high quality photogravure. Six pages were in full colour. The cover design of the early issues was quite distinctive, leading with a documentary style opening to the Joe 90 comic strip over the page.

It has to be said that unfortunately Joe 90 was one of the weakest strips in his own comic. I suspect the editors knew this too, which may be why the comic's full colour pages were devoted to two strong and dynamic supporting strips based on American TV shows. Before we get to those though, here's a quick look at an originated strip in the comic, Ninepence + Tenpence = Sport. Perhaps someone felt Joe 90 needed a traditional sports story, and created this serial of two Inuit boys with a talent for football. Drawn by Alfredo Marculeta, who had also been the artist of Rubberman in Smash! 

The free gift in Joe 90 No.1 was a cardboard model of the 'Jet-Air Car' from the series. Nowhere near as slick as the excellent Dinky toy but it was an amusing novelty with its matchstick and rubber band 'engine'. My gift is long gone but here's the page showing the instructions for it...

Proudly running across the centrespread of every issue was a strip version of Star Trek, excellently illustrated by Harry Lindfield. The one big drawback was... the TV series wouldn't premiere on British television for several more months (July 1969), even though it had been on American TV since 1966. Yes, for us as kids back then the weekly comic strip was our first knowledge of Mr.Spock, the USS Enterprise and Captain Kurt...

Wait. Did I say Captain Kurt? Yep, that's what he was called in the first two episodes of the comic strip! Presumably someone in editorial mis-heard the name. No videos or DVDs for reference in those days of course. 

Things got even stranger in Joe 90 No.2, where the script called for Harry Lindfield to draw a scene showing the Enterprise landing on a planet! Lindfield chose to have the starship hover just above the ground rather than add wheels to it.

Joe 90 seemed to be aiming to be more of a traditional tv comic than the shared-universe theme in TV21. Living up to the 'Top Secret' aspect was The Champions, based on the British secret agent TV series. Art by Jon Davis.

The other strip that was awarded the full colour treatment was Land of the Giants, based on the popular Irwin Allen show. Great artwork by Gerry Haylock. The first three issues adapted the first episode. Considering how accurate it was I'm sure Gerry Haylock must have had access to numerous photographic stills from the episode. Here's the full adaptation from issues 1 to 3 of Joe 90...

Towards the end of Joe 90's short run of just 34 issues it became obvious that the title character wasn't the selling point, so Land of the Giants and Star Trek took turns to appear on the covers. In September 1969 Joe 90 merged into TV21 and restarted as TV 21 and Joe 90 with a new No.1 (although the merged comic was more like Joe 90 than its parent title). 

I'll take another look at some issues of Joe 90 soon, with a focus on the Joe 90 strip itself. In the meantime, here are the covers to issues 2 and 3. Click on them to see them full size...

This week in 1971: Dr.Who

Yes, 'Dr.Who', not 'Doctor Who'. That was often how licensed BBC merchandise and comics had it back then. Even the Doctor Who TV series itself listed the character as 'Dr.Who' in the end credits for a while in the early days. And no one cared. 

Here's the Dr.Who strip that appeared on the covers of Countdown comic this week in 1971. Part of The Celluloid Midas serial illustrated by Harry Lindfield. Very nice artwork by one of the top comic artists of the day.

This of course was back in the days when The Doctor was a tall middle-aged grey-haired chap dressed in black with a red lining to the outfit. Wouldn't it be great to have a Doctor looking like that now? Oh, hang on...

Doctor Who returns to our TV screens on Saturday August 23rd! Don't miss it! 

Doctor Who cover gallery

I'm sure a billion other blogs will be posting about Doctor Who today on this 50th anniversary of the show so I thought I'd join in the celebrations. Here's a brief look at just a few of the comic covers that The Doctor appeared on during the first ten years, starting with Walt Howarth's painting of William Hartnell as the first Doctor for the first Doctor Who Annual above.

Next up, here's one of John Canning's TV Comic covers featuring the second Doctor, Patrick Troughton (issue 796, March 18th 1967). You may notice that Canning managed to get his name on the cover by blatantly making it part of the shop front.

By 1971 the Doctor Who comic strip had moved to TV Comic's new sister publication Countdown. Here's a Harry Lindfield cover to issue 27 featuring Jon Pertwee as the third Doctor.

Countdown's falling sales led to a big revamp in 1972 and a title change to TV Action, but the Dr.Who strip continued, now with a regular cover spot. The artist by now was Gerry Haylock who captured Jon Pertwee's likeness perfectly.

Using the Daleks as the foes in the strip during the revamp was a good idea to retain the readers interest. Here's another Gerry Haylock cover from a few weeks later.

TV Action had run a competition in its first issue for readers to create a new monster for the Doctor to battle. The winning entry, The Ugrakks, was announced in issue 72, chosen by a team of judges including the comic's editor Dennis Hooper, Doctor Who producer Barry Letts and Jon Pertwee himself. The monster then appeared in issue 79 (August 19th 1972) with the lucky winner himself also appearing on the cover...

Another revamp for the comic with issue 101 led to cover strips being dropped in favour of full page illustrations representing that week's 'Big Story' (the strips took turns to feature in one seven page complete story inside). Doctor Who had a few turns, including these two striking images. 

TV Action's fortunes sadly continued to fall and it was merged into TV Comic, taking Doctor Who with it. In 1979, Marvel UK acquired the strip rights and have been publishing Doctor Who Weekly (or Doctor Who Magazine as it soon became) ever since. Happy 50th, Doctor Who!