A look back at VALIANT No.1 (1962)

Fleetway Publications launched Valiant No.1 on Saturday 29th September 1962 (cover dated 6th October). Like Buster, launched two years earlier, Valiant was part of Fleetway's determination to modernise the comics line for a new era, with a bolder, cleaner look than the dated (and long-dead) comics such as Comic Cuts and Chips that had been produced by their predecessors The Amalgamated Press. Valiant actually replaced Film Fun on the schedule when that long-running comic merged into Buster a month before Valiant debuted. There was no doubt that Fleetway intended to clear the decks for their new style comics. 

The cover of Valiant No.1 was bold and effective; a single image of Captain Hurricane welcoming the readers, set against primary colours. I've already shown the first episode of Captain Hurricane in an earlier post (see here) so I won't show that again, but I was lucky to recently win Valiant No.1 on eBay so I thought I'd show a few of the other pages today. 

Valiant's 32 pages featured adventure strips with a few humour pages added to balance things out. One of those funnies was The Nutts, drawn by Angel Nadal, that would prove so popular it would remain in the comic until the final issue in 1976. 

One of the most memorable series that appeared in the comic was The Steel Claw, written by Ken Bulmer and illustrated by Jesus Blasco. This atmospheric first episode reveals how Louis Crandell gained the power of invisibility. In these early tales, Crandall was a villain! When the strip proved popular, it was decided he should become a hero, and his evil ways were explained away as the result of the lab explosion. However, as can be seen in this first episode, Crandall was resentful and greedy before the accident...

Valiant No.1 featured a high standard of talent, including the great Roy Wilson illustrating Percy the Problem Child. Wilson was considered the main humourist of the old A.P. comics, with the "house style" that others were encouraged to emulate. By 1962 he was sadly nearing the end of his life (he passed away in 1965) and his style was no longer flavour of the day of the fickle comics industry but he could still draw as well as anyone in the business. 

The centre pages of Valiant's first issue were taken up with episode one of To Glory we Steer, distinctively illustrated by Eric Parker. I must confess I found his style too 'heavy' for my liking as a child, but now I can appreciate what a skilled and unique artist he was.

The editor's letter welcomed the readers on It's All Yours, a page inviting kids to send in their jokes and anecdotes. But how did they get submissions for the first issue? It was hardly a trade secret; they were simply made up as an example to show they type of material they wanted readers to submit. (EDIT: On the other hand, some jokes were spare ones that had been submitted to Buster. See Phil Elsham's comment below. Thanks for the info, Phil!)

The struggles of working class heroes were always a good theme for British comics, and in Valiant No.1 we had Kid Gloves, the story of a boxer from the rough end of town. Superb artwork by Geoff Campion, one of Fleetway's finest artists.

Campion also drew the back cover feature, Famous Fighters, that would graduate to the front cover after the first few issues. 

Valiant got off to a great start with this issue, with a strong line-up by the top talent in the business. It's no wonder the comic lasted as long as it did, running for 14 years in total before merging into Battle Picture Weekly. 

...and if you'd like to see a few pages from the second issue of Valiant, you'll find them here:
https://lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/looking-back-at-valiant-no2-1962.html

Classic Action Holiday Special (1990)

In early summer 1990, Fleetway released the Classic Action Holiday Special, a 52 page one-off reviving several of their old characters in brand new stories. 

It's a bit of an oddity because although the comic is obviously partly targeted at readers who would remember those heroes from Valiant, Buster, Tiger, and Lion (readers who would be adults by 1990) the stories themselves are written for children. In most instances, children a bit younger than the audience the characters were originally aimed at. The end results are stories that feel too simplistic for the nostalgic crowd whilst being perhaps too old fashioned for kids of the 1990s. 

Whatever its drawbacks, it was good to see Fleetway attempting to revive those old heroes, and interesting to see different artists tackling them where the original artists were no longer available. The special kicked off with a four page Kelly's Eye story drawn by John Cooper...

Then onto a four page full colour Robot Archie story drawn by Sandy James. Curiously, Archie was back to his original silent self (as he was in the 1950s) which was a shame as the vocal Archie of the 1960s/70s had been quite amusing. 

Next, a four page Steel Claw story. Eduardo Vano Ibarra (Vanyo) is the artist here I think. (None of the strips are credited.) By 1990, and their audience getting younger, publishers were nervous about showing certain scenes in comics in the fear of kids imitating them. In the 1960's, when Fleetway granted its readers with more sense, Louis Crandell was often shown shoving the fingers of his Steel Claw into light sockets or grabbing live wires to activate his invisibility. This presented a problem for the revival of the strip. The solution? Have Crandell suddenly struck by lightning! Stretching credibility even for this strip, but the idea being that kids couldn't imitate an act of nature.

A three page Skid Solo reprint followed, and then a new five page text story featuring Galaxus with illustrations by John Cooper...

Next, a new episode of a very old strip; Jet-Ace Logan, drawn by John Gillatt, one of the original artists of the strip back in its Tiger days...

A six page Janus Stark story followed. Not sure who the artist is.

A four page full colour Johnny Cougar strip next, by Sandy James, one of its original artists...

Finally, a new four page Captain Hurricane strip by R. Charles Roylance, who had drawn the strip in its original run...

There were also a few reprint features and a couple of Norman Mansbridge Autograph Albert funnies in the special. Overall, an interesting package despite my reservations about the scripts, and worth hunting down if you were a fan of those classic characters. 

VULCAN (1975)

In the 1970s many British strips owned by IPC were being translated and reprinted abroad via Syndication International in various foreign comics. Then someone had the idea of packaging an entire comic full of UK reprints that could be sold in Britain as well as Germany. The result was Vulcan, a co-production between Swiss publisher Gevacur and British publisher IPC, and printed in Germany.

Vulcan was a 32 page comic on cheap but glossy paper, half of its contents in full colour. An expensive format at the time, but made feasible because after doing the English language print run, the printer then changed the black plate for a translated version in German, and continued printing. The German edition was entitled Kobra, and was exactly the same as Vulcan except for the language.

The first issues of Vulcan and Kobra were published on the same day, February 22nd 1975. Perhaps IPC were unsure of its sales potential so Vulcan was only distributed in Scotland as a sort of test launch. It continued this way for 30 issues.

The contents of Vulcan featured reprints of some of the best adventure stories that had appeared in Fleetway comics of the 1960s. All the earliest episodes of Mytek the Mighty, Kelly's Eye, The Spider, The Trigan Empire, The Steel Claw, Saber: King of the Jungle, and Robot Archie. Actually, the four pages of Robot Archie were completely redrawn versions based on old scripts, including giving Archie's human pals longer hair to make them more contemporary. This may seem an unnecessary expense but perhaps it was because the original strips had already been reprinted overseas. 

Vulcan was smaller and differently proportioned than the original comics it took its material from. For the reprints, strips had to be resized to fit. Sometimes the resizing was subtle, but often not. Here's one of the slightly better results. First, the original page from Valiant dated 3rd April 1965...

...then the resized reprint from Vulcan 27th September 1975...

It seems that Vulcan had sold well enough in Scotland to warrant a relaunch across the UK. Readers South of the border had no idea that this Scottish comic existed, so all the serials in the comic had to conclude in the final Scottish edition dated 20th September 1975. Brand new endings were drawn to wrap up the reprints in a hasty manner!  

New ending for Reg Bunn's The Spider drawn by Joe Colquhoun...

New ending for Jesus Blasco's The Steel Claw drawn by John Stokes...

New ending for Solano Lopez' Kelly's Eye drawn by John Stokes...

The following week saw a fresh start with a new Vulcan No.1, published on 20th September 1975, reprinting stories that had not appeared in the Scottish edition. For once, the cover was brand new (a smashing Mike Western job) rather than enlarging an interior panel for the cover as was the norm. For those of us living in England, this was a new comic, and we were totally unaware it had already been running for 30 weeks in Scotland!

Mike Western also drew a new cover for issue 2 of the new series...

One attraction of Vulcan was that it featured 8 full colour pages of The Trigan Empire every week. The pages were edited and resized from Ranger and Look and Learn but Don Lawrence's artwork was still superb.

Unfortunately, Vulcan didn't fare too well as a national comic. With the 28th issue (No.58 including the Scottish series) came this announcement...

Final issue of Vulcan.

The following week, the first Valiant and Vulcan appeared on 3rd April 1976 with this Carlos Ezquerra cover.

The problem with Valiant absorbing a reprint comic was that most of the stories had previously appeared in Valiant several years before. The solution was to edit and wind up the reprints as quickly as possible by presenting Vulcan as a pull-out 'mini-mag' - four normal pages for readers to fold into an 8 page comic...

The cheap newsprint of Valiant did the reduced reprints no favours at all...

After just three weeks, the stories were concluded and the Vulcan mini-mag was dropped, although the comic was still Valiant and Vulcan on the masthead for a while longer.

In Germany, Kobra had been more successful, and ran for three years in all.

Vulcan was an odd experiment by IPC. It was good to see such classic material collected into one comic, but the presentation often let it down. I'm not sure newsagents knew where to stock it, as due to its small format (close to American comic book size) some put it in the spinner racks with Marvel and DC titles. I think it must have been on firm sale because I remember several different issues hanging around those spinner racks for months. 

For some insight into Vulcan's history there's a short piece by Dez Skinn over on the Down the Tubes website: http://downthetubes.net/?p=78

All scans from my collection except for the Kobra cover which is from the Comic Vine website: http://www.comicvine.com/kobra-7507/4000-332710/

Below: The free gift that appeared in the Scottish Vulcan No.1 (from my collection):

Flashback to 1967: FLEETWAY SUPER LIBRARY

The mid-1960s. With the ongoing success of the digest sized Battle Picture Libraries and similar comics, Fleetway ventured into a new title in January 1967 with the launch of the Fleetway SUPER Library. These books carried twice as many pages as the standard Picture Library for just 50% more money. At 132 pages for 1/6d (7 and a half pence) The Fleetway SUPER Library looked great value for money. 

Ad from VALIANT dated 14th January 1967

The series launched with three categories. The Front Line Series featured war stories with Maddock's Marauders alternating issues with Ironside, the Secret Agent Series featured spy character Johnny Nero alternating with Barracuda, and the Fantastic Series saw The Steel Claw alternate with The Spider. All of the stories were brand new, specially commissioned for these books.

Those latter two characters were of course very familiar to readers of Valiant and Lion weeklies as serial strips, but the Super Libraries gave Fleetway the opportunity to present them in long, complete stories. Fantastic Series No.1 kicked off with The Steel Claw in The Raiders of F.E.A.R. illustrated by Carlos Cruz...

Carlos Cruz doing a good job of ghosting Jesus Blasco

 The back cover advertised issue 2 (on sale the same day), featuring The Spider in The Professor of Power.

With the second batch of releases, a month later in February 1967, something strange happened. With no explanation, Fantastic Series was suddenly renamed Stupendous Series, a title it would retain for the rest of its run.

The decision was made so quickly that the cover mock ups shown on the advert for the books on the back of Buster Adventure Library for February just had a blank space where the series category should have been...

The reason for the change? I strongly suspect that it was due to Odhams launching Fantastic weekly in February 1967 and Fleetway didn't want to cause any confusion amongst retailers and readers. (Both Odhams and Fleetway were subsidiaries of IPC.) A pity, as Stupendous wasn't anywhere near as good a title.

As it turned out, it seems the Super Library line wasn't too successful. The books ran for just a year, ending in January 1968, all at issue 26. A great shame, as they represented a good attempt to break away from the traditional British comics format. With each book carrying complete 122 page stories (plus reprint features as back-up) they could be considered to be the first UK graphic novels. 

Art by Aldo Marcuzzi for STUPENDOUS No.8

Like the other Fleetway "Library" comics, (along with DC Thomson's Commando) all of the Super Library titles featured painted covers, a practice presumably initially inspired by the sensationalist covers of pulps of the 1930s, and the trashy crime novels of the 1950s and 1960s. They gave the digests a more grown up look compared to the comics of the day.

Why did they ultimately fail when the 1/- war digests still proved popular? Perhaps at 1/6d they were simply too expensive for the time, or perhaps the older reader they were aimed at felt the characters were too juvenile for them? Perhaps the market for digest comics was just too crowded to support any more titles? 

Art by Francisco Cueto for STUPENDOUS No.20

Whatever the reason for their demise, the Fleetway Super Library still stands as a nice collection of British comic books. The artwork for the books was produced by international artists, who were no doubt cheaper for Fleetway to employ. Regular Spider artist Reg Bunn never drew any of the Stupendous books, although some artists were obviously told to try and emulate his style. Not all of them though. There's a really loose, individualistic style to Stupendous No.24 (The Melody of Crime) that's very refreshing. I don't know who the artist is but I think it's the same one who drew Gadget Man and Gimmick Kid for Lion around the same period. (UPDATE: Artist identified as Giorgio Trevisan. Thanks to Phil Rushton for the info.)

Lively artwork by Giorgio Trevisan

Similarly, although regular Steel Claw artist Jesus Blasco only drew two of the digests (Nos.5 and 13), other artists such as Carlos Cruz and Massimo Bellardinelli attempted to "ghost" his style.

STUPENDOUS No.5 Art by Jesus Blasco

STUPENDOUS No.3 Art by Massimo Bellardinelli

I've used photographs rather than scans for this article as the books are squarebound and glued and as most of the ones I have are unsold ex-warehouse issues (except for the one below) I didn't want to crack the spines by laying them flat. I hope the photos do them justice.

Reg Wooton's SPORTY was the back up in SECRET AGENT Series

Don't forget - click on the images to see them larger. (Some images require you to click again to see them even bigger.)