1969: A Year of Change

The year 1969 has always felt special to me. Not only because it was the end of the first decade I'd grown up in (and it was a GREAT decade to grow up in), but also because the UK comics landscape was significantly different at the end of that year than when it began. As a ten year old back then, there were a number of changes to suddenly get used to in the weekly comics I enjoyed. I thought I'd show those changes here, which affected not only the few comics I was buying but also others too...

January of 1969 saw big changes for D.C. Thomson's Sparky. It had been gradually evolving from the somewhat old fashioned comic it had started out as into something more contemporary and offbeat. The biggest change came with its cover star Sparky, an outdated racist caricature, finally packing his bags and vacating the comic with issue No.211 (although head shots of him would still be seen on the letters pages for a while after)...

Art by Ron Spencer.

A big announcement on the back page heralded more changes with new stories arriving...

...and the following week saw the comic given a snazzy new logo and cover star Barney Bulldog, with art by Bill Ritchie...

Art by Bill Ritchie.

March saw huge changes for Smash! comic. Previously run by Odhams, it was now controlled by IPC who decided on a complete revamp. One week it looked like this...

Art by Mike Lacey.

...with its centre pages announcing the upcoming changes...

...and the following week it was changed beyond recognition into a boys adventure comic (having previously been aimed at both boys and girls)...

Art by Geoff Campion.

IPC were determined to shake up the comics line they'd taken over from Odhams and Fleetway. A few weeks later, it was the turn of Jag to face even more drastic changes. Only launched 43 weeks earlier by Fleetway, this March issue was to be its swan song...

Art by Joe Colquhoun.

A merger with Tiger was happening!

Art by John Gillatt.

The new combined Tiger and Jag included not only the best of Jag's stories but also gained the superior paper quality that Jag had been using, upgrading Tiger from newsprint to web offset printing...

Art by Yvonne Hutton.

Changes were happening thick and fast. The long running Eagle was the next comic to face the axe with its April 26th issue...

Art by Frank Hampson studio.

...merging into Lion the following week...

Art by Geoff Campion.

With comics falling by the wayside IPC chose June of that year to launch a new comic for girls. Its title was Sally. 

Cover taken from Comic Vine website.

Over at City Magazines, another merger was afoot, with Joe 90 Top Secret ending in September after just 34 weeks...

...and TV21 ending its first series that same week after 242 issues...

...to combine into No.1 of the new TV21 and Joe 90, which content-wise was more like Joe 90 Top Secret than the old TV21 but I guess they felt the TV21 title had more longevity... 

Time for something new? IPC's first humour comic, the first of many, was launched in October 1969 as Whizzer and Chips made its debut. A far more restrained and "safe" comic than titles it had replaced such as Smash! and Wham! but it became very popular...

Finally, also around October of that year, Top Sellers ventured into the superhero market with Super DC, featuring edited and resized reprints of 1960s Superman and Batman comics. Not as good as Odhams' Fantastic which had reprinted Marvel strips and had ended twelve months earlier, but it was the next best thing...

Art by Mick Anglo.

What a year! Back then, I was disappointed to see my favourite, Smash!, change so drastically but I persevered with the new version on and off and came to like it. Same with TV21 which was far past its best by 1969. Yet I still loved comics and so Tiger and Jag and Sparky became my two new regular buys. Things didn't feel quite the same though, and a lot of the magic of comics was gone for me by the end of that year. As the years passed I soon realised that it was just a process of growing up. Change was always a constant in the comics industry, for good or bad. Sometimes it was a disappointment but other times it really was, as the ads told us, "exciting news". May of 2020 will see Rebellion revive Smash! as a one-off special, and it'll be as significantly different as its first two incarnations. Comics have always evolved to appeal to new generations, and that's the way it should be. 

(All covers scanned from my collection except for Sally which is from the Comic Vine website. Sparky is ©D.C. Thomson, Tiger, Jag, Smash!, Sally, Lion, Whizzer and Chips, and TV21 are ©Rebellion Publishing, Superman is ©DC Comics.)