1966 and all that

The frenzy of World Cup fever is nothing new, although in decades past fans tended not to believe that fixing flags to car windows or daubing their kids faces with red and white paint would manifest some tribal magic to make the England squad play better. Back in 1966 for example, the year of the only World Cup match I've bothered watching, England won even without the encouragement of TV viewers lying in a puddle of sick brought on by 16 cans of Stella. (Ok, perhaps it was Davenports beer-at-home back then instead.)

Comics of 1966 joined in the fun too. England mascot World Cup Willie was used to sell the World Cup idea to the kids, with Willie appearing on anything from badges, T-shirts, Rolykins, nougat bars and a comic strip in TV Comic. (The example below is, I believe, the work of Bill Mevin. Correct me if I'm wrong.)
Valiant also hopped on the bandwagon with the T-shirt offer shown at the top of this post and The Valiant Big Book of Football. It wasn't really a book though, but was instead a series of four page pull-outs that built up to a 32 page comic over eight weeks, (issues 30th April - 18th June inclusive) printed on traditional "sport's pink" paper.

The pull-out supplement featured a host of soccer info, from the story of the World Cup...
...to the careers of the England players...
No doubt other comics of 1966 also focused on the World Cup but, from what I remember, not to a great extent. However, never being a competitive sports fan I was happy at the time to avoid comics like Victor and Tiger and escape into the pages of Odham's Smash! and Wham!, neither of which ever featured sports stories as I recall.

Today, as a contributor to comics, I'm happy to draw football stories on occasion and in a few weeks Team Toxic has a World Cup theme in the next issue of Toxic. More on that when the issue appears.

Rovers Return in retro World Cup special

Next Wednesday (June 16th) Egmont release the 52 page full colour comic All About Roy of the Rovers. The publication is part of Egmont's regular All About series which focuses on a different topic every issue. (I understand the current one spotlights Prince of Persia.) Usually, All About only features magazine material so it's good to see an issue containing comic strips.

There are five comic strips in all, selecting material from the late 1970s to the 1990s. The issue kicks off with eight consecutive parts of a 1978 Roy of the Rovers story concerning Roy Race forming an England squad that includes real-life 70s footballer Trevor Francis and, in a rare UK comics crossover, Nipper Lawrence (from Tiger's long running Nipper strip). Artwork by David Sque, now the artist on the Daily Mirror's Scorer strip.


Two other Roy of the Rovers stories are included (drawn by Jim Eldridge and, I think, Mike White) which, at eight pages in length each, I presume are from old annuals or specials. There's also a four part Goalmouth story by Tom Tully and John Cooper which I think is from the 1990s, and a four page Andy Steel Playmaker story by H.Manning and G. Marchetti.


I'm the first to admit that football isn't really my thing and I hardly followed the old Roy of the Rovers comic at all but this is a very nice collection of strips. The format is glossier than the Egmont Classic Comics of last year and I'm pleased to see the strips are more complete rather than the open-ended choices of those Classic specials. Another big difference is that the 2009 specials were each on sale for three months, but All About Roy of the Rovers will only be on sale for one month, after which the next All About edition will replace it. (Don't expect future issues to feature comics though. This is just an appropriate World Cup tie-in.)

All About Roy of the Rovers is £3.99 and will be on sale from 16th June to 13th July.

Introducing Dez Skinn Dot Com!

Dez Skinn has been a familiar figure in British comics for several decades and now he's sharing his memories on his new website dezskinn.com

Smartly designed by Chrissie Harper, the site shows what an important and key figure Dez has been in UK comics, from his early days on Fantasy Advertiser International, working on Buster and editing The Buster Book of Spooky Stories, through improving the UK edition of Mad, developing Monster Mag and House of Hammer, revamping Marvel UK by bringing in British talent, creating Starburst and Warrior, to the essential comics trade paper Comics International and more recently books on comics. (And all that is just a sample of Dez's busy career.) There's also a peek at covers for dummy issues of IPC's aborted Captain Britain venture (yes, they came up with the name before Marvel) and Quality Comics' unseen Danger Man and Legend Testers comics.


I always enjoyed Dez's editorials and anecdotes when he was editing Comics International and his website has that same informative and informal flavour. Compared to U.S. comics there has been so little written about the production aspects of British comics and people such as Dez have a lot of stories to tell of the glory days of Fleetway / IPC for example. There's a particularly good IPC staff photograph from the 1970s on the site (reproduced above) which puts faces to the names of Sid Bicknell, Len Wenn, Bill Reid, and Keith Robson.

The website is still in development but there's already a lot of info there and Dez is continuing to add more. Dez has always had a commonsense approach to comics and I'm sure publishers today could benefit from his experience. dezskinn.com is well worth bookmarking for fans and pros alike.

First batch of Commandos for June out now

Editor Calum Laird brings news from the front of the latest issues of Commando out this week...

Commando 4299: TARGET…TIGER!

D-Day, Normandy, June 1944 — and tank commander Joe Gibson is raring to go. Then a Tiger destroys his Cromwell killing his crewmates. He blames himself for their deaths.
Joe soon returns to duty but soon in an inferior, in his mind, M4 Sherman. To his new crew it looks like Joe has lost his nerve.
Was that the truth? Even Joe is beginning to wonder — especially when he has a Tiger in his sights…

Story: Ferg Handley

Art: Morahin

Cover: Janek Matysiak

Another cover from Janek Matysiak using his new direct-to-screen way of working. You can see the first he did in this way at http://www.commandomag.com/index.php?id=1369




Commando No 4300: “FIRE!”

They were simply supposed to showcase some new 9-pounder field pieces. But in 1861, Austrian artillery Lieutenant Stefan Kircher and his battalion of gunners found themselves caught in the thick of the American Civil War. And fighting on the side of the Confederate South against the Union.
Stefan didn’t like it. And worse, some the Confederates weren’t keen on the Austrians’ involvement either…

Story: Ferg Handley

Art: Macabich

Cover Art: Macabich


Commando 4301: WINGS OF WAR

From the first day of war in 1939, the soldiers, sailors and airmen of the countries opposed to Hitler’s Germany knew that it would be a long, bloody struggle before the Nazis were toppled to defeat.
They couldn’t know then that the day of victory would come in May, 1945, but they did know that only the lucky ones would survive the war. Brothers Rory and Hamish McLean, fighter pilots, would push their luck to the limit…and beyond!

Story: Ian Clark

Art: José Maria Jorge

Cover Art: Ian Kennedy

Originally no 2855 from 1995

Part five of our seven-part series celebrating the end of the war in Europe in 1945. This time an air story with illustrations by two experts in the field.


Commando 4302: CODE OF HONOUR

From the first day of war in 1939, the soldiers, sailors and airmen of the countries opposed to Hitler’s Germany knew that it would be a long, bloody struggle before the Nazis were toppled to defeat.
They couldn’t know then that the day of victory would come in May, 1945. And for Wehrmacht Major Franz Thomas, that day hadn’t come soon to save many lives…and he was sure it was his fault!

Story: Ian Clark

Art: Carlos Pino

Cover Art: Ian Kennedy

Originally No 2856 from 1995

Part six of our seven-part VE-Day series. The story is seen from the point of view of a German — something Commando has done many times over the years.

40 Year Flashback: COR!! No.1

Forty years ago today IPC Magazines followed up the success of their first humour title Whizzer and Chips with a companion weekly: Cor!! The 32 page comic was priced 7d, the standard cover price for most IPC comics of the time, which immediately made it almost twice as expensive as its main competitors Dandy and Beano.

Nevertheless, Cor!! had twice as many pages as its two rivals, - something it didn't really capitalize on strangely enough. Perhaps IPC felt the content itself was strong enough to compete, and it certainly boasted a good line up of creators with Joe Colquhoun, Mike Lacey, Frank McDiarmid, Terry Bave, Reg Parlett and more.

Kicking off with a distinctive logo, the eye-catching cover of issue one was drawn by Mike Lacey (who also drew the Gus Gorilla vignette which resided beside the masthead for years). The free "10 glasses of fruit drink" was in the form of a sachet of flavoured powder (raspberry as I recall) which you added to water. A similar free gift had been given with Buster five years previously.

Inside, the comic was packed with numerous new characters. Some of them would endure for years whist others, such as Mike Lacey's Whacky (a bit like Chips' Shiner but with a sore arse instead of a sore eye), would eventually vanish into obscurity.


One of Cor's most popular strips was Hire-A-Horror by Reg Parlett. Reg's Rent-A-Ghost had been a success in Buster so presumably group editor Bob Paynter felt it was time to repeat the concept.


The problem I often had with IPC strips was their concept was too narrowly focused. Whilst the tomboyish aspects of The Beano's Minnie the Minx were only part of her character, Cor!! presented us with the less subtle Tomboy. Nice artwork by Brian Lewis on this opening strip though.


Cor!! had a refreshing number of female characters although unfortunately Harriet and her Horse was another case of a strip with a narrow focus and it didn't last very long. Les Barton was the artist, although he'd adopted a simpler style to that which he'd used on I-Spy for Thomson's Sparky.


The strip with the most longevity was Ivor Lott and Tony Broke. This comedy of class war ran throughout Cor's run and into Buster for many years. Another contribution by Reg Parlett, a veteran of humour comics whose style was always perfectly clear to follow and pleasantly amusing. Flawless cartooning. Curiously in this first episode it's Ivor who gets the last laugh, going against the usual comic formula of the underdog getting the winning hand.


The centre pages of Cor!! were a real treat with the adventure serial Kid Chameleon illustrated by Joe Colquhoun. The artist had already earned respect amongst readers and his peers on strips such as Paddy Payne for Lion and Football Family Robinson for Jag, so his appearance in Cor!! was a definite plus. Unfortunately the reproduction on the new comic wasn't as good as it perhaps could have been for Colquhoun's colour work, with his finer detail dropping out.



Graham Allen, who had contributed many pages to the Odhams comics, was also part of Cor's team with two strips; Eddie (gimmick: he's always bored) and Spoilsport (a bully who picks on kids playing sport, hence he spoils sport, - geddit?). Great cartooning despite another limited concept, but looking at it now I think it may have had a subliminal influence on my Tom Thug character.


Mike Noble, who had produced glorious colour pages for TV21 in the Sixties, was on board to illustrate Four Alone on the Abandoned Island in black and white. Although the strip didn't run for long (and, I think, another artist took over in time) it made a change to see Mike break away from the futuristic aspects of Fireball XL5 and Zero X.



On the back page was Teacher's Pet drawn by Norman Mansbridge. As with Fuss Pott which appeared later in Knockout, Mansbridge was great at portraying horrendous schoolgirls and Teacher's Pet was one of Cor's most popular strips, running until the final issue in 1974.


Cor!! No.1 featured 27 strips in all. For those of us who'd grown accustomed to the brasher characters and more varied content of Wham!, Smash! and Pow! the more formularized format of Cor's endless kids-with-gimmicks was a bit of a disappointment. Even so, Cor!! had some of the best artists in the industry working on it, although Barney's Brain Box was never going to be a substitute for Smash's The Nervs.

Nevertheless, Cor!! was a good solid comic which had a respectable four year run before merging into Buster. At the time, the title Cor!! was considered to be a bit risque, as it was a shorthand version of "Cor blimey" (God blind me). Even today I still remember one lad's Mum in WH Smith taking the comic off him and putting it back on the shelf, saying "I don't care for the language in that"! I wonder what she'd have made of Viz?