Blogs on British comics seem to be springing up all over the web these days. as well as the new Beezer blog I mentioned the other day there's now one dedicated to D.C. Thomson's Champ.
Champ was a boy's adventure weekly that ran for a while in the mid 1980s. If memory serves me right it was the last traditional adventure weekly the company would produce. A nice mix of football, mystery, and schoolboy adventure plus a humour section.
The Champ blog has only just gotten underway so there's not a lot there yet, but what is there should whet the appetites of everyone who remembers this lively comic. Visit the site at:
http://champweareunited.blogspot.com/
Yup - I remember CHAMP, and I should still have the complete run tucked away in a box somewhere. (I hope.) Another comic in a similar vein, if I remember correctly, was SPIKE - I should still have them stacked away somewhere, too.
ReplyDeleteDo you have a favourite comic of all time, Lew? If so, what is it?
I like a lot of comics equally but my absolute favourites would be Dandy throughout 1964 ('cos it was my first regular comic), the Odhams run of Smash!, and TV21 from 1965 to about 1967, its best years.
ReplyDeleteChamp was one of those (sadly short-lived) DC Thomson titles which really caught my imagination - along with The Crunch, Buddy and Spike - with its blend of different forms and genres.
ReplyDeleteI particularly liked the way it opened up the traditional football story with its pseudo-realtime split-strip We Are United, which helped introduce some real tension into each issue.
There were grittier characters throughout, certainly compared with standard DC Thomson fare - though never quite as lumpen as in IPC's output.