Bear Alley Books have announced their latest offering and it's sure to interest fans of 1950s UK independent comics. The Complete Captain Future is to be a 200 page A4 softback reprinting Norman Light's space hero character. The artwork has a retro charm about it by modern standards but it's very well illustrated and certainly worthy of a collection.
For some reason, outside of Eagle and The Beano, postwar and 1950s British comics are sometimes overlooked by collectors but it was an important decade for the industry. It was a time when comics broke free of the traditional formulas and more independent companies surfaced. Adventure comics began to hold their own instead of being a back up to the funnies, and the influence of American comics encouraged UK artists to create more dynamic page layouts. Basically that postwar/1950s period set the scene for decades to come. Captain Future is a perfect representation of those times.
If you order The Complete Captain Future before publication you'll get a discount. (I've just ordered my copy.) Here's the Bear Alley Books page where you can discover more about the book and how to order it:
http://bearalleybooks.blogspot.co.uk/
6 comments:
Why Captain I wonder ? Captain America, Britain, Marvel, Victory, Future and I recently heard of a Canadian one called Captain Canuck.
I think it simply adds an air of authority without sounding too high ranking. To be a Captain sounds young and cool, but a General or Colonel sounds like an older, more establishment figure.
Captains Kirk, Hurricane, Scarlet, etc. The list goes on.
Captain Underpants....there's an authority figure for ya! ;-)
It's true! He'd have less authority as plain Mister Underpants. :)
This is yet another one I hadn't heard of. There are lots of hidden gems from the 50's. Thank goodness for the likes of Steve and yourself for bringing them to our attention!
Whenever I meet up with Mike Higgs we usually end up talking about this era. It sounds like a very interesting time when readers never knew what gems they'd find in their local newsagents. Sadly it'd never happen today as the distribution system is so different.
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