PANTO PLAYTIME COMIC (1948)

Well, it's the right time of year (Oh no it's not! Oh yes it is!) so I thought I'd dig this comic out of my collection. Panto Playtime Comic was one of the numerous British independent comics published after the war. It had just eight pages on cheap paper, with hasty spot colour on four, and was the size of an American comic. It was published by The Hotspur Publishing Co. Ltd, Gloucester Street, Manchester and was a one-off. 

The artist on all of the humour strips was Alan Fraser, who had a simple and very distinctive style. His artwork and the somewhat surreal stories remind me a little of Nigel Auchterlounie's work on The Numskulls in the present day Beano.

The comic featured one adventure strip, Dexter Lee, drawn in a basic style by an anonymous artist. The strange thing was, the same story was also told in text form on the same page as Crime in the Haunted Manor. Whilst it was common in British comics then to have text beneath each panel telling the story, this parallel storytelling method seems a bit baffling and unnecessary. The strip is a much more condensed version of the story, so it actually works better as a prose tale. 

There was also a different Pantomime theme comic by the same publisher a year later, which I'll show in my next posting.