The New Captain Scarlet comic (2005)

With the brand new Thunderbirds Are Go series starting on TV on Saturday 4th April (5pm ITV) I thought it'd be appropriate to look back at a comic based on the previous Gerry Anderson show that was resurrected. In 2005 a new all-CGI version of Captain Scarlet debuted on ITV. Despite being an impressive series with some solid storylines each episode was split into two parts by ITV and buried within some Saturday morning sub-par Tiswas type show. Subsequently it failed to reach all of its potential viewing audience.

Nevertheless, a contract had been agreed with John Brown's company GE Magazines to publish a magazine based on the series so in October 2005, the first issue of Gerry Anderson's New Captain Scarlet appeared in newsagents.

Considering the poor treatment the TV series had suffered it won't surprise you to hear that the magazine didn't fare too well. Only six issues were published. However, I for one felt it was a few notches above the usual licensed titles of recent years and deserved to succeed.

Any editor putting together a licensed comic these days will often have to do their best with limited resources and material. What editor Will Potter did with the New Captain Scarlet mag was to use screen grabs of the TV episodes to produce photo strip adaptations. Depending on the grabs, and the limitations of condensing a 20 minute story into an 11 page strip, the results were varied but on the whole suitably dramatic and engaging. 

The rest of the 28 page issues were taken up with pin ups, character profiles, vehicle data, puzzles and suchlike. The designer of the magazine, Tom Moore, did a very good job with it.

Sadly issue 6 was the final issue and it ended with quite a downbeat message telling the readers that the Mysterons had won! 

As licensed titles go, New Captain Scarlet was one of the better ones of this century so far. While I appreciate that the budget couldn't cover originated comic strips I'd have preferred it if the photo-strips had used screen grabs from different episodes to create new stories (as I'd done with Egmont's CiTV Tellytots mag a few years earlier). Still, Will and his team did a fine job on the mag and the six issues are a nice collectors item for any enthusiast of Gerry Anderson memorabilia.  

By the way, Gerry Anderson's New Captain Scarlet is still available on DVD. Well worth buying if you haven't seen it.

TV TORNADO (1967)

As with Solo (covered in the previous blog post) TV Tornado was a comic launched by City Magazines after the successes they'd had with TV Century 21 and Lady Penelope weeklies. Unfortunately it never reached the heights of popularity of those two comics, although it did manage to run for 88 weeks.

TV Tornado was a bit... odd. Take a look at the cover to issue 1 above for example. Various redrawn images of popular characters but the composition is quite bizarre, with Tarzan apparently threatening Batman and Robin much to the amusement of Hoss from Bonanza and the nonchalance of Superman. Even as a 7 year old I thought this was a strange cover, and I'm sure most readers would have preferred a more heroic illustration of Batman rather than the peculiarly cowering one that was used. 

Inside, the editorial by 'Ed Storm' tells us that TV Tornado is a "bumper bundle of thrills" featuring comic strips and text stories. It neglects to mention that The Phantom isn't actually a TV show, but perhaps he came as part of the King Features deal to use Flash Gordon. (Flash wasn't a TV series either at that stage but kids were familiar with him due to the 1930s chapter serials still being screened at Saturday morning matinees at ABC cinemas.) 

Everything about TV Tornado screamed low budget, from its one colour page (the front cover) to its use of prose stories and U.S. newspaper strips. It does have some interest for collectors though. Here's a three page Batman text story from issue 1...

There were also text stories for The Man from UNCLE and Superman...

Curiously, Batman and Superman were only in the first few issues. The next issue I have is issue 10, by which time they'd been replaced by The Green Hornet and Magnus, Robot Fighter. The latter was a popular American comic published by Gold Key but the strip in TV Tornado appears to be new.

TV Tornado also carried a new humour strip, - Dan Dan the TV Man by Denis Gifford...

With issue 37, the comic became TV Tornado and Solo, absorbing its ill-fated companion comic.

By this time, The Saint was starring in the comic, based on the hugely popular Roger Moore TV show.

A new addition to the merged title was The Mysterons, in order to cash in on the Captain Scarlet and The Mysterons TV series which debuted on ITV that week. The first episode of this strip had appeared in the final issue of Solo the week before (see my previous post). Despite being drawn by Don Harley, one of the top artists of the day, The Mysterons was a strange concept for a strip. In the TV series, we only see the Mysterons as copies of the humans or vehicles they've destroyed, created by twin circular beams of light. The comic strip took the imagery literally, initially showing the Mysterons as beings of hooped light, then changing them into physical hexagonal beings! The idea behind the stories seems to be to emulate the style of The Daleks strip from TV21, but it really struggles to work and I can't imagine many readers really connecting with it. 

The editor of TV Tornado was someone who'll be very familiar to many; Mick Anglo, creator of Marvelman. He also illustrated some of the material for TV Tornado, including the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea strip and some covers I believe. 

TV Tornado lasted for 88 issues, and merged into TV21 in September 1968.  

Comic Oddities: Sticker Fun Books (1960s)

Kids love stickers and, back in the Sixties, most kids loved comics too. Someone had the idea of combining the two and the result was a range of Sticker Fun Books published by both WDL (World Distributors Limited) and Century 21 Publishing.

I'm not sure exactly how many of these books were produced as I only had the four shown here. However the format appears to have been the same for all: large size, card covers, 8 interior pages. Stapled into the centre pages was a large sheet of full colour gummed stickers. The artwork on the stickers showed various segments from the stories within the books. For example some might show an arm and part of a torso, others showing part of an aircraft, another showing a face etc. The idea being that you'd stick the segments into their appropriate places in the story, adding colour to otherwise black and white strips.


There wasn't a sticker to cover every piece of black and white artwork, so for additional fun you were expected to colour the rest yourself. As you can see from the examples, I didn't really bother personally.



Basically then, these were colouring books that would do part of the job for you once you'd put the sticker segments in place. Although this passed the time pleasantly enough the results could be a bit rough if the stickers weren't quite placed properly, as shown in the scans here.


The Captain Scarlet and Joe 90 books each featured a story in comic strip format. Stylistically they looked just like the sort of strips that would turn up in the TV21 Annuals so were no doubt produced by the same team. Jim Watson provided the artwork, - a frequent contributor to the Century 21 comics and annuals.



In 1966, a couple of years prior to Century 21's Captain Scarlet and Joe 90 editions, WDL had produced Sticker Fun Books for Batman and Thunderbirds. Same format, but these only featured full page illustrations accompanied by short text to tell the story. In fact the Thunderbirds one didn't even have a story, just a series of eight illustrations introducing the basic premise.


Although simplistic by modern standards the Sticker Fun Books were an enjoyable enough piece of Sixties nostalgia. Priced at 2/6d each (12 and a half pence) they were over four times the price of the average comic, but they'd be given as Christmas stocking fillers or perhaps as an extra birthday present.