Diana was a weekly comic for girls that had a quality above most of its sister titles of the 1960s. Published by DC Thomson, its glossy, large size format had many pages in full colour at a time when most comics were on newsprint in black and white.
The luxurious photogravure printing process allowed artists to produce colour work with a full palette, rather than relying on flat, primary colour overlays to be added later, as in Bunty.
In 1967, DC Thomson gained an arrangement with ABC Television Ltd to adapt the top rated TV series The Avengers into brand new comic strip serials to run in Diana.
The strip ran at two pages a week, on pages two and three, from issue 199 until No.224. From what I can gather from the few I have, the scripts were understandably juvenile for Diana's young readership and never on a par with the wit of the TV series but the artwork was excellent. The main artist was Emilio Frejo, although he was assisted at times by Juan Gonzalez. Frejo could usually produce good likenesses of the actors Patrick McNee and Diana Rigg, although no doubt he was limited by the reference available to him in those pre-video days.
Here are a few episodes of the run from various issues of Diana in 1967. I'm not sure who'd own the rights to this strip now but I'm sure fans of the TV series and the artwork would like to see a book collection of the material.
The license for the strip was soon taken up by TV Comic after the run in Diana ended, but Polystyle's version wasn't really in the same league.
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| Polaroid cameras and Engelbert Humperdinck. Yep, 1967! |
