Back before Summer Specials became a thing, weekly comics would label one issue of their regular run as a summer edition. This very week in 1934, this "Jolly Summer Holiday Number" of The Joker was in the shops. Let's take a breezy coastline stroll through some of its contents...
The cover strip was the popular Alfie the Air Tramp, drawn by John Jukes, ending with a slap-up feed.
This issue was its regular weekly size (regular then being 8 pages, tabloid size, printed on green paper) and despite being a "Summer Holiday Number" not all the strips had a holiday theme. Here's Monty the Mountie, drawm by Harry Banger, who, years later, illustrated many strips (and quite a few covers) for the independent publisher Swan.
Midge and Moocher has a beach setting for its slapstick hi-jinks. Art by Arthur Martin.
Perky the Park Keeper uses the standard theme of the hero accidentally thwarting a wrong 'un. In this case, someone stealing flowers! Art by John Turner.
Phil Pott, The Saucy Sea Cook has some nice art by Harry Banger. A pity it's marred by the racial slurs and stereotyping that was around at the time. Sadly, this kind of thing was prevalent everywhere back then in books and periodicals.
The Joker ran from 1927 to 1940 (when presumably wartime paper restrictions had an impact), merging into Illustrated Chips.
It's been a while since I featured any 1940s comics on this blog so let's have a look at a few pages from the Funnies Album 1949.
It's interesting how different art styles come in vogue over the years. This annual cover is very much in the style of the late 1940s but to modern eyes I think it'd terrify some kids today with its characters bursting out of a big leering face. It's supposed to represent international characters on a globe of course but the execution is a bit weird. Equally alarming are the racial stereotypes but in the context of 1948 when this was published that was the norm I'm afraid.
The publisher was the enterprising Gerald G. Swan, who was very prolific in the 1940s and 1950s. His comics were crude and cheap looking compared to those by the major publishers but Swan definitely made his mark as an independent, and his titles are still collectible today.
Funnies Album 1949 has 96 pages including its thick card covers. It's a busy mixture of humour and adventure strips, none of which exceed four pages. The standard of the scripts and artwork isn't high on most strips but Swan regular Harry Banger is excellent and stands out with his distinctive Stoogie character.
Some of the strips have a bleak and eerie tone about them, particularly an adventure with Krakos the Magician which features several deaths as our hero fights the devil himself.
There's a scene in Micky's Magic Mirror that's a little bit unsettling too, with the razor blades growing out of the store manager. "Ho ho! That's made him all cut up!" Blimey.
That said, it's surreal elements such as those that may explain why the Swan comics had such appeal. Perhaps the attraction was that they didn't feel as safe as the comics from the big two publishers D.C. Thomson and Amalgamated Press? Even a more traditional strip, Miss Whackem, seems more brutal than the usual school strip, with her cane permanently at the ready, waiting for any excuse to punish the children.
On the back cover was an advert for the range of Swan albums for that year. The perfectly innocent Kiddyfun Album sounds far too dodgy a title now, and the cover of Cute Fun Album features stereotypical cannibals. It really was a different era.
More on Gerald G. Swan:
There are certainly a lot of independent comic publishers around these days, but the concept is far from new. Small UK publishers have been around throughout the history of British comics, and many back then it seems made a healthy profit and had their comics distributed to newsagents.
One such enterprising independent publisher was Gerald G. Swan (1902 - 1981) who began publishing magazines in the 1930s. Sensing the impending war at that time, he stockpiled paper so that when wartime paper restrictions came into force he was in a good position to continue and expand. Not only did he distribute his titles to newsagents, he also had a street market stall, similar I suppose to the way that today's indie publishers have tables at various comic events. Swan's publications included mystery, crime, and science fiction magazines and books. He also published comics.
Swan published various hardback comic albums but his weekly comic (sometimes fortnightly or monthly) was Slick Fun, which ran from June 1940 to January 1951. From issue 35 it added colour, which presumably is when it changed its title to Coloured Slick Fun. I don't know what the early issues were like but as you can see from No.84 shown here, the "coloured" aspect was just spot colour on some pages. Although, to be fair, even that would make it stand out amongst rival comics such as AP's Film Fun which were solely black and white.
This issue of Coloured Slick Fun (dated 14th October 1950) had just 16 pages, and was printed on rough, cheap paper, but it did the job. It still packed in a lot for its 3d (1p) cover price. The strips in Swan's comics were often derivative in style to those of their mainstream rivals Amalgamated Press and DC Thomson, and in comparison the scripts and art were considerably inferior, but even today Swan's comics are very collectible. Their rough and ready aspect was part of their charm. As Phil Clarke and Mike Higgs said in their book Great British Fantasy Comic Book Heroes, "they were so bad they were good".
Something Swan's comics had in their favour was the artist Harry Banger, who signed his pages 'Bang' (although his surname apparently rhymed with ranger). You can see a cover above by 'Bang' that leads off this post. His style was easily on a par with most humour artists, plus it had a very likable look of its own. Interestingly, the everyman character Stoogie, seen on the cover, was anything but an everyman in some strips as he was flying around in costume as Stoogie the Superman in the Slick Fun Comic Album, thanks to a magic elixir.
Here are a few more pages from this 1950 issue shown. I'm unsure of the artists as the pages are unsigned (except for Jim the Gym Instructor by 'Robbie'). You'll notice a couple of British superheroes amongst this selection too, - T.N.T. Tom who seems as powerful as Superboy, and The Phantom Raider, who simply seems to be an adventurer in a mask.
Slick Fun was about the proportion of an American comic, and I understand it was Gerald G. Swan's comics that were the first to use that format in the UK. I've enlarged the pages for you to read them easier. Click on the images to see them bigger.
I'll show some other Swan publications soon. You can also see a lot of 1950s independent strips from Swan and other publishers reprinted in the hardcover book Great British Fantasy Comic Book Heroes, published by Ugly Duckling Press. (Which I reviewed here: http://lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/review-great-british-fantasy-comic-book.html )
