50 Year Flashback: JOE 90 DOSSIER (1969)

Back in 1969 when I was a little kid I saw the above advert on the back page of Smash! and TV21. It raised my curiosity as I was a fan of Gerry Anderson's shows but I assumed the Dossier would be just a small booklet and not worth saving the meat paste lids for. As that was the only way to obtain a copy I never saw the publication with my own eyes.

Skip to a few months ago and I saw the Joe 90 Dossier up for grabs on eBay so bought it. Pleasingly it turned out to be a much more substantial item than I expected. A4 in size, with a card cover and 32 glossy pages inside, it was designed and published by Century 21 Publishing. The result was a classy looking publication on par with the TV21 Annuals of the time. As it was produced by Century 21 (who also did the Joe 90 TV show) it meant they had access to the official photographs and background info on the Joe 90 characters. 

The magazine is comprised of character data, cutaways, activity pages, prose stories, and one 4 page interactive comic strip (interactive in that it includes a dot-to-dot, and other clues for the reader to discover). All in all, a very good package considering that back in 1969 it'd only cost four meat paste lids! 

Here's a selection of pages from the Dossier...

The Joe 90 Dossier was published around the same time that Century 21 launched their Joe 90 Top Secret weekly. You can read about that comic at this link:

https://lewstringer.blogspot.com/2015/05/joe-90-top-secret-1969.html

50 Year Flashback: STAR TREK arrives in the UK

Although Star Trek had debuted on TV in the USA in 1966 it wasn't until this day in 1969 that it was broadcast in the UK. The BBC kicked off with the episode Where No Man Has Gone Before at 5.15pm on Saturday 12th July 1969, and millions of us were immediately enraptured. 

However, many of us had already been following the adventures of the U.S.S. Enterprise since January 1969, when it appeared as a comic strip in the first issue of Joe 90 Top Secret, a 20 page glossy tabloid-sized anthology weekly that also featured Land of the Giants, The Champions, and of course Joe 90 himself. Although beautifully illustrated by Harry Lindfield, the scripts suffered from either insufficient information supplied by Paramount or a bad transatlantic phone connection... with Captain Kirk referred to as Captain Kurt for the first few weeks! 

Nevertheless, the Star Trek strip was exciting and fast paced, and in full colour! A big deal back when the majority of UK viewers still had black and white televisions. Even so, the strip made colour mistakes with the uniforms, sometimes giving Kirk a red tunic. It's a wonder he survived!

City Magazines, the publishers of Joe 90 Top Secret,  were on the ball when Star Trek arrived on British TV. That same week they featured Star Trek on the cover, and also on the covers of the following three issues. 

Sadly the fate of the comic was already sealed and it was set to merge with TV21 a few weeks later. However, the popularity of Star Trek ensured it a place in the new TV21 and Joe 90 comic, where it later became the regular cover strip. 

Art by Mike Noble.

In 1971, TV21 merged into Valiant, but the Star Trek strip survived, drawn by John Stokes, becoming the regular centre-page attraction (apart from the second episode which appeared on Valiant's cover). 

Cover by Mike Western.

Star Trek's British strip finally ended in the Christmas 1973 issue of Valiant. Its run in comics had actually lasted as a five-year mission, although that was more likely due to the length of the license the publishers had been contracted to rather than any deliberate homage to the Enterprise's tour of duty. 

Personally, I've never been into Star Trek fandom, and wouldn't consider myself a Trekkie (or Trekker, or whatever the favoured term is) but I did really enjoy the original series. I watched some of the newer Star Trek series too, which were ok, but I'm not fussed to ever watch them again. I do like Star Trek: Discovery, but, again, not enough to watch the episodes more than once. The original series remains my favourite; a colourful Western in space with a great cast, likeable characters, and solid writing. 

Incidentally, several Star Trek actors including William Shatner and Walter Koenig will be amongst the guests at the London Film and Comic Con at the end of this month! So will I, come to mention it. Check it out:
https://www.londonfilmandcomiccon.com

Do you have any thoughts about Star Trek, either the TV shows, the strips, or the merchandise? If so, share your comments below...

Sugar Smacks was my favourite cereal 50 years ago because of free gifts like these.

All images scanned from my collection. 

Joe 90: Top Secret (1969)

Cover by Frank Bellamy.

I had this comic as a child but sold them long ago. However I recently purchased several issues in excellent condition at fairly reasonable prices so it's time to give the publication some long-overdue coverage starting with the earliest issues. 

There's always been some disagreement about the actual title of the comic. Since childhood, some of us have always thought it was called Joe 90: Top Secret due to the ever-present 'stamp' on the logo. However, in the actual comics, letters pages, etc it's only referred to as Joe 90. To add to the confusion, the one annual that the comic spawned was definitely advertised as Joe 90/Top Secret Annual but that may be because the ad was produced by a different department. However I still prefer the longer title and to my mind it'll always be Joe 90: Top Secret but for the sake of brevity I'll just refer to it as Joe 90 for the rest of this post.  

Published by City Magazines in co-operation with Century 21 it was launched on 15th January 1969. Joe 90 was a companion paper to TV21 and followed the same format of having 20 tabloid sized pages, printed in high quality photogravure. Six pages were in full colour. The cover design of the early issues was quite distinctive, leading with a documentary style opening to the Joe 90 comic strip over the page.

It has to be said that unfortunately Joe 90 was one of the weakest strips in his own comic. I suspect the editors knew this too, which may be why the comic's full colour pages were devoted to two strong and dynamic supporting strips based on American TV shows. Before we get to those though, here's a quick look at an originated strip in the comic, Ninepence + Tenpence = Sport. Perhaps someone felt Joe 90 needed a traditional sports story, and created this serial of two Inuit boys with a talent for football. Drawn by Alfredo Marculeta, who had also been the artist of Rubberman in Smash! 

The free gift in Joe 90 No.1 was a cardboard model of the 'Jet-Air Car' from the series. Nowhere near as slick as the excellent Dinky toy but it was an amusing novelty with its matchstick and rubber band 'engine'. My gift is long gone but here's the page showing the instructions for it...

Proudly running across the centrespread of every issue was a strip version of Star Trek, excellently illustrated by Harry Lindfield. The one big drawback was... the TV series wouldn't premiere on British television for several more months (July 1969), even though it had been on American TV since 1966. Yes, for us as kids back then the weekly comic strip was our first knowledge of Mr.Spock, the USS Enterprise and Captain Kurt...

Wait. Did I say Captain Kurt? Yep, that's what he was called in the first two episodes of the comic strip! Presumably someone in editorial mis-heard the name. No videos or DVDs for reference in those days of course. 

Things got even stranger in Joe 90 No.2, where the script called for Harry Lindfield to draw a scene showing the Enterprise landing on a planet! Lindfield chose to have the starship hover just above the ground rather than add wheels to it.

Joe 90 seemed to be aiming to be more of a traditional tv comic than the shared-universe theme in TV21. Living up to the 'Top Secret' aspect was The Champions, based on the British secret agent TV series. Art by Jon Davis.

The other strip that was awarded the full colour treatment was Land of the Giants, based on the popular Irwin Allen show. Great artwork by Gerry Haylock. The first three issues adapted the first episode. Considering how accurate it was I'm sure Gerry Haylock must have had access to numerous photographic stills from the episode. Here's the full adaptation from issues 1 to 3 of Joe 90...

Towards the end of Joe 90's short run of just 34 issues it became obvious that the title character wasn't the selling point, so Land of the Giants and Star Trek took turns to appear on the covers. In September 1969 Joe 90 merged into TV21 and restarted as TV 21 and Joe 90 with a new No.1 (although the merged comic was more like Joe 90 than its parent title). 

I'll take another look at some issues of Joe 90 soon, with a focus on the Joe 90 strip itself. In the meantime, here are the covers to issues 2 and 3. Click on them to see them full size...

Veteran artist John Cooper passes

I've just heard via editor John Freeman that veteran comics artist John Cooper has passed away after a short illness. Born in 1942, John's first adventure comic strip was drawing a Special Agent 21 story for the TV21 Annual published in 1968. (Source: An interview by Terry Hooper at this link.) His long career saw him illustrating numerous strips for many comics over the years including several Judge Dredd stories for 2000AD but he's probably best remembered for One Eyed Jack in Valiant in 1975 and taking over the Johnny Red strip in Battle - a strip which he made his own.

John's work was also seen outside of comics, such as illustrating scenes for TV news stories. 

Here's a short selection of John's work, starting with his very first comic strip from the pages of a TV21 Annual (undated on the cover but according to the indicia inside the book it was published in 1968)...

A page of a Joe 90 strip from the Joe 90 Annual published in 1969...

The first episode of One Eyed Jack (script by John Wagner) from Valiant dated 20th December 1975...

Part of a Goalmouth strip from Roy of the Rovers comic...

Another of John's excellent covers for Battle-Action...

John's work must have been seen by millions who grew up on boys comics from the late 1960s to the end of the 20th Century and his dynamic layouts and action-packed style brought a lot of pleasure to those readers. I only met John once, briefly at a convention in Norway years ago, but the easy going Yorkshireman was good company. My sincere condolences to his family and friends on their sad loss.

There's an excellent tribute to John Cooper on the Down The Tubes blog:
http://downthetubes.net/?p=20091