The Christmas EAGLE (1950)

Scanned directly from the actual comic, this first Christmas Eagle might not have snow on the logo but the decorative holly around and between the panels gives it a nice festive look. Surprisingly for a serial, it manages to include references to Christmas Day within the story too. A wonderful Dan Dare strip by Frank Hampson and his team. 

Even the centrespread by L. Ashwell Wood that issue had a festive connection...

A festive feature/strip on Christmas trees. The latter drawn by 'Ross'. Anyone know who he was?

A Christmas Chicko mini strip by Normal Thelwell...

An advert in the issue...

A brilliant Harris Tweed page crammed with detail by the distinctive John Ryan...

...and on the back page, nothing could be more appropriate for a Christmas issue than the episode of The Great Adventurer reaching the point of the birth of Christ. Written by Chad Varah and drawn by Frank Hampson and Norman Williams...

There'll be one more Christmas flashback tomorrow, on Christmas Day! Drop by whilst eating a mince pie and find out what year our final destination is!

Comic Oddities: SIGNAL (1963)

It's always good to discover comics you've never heard of before and the case in point is this one I bought on eBay last week. Signal was an 8 page comic, printed Photogravure like Eagle and TV21 (but smaller) and used to promote Signal toothpaste. I've no idea how many issues were produced but this is No.4.

There's no price on the cover, or date, so I'm presuming it was given free to children at their local dentist. It was published by Newman Neame Ltd in association with Foote, Cone and Belding Ltd of London. The design reminds me of Odhams' comics of the same period so I'm wondering if it was packaged by them for the publishers. The content has a mixture of strips and features, and the quality was high. Here's a few examples. 

The strip on the front and back covers, Plotters on the Moor, is a traditional yarn of kids foiling a "foreign gang" who presumably plan to sabotage a research station. There are no creator credits, but the artwork looks like one of the Dan Dare studio artists. Perhaps Eric Eden or Don Harley?

Inside, Castle Glorious and The White Knight is also uncredited (as are all the strips in the comic). The style looks familiar. Perhaps Pat Williams or John Canning?

Gordon Glue shows us how to make "The Signal Calendar". Seems a lot of effort. 

The centrespread is very Eagle-like, with a humour strip Little Ruth by the unmistakable John Ryan (creator of Captain Pugwash), a feature on Telstar, and a mini educational strip. 

As comics were so popular with children in the 1960s it made sense for companies to use them for promotional items such as this. Gibbs, the manufacturers of Signal toothpaste, also had another comic, Arrow, which I covered in a previous blog post here:
http://lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/comic-oddities-arrow.html

The Christmas EAGLE (1955)

This issue of Eagle from exactly 60 years ago was published the same week as the issue of Girl that I covered the other day. Such an influential and popular comic, the cover featured Dan Dare at the height of the strip's run during one of the best serials, Rogue Planet. Wonderful artwork by Frank Hampson and Don Harley.

As was the norm with adventure strips, they didn't often go off at a festive tangent just because it was Christmas week. However, this P.C.49 serial did just that, breaking the fourth wall by sending a Christmas message to the readers. Art by John Worsley. 

The fantastic centrespread cutaway by L. Ashwell Wood that week featured London's Christmas Rail Traffic. I've also retained the Luck of the Legion part of the spread, even though it has no festive theme, as it seemed a shame to crop off such great art by Martin Aitchinson.

The Eagle reader's page featured a message from the editor reminding us that it was Jesus' birthday (although that's debatable) and a humour strip, Chicko, by Thelwell.

Harris Tweed by Captain Pugwash creator John Ryan. This is the sort of humour/adventure serial that I wish British comics did more of as it worked well enough in Europe for decades. Still, at least Tweed did lead to Leo Baxendale's Eagle Eye, Mike Higgs' The Cloak, and I suppose we can add my Combat Colin to that too. (And The Phoenix runs humour/adventure serials these days.) 

Eagle carried a lot of features as well as strips of course. Only 9 and a half of this issue's 16 pages were strip, even though we still refer to Eagle as a comic. I'm including Christmas and its Customs as one of those strips, even though it's more of an illustrated article as it's not sequential storytelling. Art by Norman Williams...

I hope you're enjoying these flashbacks to old Christmas comics. I'll be posting my final selection sometime on Christmas Eve, with samples from not one but two issues of a vintage story paper. See you then! 

The Christmas issue of GIRL (1955)

One of the companion comics to Eagle, Hulton Press' Girl set out to offer the same mixture of intriguing stories and educational features as its fellow publications. Where Eagle was billed as a boy's paper, Girl was obviously pitched towards schoolgirls. As this was the 1950s there was a slant towards needlework, cookery, and stories about ballet and nursing. That said, Girl also featured characters in adventure settings just as Eagle did, and its heroines were just as resourceful, independent, and brave as their male counterparts. 

Let's look at a few pages from the Christmas issue that was published 60 years ago this week, dated 21st December 1955. Unlike most of its rivals, Girl published full creator credits so there's no problem identifying who did the strips.

The cover strip (above) is Wendy and Jinx. Script by Stephen James, art by Ray Bailey and Philip Townsend. It continues onto page two...

As the comic mainly featured serials, not every story had a Christmas theme. However, Susan of St.Bride's did. Presumably the lonely patient had a happy ending in subsequent chapters. Script by Ruth Adam, art by Peter Kay. (No, not the bloke off the telly.)

The centrespread of this issue couldn't be more festive if it tried. A Real Life Story of Franz Gruber, the composer of Silent Night (drawn by Renato Polese, written by Jenifer Callahan); Lettice's Christmas written and drawn by John Ryan (creator of Captain Pugwash); and The Journey of the Magi painted by Eric Winter. What a fantastic array of artistic talent across two pages.

Only nine of Girl's 16 pages featured comic strips (although we still refer to it as a comic, not a magazine). The rest contained features such as this one. Different times, different meanings...

Some strips were educational, such as Cookery Corner. Here you go; a mince pie recipe for Christmas. This strip is uncredited unfortunately, but what interests me is that this sort of 1950s art style (now often called "retro") has come back into fashion, although is usually drawn with vector graphics now...

The back page strip has no festive theme but I thought I'd include it as it's illustrated by Gerry Haylock, and artist many of you will remember for his work on the Doctor Who and UFO strips in Countdown / TV Action in the early 1970s. 

Which Christmas will the Blimey Time Machine land in next? Bookmark this blog and come back soon!

Basil Brush by John Ryan

Here's something I noticed whilst looking through old issues of TV Comic. I've previously shown Basil Brush strips that were drawn by Chas Sinclair (see here) and he's the artist I've always associated with that strip... but he wasn't the only one to draw it. 

The example above is from TV Comic No.847, dated 9th March 1968, predating the Sinclair strips, and is in the distinctive style of John Ryan! As you'll all know, John Ryan was the creator of the strips Captain Pugwash and Harris Tweed for Eagle, and of course Pugwash later became a very popular TV series.

I don't know how many weeks John Ryan drew the Basil Brush strip but Chas Sinclair was definitely the artist a year later when I started buying TV Comic regularly. Dick Millington drew some as well apparently. Anyway, I thought it was an interesting page and worth posting here for fans of John Ryan's work. 

A tribute to John Ryan that I wrote in 2009:
http://lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/john-ryan-1921-2009.html

John Ryan Exhibition

I've just been contacted by Isabel Ryan, the younger daughter of Captain Pugwash creator John Ryan, and she tells me there's a retrospective exhibition of her late father's artwork opening on November 19th at the Rye Art Gallery, East Sussex.

Isabel says she enjoyed selecting the work for the show and that the exhibition will feature "book illustrations, strip cartoons, and TV animations (over 50 works)".

The poster above gives the details and you can find out more at http://www.ryeartgallery.co.uk

(As many of you will already know, before the TV series made the character famous Captain Pugwash made his debut as a comic strip in Eagle back in 1950. For a previous blog entry about John Ryan see here.)