The Christmas VALIANT AND TV21 (1973)

No snow on the logo, but Mike Western's Christmassy cover art gives the comic plenty of festive cheer. If you don't know the answer to "Who Is It?" you need to brush up on your pop culture history. 

Inside, Captain Hurricane was doing his bit to wipe out Nazis before indulding himself in Christmas dinner. art by Charles Roylance...

Janus Stark had been going for nearly five years at this point and the stories could be somewhat trite but he remained a popular character. Art by the Solano Lopez studio...

Although Valiant was mainly an adventure comic, it also featured quite a few humour strips during this period. The Swots and the Blots had joined Valiant in 1971 when Smash! had merged into it. A great strip that deserves to be collected. Originally by other hands, Leo Baxendale took over the strip and made it his own in 1969, and was still going strong by this 1973 episode...

The centre pages featured Star Trek, with all new strips exclusive to Valiant drawn by John Stokes. It had been in Valiant since the merger with TV21 in 1971. Although this was the final episode, the TV21 logo continued to be on the comic's masthead for several more months, even though no strips from TV21 remained, and the comic had no strips based on TV shows at all. A shame that the once mighty TV21 should fizzle out in such a way.

Valiant contained reprints at times to save on budget, and Micky the Mimic was a reprint from an early Sixties Buster.

The famous Billy Bunter had joined Valiant in 1963 when Knockout merged into it, and continued to run until the final issue. Art by Reg Parlett...

On the back page, the long running Nutts continued to amuse, with art by Angel Nadal. This strip began in Valiant No.1 in 1962 and lasted until the final issue in 1976, although some were reprint in later years.

Christmas is getting closer! Another festive flashback tomorrow! Which year will we visit next?

The Christmas BOYS' WORLD (1963)

Boys' World was published by Odhams from 1963 to 1964, the company that also brought us Wham!, Smash! and Pow! I'll show some more strips from it next year, but for today let's look at the few pages it contained relative to Christmas from this festive 1963 issue.

The cover featured the regular What Would YOU Do? brain teaser, and this time it had an appropriate Christmas aspect to it. Art by Eric Kincaid.

On page two, the editor's message wished the compliments of the season to his readers, alongside a short Mini-Mystery...

On page 4, a funny festive Did You Know? by Reg Parlett...

Billy Binns and His Wonderful Specs on page 6 kicked off with a Christmas party, drawn by Bill Mainwaring. As some of you know, a Billy Binns strip also ran in Wham! comic for a while, with a different storyline to those appearing in Boys' World at the same time.

The Lucky Dip activity page packed a lot in. These days, each activity might take up a double page spread in kids' mags. Not that you'd have tricks requiring matches in comics today. 

Private Proon the Barrack Square (drawn by Leslie Harding) was kind of Odhams' version of The Dandy's Corporal Clott, and also inspired by the TV series The Army Game I would imagine. The page also contains the solutions to the puzzles and mysteries shown above.

The other strips in Boys' World didn't have a Christmas theme but they're so good that I couldn't resist showing a couple of them. Here's the cenrespread strip, Wrath of the Gods, illustrated by John M. Burns...

..and this was the back page strip, The Ghost World, by Frank Bellamy! Boys' World certainly delivered a top quality comic for 6d!

There'll be another festive flashback tomorrow! 

The Christmas BUSTER (1984)

By 1984, Buster was still printed on increasingly flimsy newsprint but it contained some good stuff. This festive cover by veteran artist Reg Parlett is simple but effective. I wonder how many Christmas strips Reg drew in his long career that stretched to about 60 years?

Inside, The Leopard from Lime Street continued to be one of the most popular British superheroes around. I think the art was by Mike White by this time...

School Fun had merged into Buster months before, and appeared as a separate pull-out section, akin to Chips in Whizzer. The School Fun Section only had 12 pages though, (leaving Buster with 20) so it wasn't an equal 50/50 split like Whizzer and Chips. Artwork on School Team was usually by Vic Neill but this is a fill-in by Doug Jensen. (Thanks to Andy Boal for his observations.)

School Belle was another strip that had joined the comic from School Fun. Art by Tom Paterson...

A festive Faceache page by Ken Reid, even scrunging at Christmas. 

Good Guy that issue had a smashing festive decorative border. Terry Bave going the extra mile there...

On the back page, Buster's Diary, with Reg Parlett again on the artwork, and the story ending with the traditional slap-up feed!

Another Christmas comic tomorrow. Or maybe even two! Stay tuned!

Reg Parlett's DID YOU KNOW? (1963)

Here's a little strip that some of you may not have seen before. In 1963, Longacre Press launched Boys' World weekly, a kind of cross between Eagle and Look and Learn. Initially, it only featured a few strips, and one of those was a half page feature called Did You Know? drawn by veteran artist Reg Parlett. 

Reg had already been working in comics a long time by this stage and you'll find some of his older strips elsewhere on this blog if you put his name into the search window. Later on of course he drew many strips for IPC including Rent-A-Ghost and a long stint on Buster. 

Without further ado, here are the Did You Know? strips from Boys' World Vol.1 Nos.2 to 6, covering 2 February 1963 to 2nd March 1963. A nice little humourous educational item that gave Reg the opportunity to draw a few realistic characters alongside his distinctive cartoony style. IPC reprinted some of these in an annual or holiday special around 1969 or 1970.

BUSTER AND COR!! - First merged issue (1974)

At fifteen years old in 1974 I was going through my "British comics are just for kids" phase and didn't really appreciate what a good comic the merged Buster and Cor!! was. At the time, I was beginning to "grow out" of humour comics and stopped buying Buster shortly after. 

In truth, Buster and Cor!! was a solid comic with some great talent working on it. At 15, I was too old for it of course, but in retrospect, looking at it from a creative viewpoint, it was one of the best comics around at that time. Let's take a look at a few of the strips from this first merged issue...

One of the significant things about this issue is that the Buster strip itself saw a change of artist from Angel Nadal to Reg Parlett (who also drew the front cover). I'd grown up with Nadal's version and wasn't too keen on the change, but it can't be denied that Parlett was ideally suited to the strip and its fast paced slapstick situations...

The merger also saw some new strips starting that week that hadn't been seen in either Buster or Cor!! before. One of which was Snooper, by the always-wonderful Leo Baxendale...

Whenever comics merged, it was always a concern that some favourites would be pushed out. Thankfully, Ken Reid's excellent Faceache strip had proved popular to survive. (A collection of Faceache strips will be published by Rebellion in November.)

Another new strip was Marney the Fox, written by Scott Goodall and drawn by John Stokes. It was rare for strips in Buster to tug on the emotions as much as Marney did but it made for compelling reading. (Marney the Fox is another collection coming from Rebellion this year, and the one I'm looking forward to the most.)

Val's Vanishing Cream was one of the strips that had transferred over from Cor!! and was drawn by Mike Lacey. A typical IPC humour strip in that it featured a kid with a gimmick. That could restrict the humour somewhat but this is a good episode...

This issue gave the comic the opportunity to fill in new readers with the backstory of Fishboy before he embarked on a new adventure. A kind of British equivalent to Aquaman, this is another strip by Scott Goodall and John Stokes that deserves collecting.

There was a lot of good material in this issue and this was just a sample of pages. Rebellion now own a lot of classic material ripe for reprinting so I hope that readers support the Treasury of British Comics books so that we see more!
https://treasuryofbritishcomics.com

GIGGLE (1967)

Those of us who were reading comics in the 1960s will remember all the classics; TV Century 21, Sparky, Wham!, Smash!, Pow!, Valiant... and then there was Giggle. 

Giggle seems to be a comic that passed some of us by. I certainly wasn't aware of it back then, not until it had been merged into Buster for a few months. Giggle was published by Fleetway Publications Ltd and its first issue was dated 29th April 1967. Priced at 5d (2d cheaper than its Fleetway companion comics), it was evident that it was trying to directly compete with the D.C. Thomson comics. Even Giggle's logo, with the framed 'G' had similarities to the logo used by The Dandy at the time, and the character Giggle the Playful Cat (who soon became Giggle's cover star) was evidently trying to mimic the popularity of Dandy cover star Korky the Cat.  Despite some nice lively art, he was no Korky...

Unfortunately, the reason that Giggle isn't as well remembered as most other '60s comics might be because it wasn't very remarkable. Clearly having a lower budget than other comics, most of Giggle's content was either reprint from old UK comics or translated European reprint. I'm not sure of the sources of all the European strips but Buck Bingo was clearly Lucky Luke. His ever-present cigarette was erased from his lips for the UK reprint, turning it into an ever-present pout instead!

Herlock Sholmes was by Yugolslav artist Julio Radilovic...

Dim Dan, The Film Stunt Man was evidently European, and drawn in a nice style but I can't quite place the artist. It looks Spanish to me. Can anyone provide more info?

The reprints from old British comics included The Gremlins from Knockout retitled as The Chuckles (art by Fred Robinson I believe)...

Niblo Nibbs by Eric Roberts, was originally from Film Fun (I have the original art for this page from when it was renamed Nippy Nibbs for a further reprint in Cor!!)...

Castaways to Danger is a curious reprint from somewhere, but I don't know where. I'm guessing it may have originally appeared in a girls' weekly. Furthermore, I think the art has been altered to change the gender of the native who steals the necklace from a girl to a boy, perhaps to appeal more to Giggle's mixed readership. Can anyone confirm this?

I think a few of Giggle's strips were brand new. I don't know who drew The Wild Bunch but I'm positive it's written by Roy Davis, a prolific Fleetway/Odhams scriptwriter. As Roy was also a cartoonist he used to supply his "scripts" as rough penciled comic pages. He wrote many of The Vampire Brats stories I drew for Buster and I recognise the distinctive rhythm of his storytelling and style of dialogue in this page...

I think The Space Travellers was new too. The art looks a bit like Mike White's work but I don't think it is by him.

Helpful Hettie is either brand new or a reprint from a girls' comic. The art is definitely by Reg Parlett...

Giggle lasted for just 38 weeks before merging into Buster, so it wasn't a success by any means. Why did it fail? There was an increasingly crowded market for comics in the mid-sixties and inevitably not all could survive. Perhaps the mixture of European content and old-fashioned looking UK reprints didn't help, and the fact that, compared to its colourful rivals at D.C. Thomson, Giggle looked very dull with 28 pages and only the front cover in colour. I'm only judging it by my perspective as an adult, as I never read it 50 years ago, but it seemed to lack the excitement and polish of its companion comics such as Valiant and Buster. For a comic calling itself Giggle it simply wasn't a great deal of fun.