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. 

Sugar Smacks!

Ad from the back page of TV21 and Joe 90 No.1. 1969.

As a break from comics, if you go over to the Down the Tubes blog today John Freeman is waxing nostalgically about the free gifts given away in packs of Sugar Smacks cereal in the 1960s/70s. Take a look here....
https://downthetubes.net/?p=106086

Christmas comics: TV COMIC (1977)

In the previous post I showed an issue of TV Comic from 1952. This one is from 1977 and it's significantly different to the one from 25 years earlier. There are obvious changes in the content of course, as the nature of TV Comic was to reflect children's television of the day, but other changes, such as it no longer being a nursery comic, are also evident. 

The biggest change in this period was its format. Although outwardly it looked like an A4 size comic, it actually folded out to a 16 page tabloid-sized A3 comic. This format had been instigated the year before (along with a temporary name change to Mighty TV Comic) and perhaps this was the publisher's way of trying to compete with Thomson's Beezer and Topper. If so, it was an odd, and perhaps misguided, notion. Tabloid comics were very much on their way out by this time and this experiment didn't last.

The cover of this issue isn't particularly Christmassy unfortunately, although the Basil Brush story gets a bit more festive when it continues onto the back page...

Opening the comic to its full A3 size, the first strip inside is Rod Hull and Emu, drawn by Bill Titcombe...

Mighty Moth, by Dick Millington, was never a TV character of course, but he still proved to be a favourite with the readers and ran in TV Comic for many years...

This issue featured various strips, such as Barney Bear, Popeye, Pink Panther, and more. Some new, some reprint from earlier issues. In the centre pages was Star Trek, not exactly using the massive format to its best advantage. By only reprinting two pages from the American Gold Key Star Trek comic every week it would have taken about three months to tell the full story. Art by the brilliant Alberto Giolitti.

The other adventure strip in this issue was Doctor Who, with art by John Canning. It'd be another two years before Marvel UK launched Doctor Who Weekly with a strip more in tune with the TV show...

On the inside back page; Tom and Jerry, one of TV Comic's most popular and long-running strips. Art by Bill Titcombe...

Any thoughts on this issue or Christmas comics in general? Post your opinions below!

British Star Trek strips to be reprinted in 2016

Just a heads up for any of you who may have missed the news on Down The Tubes last week. Next year, American publisher IDW is to publish collections of the UK Star Trek strips that appeared in British comics almost 50 years ago.

Volume 1 of Star Trek: The Classic UK Comics will contain all of the Star Trek stories that appeared in Joe 90 Top Secret in 1969 and the strips that appeared in the merged TV21 and Joe 90 in 1969 to 1970. (Volume 2 will presumably reprint the strips from Valiant and TV21 from 1971 to 1973.) 

The first UK Star Trek strip from JOE 90 No.1 (1969).

A number of top British artists worked on the strip, including Harry Lindfield, Mike Noble, and Harold Johns. IDW have a great reputation for producing books of high quality so I'm sure we'll be in for a treat. 

Readers need to bear in mind that the the storylines and dialogue of the UK Star Trek strips are very much in the tradition of British adventure comics of the time. For example, Mr.Spock tends to be far more hot-headed in the strips, and the characters don't always 'sound' like their TV versions. The first two episodes (from Joe 90 Nos.1 and 2) even call the lead character Captain Kurt! It'll be interesting to see how American readers react to these stories but hopefully they'll accept them as the fast-paced fun strips they were intended to be. 

To read more about the project, see John Freeman's Down the Tubes website here:

http://downthetubes.net/?p=27194

(All the scans above are from my collection, not from the book.)