Since the first UK comic convention in 1968, comics fans and pros alike eagerly await each annual get-together. Fortunately in the last few years we've been blessed with at least two conventions a year (or festivals, expos, or shows, depending on who's organizing it).
The next major event is the always-enjoyable Bristol Comic Expo on May 12th - 13th, organized by Mike Allwood and his ever-efficient team. Many comics creators including myself will be guests once again and if it's anything like previous expos it'll be a fantastic weekend.
For full details see the official website at http://www.comicexpo.net/ and if you want to see some photos of last year's event (like the one above) click here .
With Pow! and the other Odhams comics being the UK home for Marvel reprints it was inevitable that comics fandom would show an interest in the weeklies. No doubt this was also helped by the fact that comics fan Steve Moore was on the staff. The Odhams "Power Comics" (Wham!, Smash!, Pow!, Fantastic, and Terrific) had a good rapport with their readers thanks to the News From the Floor of 64 feature which ran in all five titles. (The name referring to the address of Odhams at the time; 64 Long Acre, which I understand today is the location for Field and Trek a shop selling camping supplies. )
The News columns in the comics were basically a UK version of Marvel's Bullpen Bulletins, providing chatty information about the comics and their creators. However, they also revealed the early days of active comics fandom in this country. As the examples here show, Odhams were quite happy to mention comics fanzines and plug the very first UK comics convention. (By the way the Spot the Boob Contest mentioned in one of the News columns scanned here shows how things have changed. In the 1960's a boob was slang for a mistake! Snigger. Fnar fnar.)
Sadly, after the demise of the Odhams comics, IPC were not so keen to connect with their readers in the same fashion and such news pages were dropped. A great shame, as, to my mind anyway, it made comics such as Cor!! and Whoopee! seem more distant than their predecessors had been. (It was pleasing though that when 2000AD arrived it gradually developed a more informal connection with its readers, as Marvel UK also did, and as Panini does today.)
Incidentally, I've also added a scan of another Pow! cover to this entry, as an example of how the standard US comics page was edited and rearranged to fit the larger UK size. (They'd usually redesign two US pages to fit one UK page.) This is a Steve Ditko strip from one of the Marvel anthology titles (Strange Tales or similar).
An interesting item I found whilst looking through those old issues of Pow! was this piece from the News From the Floor of 64 column. This news feature ran in all the Odhams "Power Comics" and to my knowledge is the very first mention in a professional publication of a British comics convention. That first UK con later took place (in 1968) in Birmingham and was organized by Phil Clarke, Mike Higgs, and "Sunny" Steve Moore. (Steve was an office boy on Pow! back then, but later went on to write for Warrior, 2000AD, and many other comics.)
Although Pow! clearly had a lower budget than its companion comics Wham! and Smash! it still contained some memorable strips. Apart from those already mentioned, the comic's line up later added Experiment X and The Two Faces of Janus.
Forty years before Torchwood, Experiment X concerned the exploits of F.E.A.R. (The Federation for Extraordinary and Alien Research) a secret branch of the British government headed by the sinister and mysterious Doctor Morg. (And what kid could resist the lure of that cover, shown here, to announce the arrival of the series?) Although the strip ended in 1968, Doctor Morg returned a few years later in the story Appointment with F.E.A.R. in Pow Annual 1972.
Odhams comics thrived on having less clean-cut heroes than their rivals, and Cliff Adam in The Two Faces of Janus was no exception. Due to an "old man's curse" handsome Cliff found his features contort into an ugly and frightening face. Obviously influenced by Jekyll and Hyde, but in this scenario the hideous "Janus" (as he came to be known) was still a good guy. However, in a comment on how shallow society is, Janus was hated and feared by the public due to his appearance and hunted like a criminal.
The Cloak, Experiment X and The Two Faces of Janus brought a lot of entertainment value to Pow! but even they couldn't stave off the inevitable. Perhaps Odhams had expanded their comics line too quickly, or perhaps most kids preferred mundane strips they could "relate" to, but whatever the reason, sales were dropping. By issue 53, Wham! had merged into Pow! but even that didn't save the comic. Desperately, the now double-barreled Pow! and Wham! tried to appeal to traditional tastes by bumping superheroes off the cover in favour of other material such as mystery or sport. The last two covers featured football strips, something Odhams had previously avoided like the plague. For such a non-conformist comic as Pow! this was the final nail in the coffin. After just 86 weekly issues, Pow! merged into Smash!
With issue 18 of Pow! (on sale 13th May 1967) The Cloak replaced the adventure strip Jack Magic strip in the weekly comic. The Cloak was the creation of Birmingham-based cartoonist Mike Higgs, a lifelong fan of comics and pulp magazines. In 1964 Mike had produced a fanzine entitled The Shudder, a parody of pulp magazine legend The Shadow, and with a few tweaks this character became the inspiration for The Cloak strip that he submitted to Odhams.
The editors of Pow! liked what they saw. Their line of comics already had serialized spy strips (Eagle-Eye, Man from B.U.N.G.L.E. and Wee Willie Haggis) but clearly they saw that The Cloak was something unique. The other strips were in the Leo Baxendale mold (more or less the closest thing Odhams had to a house style) but Mike Higgs' work had none of that, being more influenced by Peter Maddocks, Chester Gould, and Elzie Segar. More importantly, his style looked very contemporary, very Sixties... and the one thing that set Odhams above their competitors was how much they reflected the "swinging sixties".
Kicking off with a three pager, The Cloak then settled into a regular double-page slot every week. The basic set up was that The Cloak, whose real name and origin remained a mystery, was an agent working for the "Special Squad", assisted by his partners Mole and Shortstuff. (Later, The Cloak would also acquire a partner / girlfriend by the name of Lady Shady, without a doubt the sexiest woman ever allowed into British humour comics.)
The Cloak and his team battled against bizarre villains (influenced by the fact that Mike was a big fan of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy) and each serial ran for around six weeks, with cliffhanger death-trap style endings at the end of each installment. (For avid viewers of the Batman tv show, as all of us were back then, this was right up our street.) The strip never sat still. Werewolves, robots, mad scientists, warlocks, monsters, aliens... The Cloak fought them all. (The strip was a huge influence on my work, Combat Colin in particular, and during 1983/84 I was honoured to work as Mike Higgs' assistant for a while.)
The Cloak became a hit with the readers of Pow!, even elbowing Spider-Man off the front cover for a few issues. When Pow! merged into Smash! in 1968, The Cloak was one of the strips to make the transfer. However, with the formation of IPC looming over the horizon things looked bleak for anything that didn't suit their formula. When IPC took the reins of Smash! in 1969, revamping it into a clone of Lion and Valiant, the humour content was cut back and out went The Nervs (by then superbly drawn by Ken Reid) and The Cloak.
IPC segregated their comics department into two divisions: humour and adventure. Sadly, this meant that the humour comics, heralded by Whizzer and Chips in October 1969, were a little "younger" in tone than Odhams' approach had been. Although Odhams' comics had a large following comprised of children and adults, (as clearly evidenced from the letters they published) the new IPC humour comics were firmly aimed at children. Most of their content became increasingly tailored towards the "kid with a gimmick" limitation (X-Ray Specs, Chalky, Val's Vanishing Cream, etc.).
With The Cloak suddenly canceled for no good reason, Mike Higgs created a new strip for Whizzer and Chips the first of IPC's new line of humour comics. The strip was a single pager called Space School. Mike stuck it out for a year, but the restrictions of the formula (complete one-page stories) and the insistence by the editor that he focus on classroom-based capers rather than expanding the environment as he had with The Cloak led to Space School being a very tame strip. (The editor was also trying to discourage Mike from using his own style and wanted him to draw more like house-style artist Reg Parlett.)
Although the new IPC comics were a massive hit with the readers, Mike felt unhappy with Space School being steered towards becoming something akin to The Bash Street Kids in space. As a result he quit after a year on Whizzer and Chips to work in other fields which over the years included newspaper strips (Moonbird, Baz & Co), Moonbird children's books, lots of commercial cartooning, and editing/designing the Dan Dare collection for Hawk Books. Subsequently, British comics have never seen anything quite like The Cloak since, and for many collectors it remains one of the most unique and enjoyable strips ever seen in the UK.
(The Cloak, and his creator Mike Higgs, turned up briefly in the Albion mini-series. See the Heroes of Albion entry on this blog for a review of the graphic novel.)
