Those of you who were interested in my brief blog on Express Weekly last year might like to know that the website Comics UK has just started showcasing an issue. In their "Daily Page" section a full page of Express Super Colour Weekly No.76 (from 1956) will be scanned in for your reading enjoyment every day for the next couple of weeks.
Express (or TV Express as it later became) was a glossy quality title that has often been overlooked so the upcoming pages on Comics UK, from the likes of Bill Mevin and Syd Jordan should prove to be an interesting dip into the past.
Cover above taken from the Comics UK site and features Rex Keene by Harry Bishop. To see more visit:
http://www.comicsuk.co.uk/index.asp
Just weeks after the launch of The DFC comes another new British comic (or Scottish to be precise). However, where The DFC is a clean cut comic aimed at children, the highly irreverent Wasted is for streetwise adults, and is the antithesis of the polite tones of The DFC. As the Wasted website says, "Should you suffer from narrow-mindedness or are politically correct, then, sorry you're just not allowed to read this magazine... Log off now and report yourself to someone in authority".
Wasted is published by Bad Press Ltd of Moniaive in Scotland, and is devised by comics scriptwriter Alan Grant (2000 AD, Batman) and artists at Glasgow's Hope Street Studios. It's the successor to now-canceled dope comic Northern Lightz although this time round hardly any of the strips feature characters smoking weed.
The 64 page full colour comic is packed with humour strips of a very adult nature. Well, more often than not it's more like adult as in women-losing-their-clothes,
dogs-having-a-crap, people-cussing-for-the-sake-of-it humour. Subtle as a brick, it's cruder than Viz and lacks the topical satire of Viz. However, unlike the many adult comics of the Nineties it doesn't aim to be a Viz clone anyway, so I only use the comparison to explain what it isn't, not what it should be. Wasted has its own identity "for today's youth gone wild".
The strips that amused me the most were Tales of the Buddha by Alan Grant and Jon Haward, and A Hard Day's Death by Gavin Burrows with stylish artwork by Mark Stafford. There's a lot of other fun stuff in there too, but it's not for the easily offended. (They can buy The People's Friend instead.) Creators in issue one include Dave Taylor, John A. Short, Dave Alexander, Curt Sibling, Alan Burrows, Jamie Grant and more. All very solid work.
As with any anthology package some strips are stronger than others but that's to be expected. The good news is you can try it out for free, as Wasted No.1 is available as a PDF to download. (The comic should be in stores this month for £3.25, with issue 2 following on August 23rd).
Here's the link. Now get Wasted! -
http://www.wastedcomic.com/
Traditionally, the publication time for Christmas annuals is late August / early September. However, in a canny move to cash in on this years blockbuster movies, Panini UK have released two of their 2009 dated annuals early.
Iron Man Annual 2009 and The Incredible Hulk Annual 2009 are both full colour hardback books consisting of 64 pages each. (Yes, quite slim compared to the annuals of old.) The content of the Iron Man book features comic strips from the Marvel Adventures Iron Man US comic, plus activity pages. I haven't seen the Hulk book yet but I'm guessing its content will be similar.
The annuals are presumably pitched at a young readership, older than pre-school but not as old as the teen plus readership that most Marvel comics are aimed at these days. A good move, as it's important to bring in young readers to comics. The books retail for £6.99 but you should find them cheaper than that online.
For us oldsters, (and for kids keen to see the Sixties Marvel strips) Panini have released Marvel Masterworks: Invincible Iron Man 1963-64, a chunky softback full colour book reprinting the earliest Iron Man strips by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and the underrated Don Heck. A companion volume Marvel Masterworks: The Incredible Hulk 1963-64 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko should be on sale next week.
Only a short blog today but I thought you might be interested in seeing the ad for the very first issue of Valiant. This appeared in Fleetway's Knockout weekly dated 6th October 1962.
As you can see, the ad only mentioned a few of the characters that appeared in Valiant No.1, - and no mention at all of The Steel Claw, who was to become one of the comic's most popular characters. Perhaps back then the editors expected Brett Blade and Hawk Hunter to become big hits. (Who?)
The ad appeared in the comic shown below. By 1962 Amalgamated Press' long-running Knockout comic had been revamped into an adventure comic and was the original home for Kelly's Eye. The following year, Knockout would merge into Valiant and Tim Kelly would become another of Valiant's most memorable characters.
Cover artwork by Eric Bradbury.
These have been around for a while but if you've never seen them, they might be of interest. In recent years a company called GIT (that's Graphic Imaging Technology Inc., not, as far as I know, a company full of gits) have been producing DVD-ROMs featuring scans of classic American comics.
The products are fully licensed by the comic companies (not pirate copies like some dodgy online dealers sell) and feature 500 comics or more on one DVD-ROM! Each product usually focuses on one comic series and features scans of every single page of the comics, including letters pages and ads.
The format of the discs are simply laid out so the reader can see a cover gallery for each year, then he/she can click on a comic, and start reading.
One negative point is that although the comic annuals/specials are included (even the reprints) the "Giant-Size" quarterly titles that Marvel produced in the 1970s aren't. This is unfortunate as some of the monthly titles cross over into those issues.
The comics can be read in Adobe Reader (which is installed on the discs if you don't have it) and pages can be zoomed in to see the artwork as large as you wish. The two Marvel editions I have (40 Years of Avengers and 44 Years of Fantastic Four) have quite high resolution scans so the artwork can be studied in great detail.
As these are scans of the actual comics, not digitised reprints, the reader sees the comics as they were, which means off-register colour at times, and newsprint reproduction, - but that only adds to the period charm. You're looking at history!
A particularly interesting DVD-ROM in this range is Absolutely Mad: 53 Years of MAD Magazine. This contains the entire Fifties original colour comic book, plus the entire magazine run right up to a few years ago. Over 600 issues.
Unfortunately I noticed that the resolution of the pages wasn't so high on the Mad collection compared to the Marvel ones. Perhaps this is because each issue is 52 pages and there are so many of them compressed onto one disc. The text appears a little fuzzy in close up. A great pity, as most of these issues have never been reprinted before. However the pages are still legible.
If you don't mind reading comics on a computer monitor (and personally I don't find it very relaxing, but a laptop might help) then these DVD-ROMs are a cheaper alternative to Marvel Masterworks or suchlike. The discs are compatible with Mac and PC.
Check out gitcorp's website for the full range of comic collection DVD-ROMs. You may also find them available on eBay (which is where I bought mine):
http://www.gitcorp.com/
