Season's Greetings

The Blimey! Christmas Selection

  
Like a variety tin of biscuits, here's a bumper selection of Christmas stories from over the years, starting above with Dudley Watkins' cover to The Christmas Beano for 1967. 

Next, also from 1967, Kicks has a bit of bother writing a letter to Santa. (Pow! No.50, 30th December 1967.) Art by Graham Allen.

Heading further back in time, here's Tilly of the Tea Shop dealing with an amorous waiter from Comic Cuts No.2.380 (December 28th 1935).

A nice festive centrespread for Basil Brush, with art by Chas Sinclair, from TV Comic No.993 (26th December 1970)...

Time for adventure with The Black Sapper from The Beezer No.258 (December 24th 1960). Art by Jack Glass...

Over to a popular comic for girls and Bella doing a good Christmas deed from Tammy in 1980. Art by John Armstrong...

Leo Baxendale's Clever Dick teaches his cousin Basil a lesson in this page from Buster and Jet, 25th December 1971...

Back to 1953 with Abbott and Costello from Film Fun No.1,771. Artwork by Walter Bell.

 
Fuss Pot kicks up a fuss as usual from Knockout 25th December 1971. Art by Norman Mainsbridge...

From Lion dated 29th December 1973, Adam Eterno brings festive respite to No Man's Land. Art by Solano Lopez...

The Sparky People meet Puss and Boots in this back page strip from Sparky No.258 (December 27th 1969). Art by John Geering...

It's Tom Thug's second Christmas in this strip from Oink! in 1987 drawn by me.

Also from that same issue of Oink! it's Regurgitating Robbie by Charlie Brooker (yes, him who's now a telly star). Underneath is a Snowman mini-strip by Davy Francis...

Which brings us back to that issue of The Beano seen at the top of this post. Here's the back page from that 1967 Christmas issue with Dennis the Menace in his pre-Gnasher days, drawn by Davey Law...

I hope that gives you plenty of yuletide reading over the holidays. All that remains is for me to wish you all a Merry Christmas! More blogging soon.

Christmas 1935: COMIC CUTS

  
We hurtle back in time 77 years today, to 1935 and the 'Grand Xmas Number' of Comic Cuts. The cover strip is Tinker and Tich and looks like the work of John Jukes to me.

Printed on green paper the 8 page tabloid-sized Comic Cuts featured the usual Amalgamated Press formula of four pages of prose sties and four pages of strips. One of those strips starred the robot (or 'Mechanical Man' as the term was then) Mac Hinery. I'm not sure who drew this one...

Percy Cocking was the artist on The Terrible Twins. Nice solid figure work. Mr.Cocking was also the artist on Weary Willie and Tired Tim over in Chips...

 
Dusky and Dando was unfortunately one of the strips that reflected the very different attitudes of the time. Presented here as a historical document, such stereotypical caricatures of black people have thankfully long since vanished from comics. No idea who the artist was...

Tucked in the corner of page six was an advert for a Waddington's card game Bobs y'r Uncle. Bob looks a very dodgy uncle if you ask me. (You can see the cards on this website.)

On the back page, the serial Plum and Duff manages to fit in a Christmas party at the end, although that spy obviously had nefarious plans for the New Year. Artwork by Albert Pease I believe...

 

The Dandy Documentary!

As mentioned on Nigel Parkinson's blog, there's a TV documentary on The Dandy coming to your screens over the holidays. I understand it'll only be shown on BBC Scotland initially and will be broadcast on New Year's Eve. Hopefully those of us South of the border will get to see it sometime in 2013.

Here's the official programme notes from the BBC: 
"In Just Dandy Ford Kiernan celebrates the anarchic humour of the Scottish comic that has kept children of all ages entertained. As the classic publication reaches the end of its run, Ford meets the artists and writers as well as fans including comedian Frank Skinner."

On the Caledonia TV website you can view a trailer for the show which features the presenter and some exclusive Nigel Parkinson artwork. What's more, it leads off with a TV ad from the archives advertising The Dandy No.991 (November 19th 1960). For those of you who weren't around when comics were regularly advertised on TV, this is the sort of cheap and cheerful promotion they had back then. 

I don't have that issue, but I do have the preceding one, No.990. Here's the cover...

This was part of a several-week revamp of The Dandy which saw the comic increase from 12 to 16 pages, add a new logo and more colour, and introduce new characters such as Dirty Dick and Corporal Clott. Arguably this was the beginning of The Dandy's best decade, with consistently solid storytelling and artwork throughout the Sixties. (Admittedly I'm biased as these were the years I grew up reading the comic.) Here's that very first Corporal Clott story from The Dandy No.990, November 12th 1960. Art by Davey Law...

...and here's the next issue ad for that Dandy Thunderbang seen in the 1960 TV advert...

Don't forget, Just Dandy airs on BBC One Scotland on Hogmanay! 

 

The Giant Holiday Comic Albums

Every now and then discussion about these books crops up on forums and suchlike, with people discovering copies of one or all of them in charity shops, comic marts etc. Readers often express their curiosity about the books so I thought I'd take this opportunity to clarify some background info about them.

Back in the 1980s Mike Higgs (known to many of you for his creations The Cloak and Moonbird) was producing books for Patrick Hawkey's company Hawk Books. Mike would edit and design the books himself, and usually came up with the concept as well. 

In 1989 Mike had the idea of producing four comic album compilations. These would not be slick collector's volumes but would instead be chunky, cheap softbacks aimed at children for the summer holidays. The idea being to give them a nice long read over the school break whilst introducing them to some classic material from the archives of British comics. 

Through an arrangement with Fleetway Publications, Mike set about selecting material from the collections of himself and others that would be suited to the books. Four books were to be produced at the same time, each with 288 pages in black and white, and each with their own theme. 

The Giant Holiday Fantasy Comic Album

Mike Higgs designed the striking logo for the cover, and the illustrations were sourced from some of the strips within, with colour added for effect. The contents included material from the 1950s to the 1970s, including Thunderbolt Jaxon, Janus Stark, Robot Archie and Simon Test. 

Perhaps the most impressive story in this book is the complete Return of The Claw serial about the Lextrons taking over the minds of children. This epic ran in Valiant for almost two years and the full 94 page epic is collected in this book.

The Giant Holiday Fun Comic Album

With a cover drawn by Mike Higgs this book is a good compilation of some of the best humour strips to have appeared in British comics. Mike includes several of his own Cloak and Space School strips, and there's also classics such as Laurel and Hardy, Denis Gifford's Steadfast McStaunch and Sammy Sprockett, Georgie's Germs, The Stealer, Me and My Shadow and more. There's even an all-new Mike Higgs strip at the back of the book, Henry the Hedgehog Goes Travelling. 

Fans of Ken Reid will be pleased to hear that the book contains the first serial for Queen of the Seas in full. 24 pages from the early issues of Smash!

The Giant Holiday All-Girl Comic Album

Most of the material in this book seems to be from the 1950s and taken from various Fleetway pocket library titles. Characters include Sue Day, The Silent Three and others. 

The Giant Holiday Adventure Comic Album 

With another logo design lettered by Mike Higgs, this book features several of the non-fantasy Fleetway heroes such as Robin Hood, Master of the Marsh, Sexton Blake and Dick Barton. 

 
As with the All-Girl book, the focus is mainly on the 1950s and much of the material is from pocket libraries. A Dick Turpin issue and The Island of Fu Manchu are reprinted in full.

The four books were launched with a very reasonable cover price of £2.99 each. Mike Higgs and his assistants had worked hard to a tight deadline in order to have the pages scanned and cleaned up from often yellowing original comics. The results are impressive, but there was one big letdown, - the print quality was poor. The chosen print company was more used to producing colouring books and had never printed comics before. In many areas the solid blacks had reproduced too grey and patchy on the pulp paper, and detailed work such as that of Ken Reid and Jesus Blasco was badly served by the cheap reproduction. 

On the plus side, the pages that had been enlarged from pocket libraries didn't look too bad as the larger reproduction helped considerably. Also, even on the worst affected pages it was still possible to follow the strips, and the lettering was legible. It's a great shame that such a worthy effort was hampered by such poor reproduction but if you do chance upon any of these books they're still worth picking up. In more recent years IPC have shown little interest in reprinting anything from their vast archive, even to the point of selling off the original pages, so, as things stand at present, it's unlikely that similar books to these will see the light of day anytime soon.