Archive's Sunday Comics: Like a Bad Penny

Those pesky comics turned a generation of innocent schoolchildren into

sling-shot carrying, mischievous little brats.The Archive should have 

guessed Keith Chapman AKA western great, Chap O'Keefe was partly 

responsible.

Smash! was launched by Odhams in 1966 as the second of "a new breed of 

comics". The first was Wham! in 1964. Both weeklies leaned heavily on 

the creative talents of cartoonist Leo Baxendale who had quit rival 

publisher D. C. Thomson, of Dundee, after drawing such classic Beano 

strips as The Bash Street Kids and Minnie the Minx.

For Odhams in London, The Bash Street Kids became The Tiddlers for Wham! 

and later The Swots and the Blots for Smash! Both these comics allowed 

more outrageous and anarchical humour than had been the norm for the 

Scottish publisher and gave work to Baxendale and a team of artists 

ghosting his style. But it was relatively short-lived. The Odhams titles 

began adding reprints of American Marvel superhero comics to the mix. 

And it launched several more weeklies, like Pow! and Fantastic, for a 

so-called "Power Comics" stable.

Keith Chapman, who edited and scripted for several Wham! and Smash! 

annuals, says, "The writing was on the wall before I left for New 

Zealand in 1967. The market could take only so much. The new comics must 

have been competing with their own companions for the kids' pocket 

money. Also, the cost of the US reprints to Odhams was set to rise 

rapidly as sterling stumbled into a series of crises. The Odhams Books 

division was never able to buy rights to the likes of The Fantastic Four 

and The Incredible Hulk for their hardcover annuals. By the end of 1968, 

the Power Comics weeklies were back to just one, and that was Smash! "

Odhams was owned by the giant International Publishing Corporation who 

in 1969 rationalized all their comics operations, which included the 

tamer Fleetway titles, under one company, IPC Magazines Ltd. According 

to Wiki, the defunct Odhams Press Ltd was left to go bankrupt. The IPC 

Smash!, much reformed, was finally merged with the old Fleetway Valiant 

in April 1971.

The strip here, Bad Penny at the Seaside, is from Smash! Annual 1967 

(published late 1966) and is a slice of a vanished, very British life. 

The annual seaside holiday with the kids, smelly gasworks, guest houses, 

deckchairs on the beach, candy floss, Punch and Judy, old mines 

converted into collection boxes, sandcastle competitions ... all are 

likely to be familiar to Britons over a certain age!

Bad Penny is clearly in the Minnie the Minx mould. And is that jersey 

"borrowed" from the British Dennis the Menace?