The Comics at War Part One: The Early Days

Recently whilst reading the latest titles from DC Thomson's Commando Comics, a series of titles that have been running for longer than I've been alive, I was struck the realization that war stories have been a staple of comic books for as long as the medium's existed. It is said that at any point in time, on some foreign field, the British Army is fighting one war or other, and I suppose in many ways British history has been shaped by events on the battlefields. From Lionhearts crusades to the current struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, stories have echoes down the centuries and inspired poets, novelists, storytellers of all kinds.

So it would seem natural that children's literature, the forerunner of the modern comic book, would turn its attention to war stories with early titles such as Boy's Own Paper, and Halfpenny Marvel churning out tales set during the Crimean and Napoleonic Wars. It is interesting to note that early war comics and story papers concentrated on war at sea which reflected Britain's pride in having a Navy that then truly ruled the waves.

War stories were part of a mix of tales that included sport, crime, western and adventure but by the end of the Nineteenth Century, with the country gripped by the wars against the Boer, comics and story papers started to present patriotic tales with these struggles as the backdrop. Fictional stories would sit alongside reports of true accounts of heroism and gradually comic books and the story papers became part of the national consciousness.

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The real boom started in the mid 19th Century when the literacy rates were rising in Britain thanks to the sterling work done by social reformers, and when William Gladstone, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, abolished duty on paper mass market publishing was able to come about. A number of entrepreneurs turned their attentions to the growing boys fiction market. Kids across the country, unable to find X-Boxes or Playstations in the shops, were eager for entertainment. Cheap fiction was hugely in demand by working class children who could not afford to buy books - Alice in Wonderland for instance which was first published in 1865 cost 6 shillings. This was a third of the average industrial worker's weekly wage. However children could manage a penny a week and this brought in the era of what would become to be known as the penny dreadfuls.

A popular title of this period was The Boys of England which sold, at its peak, around 250,000 copies a week but given that each copy wold be shared by around nine different readers it was estimated that its readership was more than two million.

Edwin Brent started his Newsagents Publishing Company in 1866 and as well as being responsible for the aforementioned The Boys of England, realized that there was a market for more salacious reading material, and he started churning out the first penny dreadfuls. These magazines were, in effect, part work novels which subjects that covered murder, street violence and other lurid subjects. Brett's published, The Wild Boys of London in 1866, which was a tale of juvenile street criminals in the capital city and this title became particularly notorious. It contains violence, mentions of nudity and a flagellation (torture) scene and it sold like the proverbial hot cakes and started the boom in the penny dreadfuls,  which would soon come to the attention of politicians.

'The malign influence of the "bloods" (penny dreadfuls) was creeping not only into the houses of the poor, neglected and untaught, but into the largest mansions; penetrating into religious families  and astounding careful parents with its frightful issues.'  Lord Shaftsbury, speaking in the House of Commons in 1878.

A moral backlash followed and fearing that soon issues would be forced out of publication, many publishers started to clean up their act. In 1879, the Religious Tract Society first published, The Boy's Own Paper, which would go onto become one of the most enduring and popular of boy's story papers. The first issue featured sport stories, adventure stories and for the first time in a boy's magazines, stories about the perceived glories of warfare. There were also features on hobbies, nature and health. One story, From Powder Monkey to Admiral, started in the early issues and across its run told of how an ordinary boy from the working classes joined the Navy and gradually worked his way to the highest rank. This may seem unlikely but, in fact, history proves otherwise and the story was very much influenced by the life of Admiral Edward Hopson, a boy of humble stock who did indeed attain the rank of Admiral.

War stories then were a stable of The Boy's Own Paper from its early issues. Largely these stories told of The Crimean War (1853-1856) or the Napoleonic Wars but there were stores that dealt with the French (1793 - 1815) and the Indian Mutiny of 1857. All of these stories were driven by a feeling of patriotism and national pride, but did not always seen things from the British perspective. One story, The Drummer Boy (1881) told of a yound boy conscripted into the French army for Napoleon's ill-fated Russian campaign of 1812.

In 1880 another titles was published. The Union Jack was billed as a magazine of 'healthy, stirring tales of adventure by  Land and Sea for Boys'. It was priced at one penny and it was hugely popular and offered strong competition to the Boy's Own Paper. Most of the stories were set in previous wars but the magazine did become the first title to set stories on campaigns which were then ongoing. In 1882 the magazine published a story that looked at the Sudan Campaign. Readers lapped the magazine up but after 129 weekly issues it ceased publication. However by this time there was no shortage of for British readers and new titles were launched at a speedy rate. These magazines, lavishly illustrated,  were all text based stories, and the dawn of the first true comic was still some way off but it was these magazines that were very much the parents of the modern comic book.

World War Comic - Warlord and Battle Picture Weekly

Growing up comic books were of vital importance - They mattered to a young boy. There were just another of the essentials needed for any kind of  life. As every young boy knew the true necessities for a happy life were food, water, shelter, assorted candy and comic books.

It wasn't like today where you can grab a DVD

from a shelf, switch on a computer or fire up a video game. This was pre-home computer, pre cable television, even VHS video tapes were still some time in the future. We had three TV channels - two from the Beeb and one commercial station - entertainment, particularly for an imaginative young boy was thin on the ground. Sure we had our cartoons but they only played at certain times of the day, the rest of the time the small screen seemed obsessed with soap operas, game shows and current affairs. Hardly the material designed to stimulate young minds.

All in all you'd think we were starved of exciting adventure stories designed to stir the blood, but there was one avenue open to us. There was one medium offering wildly entertaining stories whenever the fancy took us. That was the comic book - the newsagents shelves were stuffed full of books with titles like Tiger, Warlord, Battle, Victor, Action - they cost pennies (I think the average price of a comic book when I started buying on a regular basis was around 5p) and yet provided entertainment worth many times that paltry sum.

In the far off United States (a country that seemed so exciting to any British kid) the comic book industry was dominated by colourful stories of super heroes, but in the UK super heroes, with very few exceptions, failed to take off. If Superman's capsule had crashed down in Clacton instead of the Mid-West, then Kal-Ell would have been grounded from the off. It wasn't that British comic books were any less fantastic, but  by and large the settings for our tales were far more grounded in reality. Of course we had our science fiction strips, Dan Dare and so forth but for pulse pounding adventure it was the war comics to which we turned.

War comics were always popular in the UK - And for decades after the guns of the second world war fell silent, British kids celebrated our victory over the Nazis in wonderfully drawn, black and white comic books. Characters like Lord Peter Flint kept a stiff upper lip while besting evil Nazi spies, Union Jack Jackson fought alongside the Americans and usually got them out of some tough spots, and the Rat Pack were too good at Hun killing to leave rotting in a high security prison. In skilfully drawn pages scores of humble Tommies stood up to the might of the enemy and gained victories against incredible odds.

By the time I started reading comics in the early 1970's there was already a rich history of boy's adventure comics - Victor, Valiant, Lion were the hot titles but these belonged to the previous generation and it was newer titles like Warlord from DC Thompson and Battle Picture Weekly from IPC that caught my imagination.

Warlord first hit the stands in 1974 and was far grittier than the usual war comics for sale during that period - so successful was it that rival publisher, IPC launched Battle Picture Weekly in order to snare some of the readers eager for this new kind of comic book reader.

Warlord was the first UK title to be dedicated solely to war stories, other comics usually contained several genres. And right from the start it set the bar very high in terms of artwork and storytelling.

Battle Picture Weekly, first published in 1975, was launched directly as a result of the success that rival publisher, D C Thomson were scoring with Warlord, and to my mind became far the superior title. With a creative team that included Pat Mills and John Wagner how could it not be! This was the comic that would one day feature a truly groundbreaking first world war strip by Pat Mills, called Charley's War which remains arguably the best war strip ever produced.

“Pat (Mills)  and John ( Wagner) wrote the initial episodes and then farmed them out to other writers. GFD ( Gerry Finley Day) was the author of D-Day Dawson. Lofty’s One-Man Luftwaffe – that was John and Pat. Their brief was not only to create a new title but bring new talent into the industry. We’d worked with a bed-rock of people. When you launched a new title, you rang up Tom Tully, he would do four of the new strips, Ted Cowan – people of that era – Ken Mennall. A lot of the people in Battle #1 were new to me."  Original Battle Staff Editor, Dave Hunt.

Perhaps the main difference between Warlord and Battle were rooted in the British class system. Battle felt working class, while Warlord seemed to be establishment. No better is this illustrated than in the original flagship characters in each title. Warlord had Lord Peter Flint, a wartime secret agent who when not away saving the country, was living the life of a wealthy aristocrat, his pleasures no doubt funded by the tax payer. But Battle's answer to the character was Mike Nelson, a working class bruiser who was billed as Britain's deadliest secret agent. And where Lord Peter Flint believed in giving the enemy a fair shake, Mike Nelson had no such morals - in the very first frame of his first appearance in Battle he shoots a German soldier in the back.

The original Major Easy

Now back in the day I read both Warlord and Battle, but Battle soon became my publication of choice. Where Warlord's heroes would dispose of the enemy with ease and then return home for tea and cakes, Battle's heroes seemed to bleed. The Mike Nelson character would become less important to Battle as the title found its true identity. The first adventure would run until May 1975, and although the character returned from time to time, it was the other strips that became reader favourites. Strips like Rat Pack, about a group of convict soldiers, was a huge success with readers, as was D- Day Dawson and in 1976 Battle introduced a character that became so iconic that he has been re-invented as Cursed Earth Koburn in the pages of Judge Dredd Magazine. This character was Major Easy, created by Alan Hebden and Carlos Ezquerra, a laid back James Coburn lookalike who usually fought the war from a horizontal position.

MAJOR EASY LIVES ON AS CURSED EARTH COBURN

It was in 1979 that Battle finally came of age, with the strip Charley's War which was written by Pat Mills and drawn initially by Joe Colquhoun. This was a different kind of war story. For one thing it was set in the First World War, when most adventure strips tended to favour the second world conflict, and for another it was an anti-war strip. YEP, AN ANTI WAR STRIP IN A WAR COMIC!!!!

'I did not want Battle to glorify war, and Charley's War is an anti-war story," said Mills. "I think that in the 1970s and 80s it was legitimate, more so than it is today, to describe the Great War as a tragedy, a mistake and criticise the incompetence of generals. In 2014, revisionists have been trying to improve the image of the generals." Pat Mills.



Charley's War is a true work of literature - a harrowing, intricately drawn look at the Great War as seen through the eyes of working class, semi-literate Charley Bourne. Pat Mills took the inspired method of telling much of the story through young Charley's diary. The strip was truly groundbreaking, featuring not gung-ho adventure but a look at the war as it truly must have been.

'A combination of well-researched and heartfelt scriptwriting, Pat’s work is the antithesis of the ‘war is hell’ gung-ho Sergeant Rock-style story. While never doubting for a second the heroism of the brave men in the trenches, The Great War is shown to be the tragedy it was, a meat-grinder that took the lives of millions of soldiers and set the stage for the even greater horrors of World War Two. On a personal note, Charley’s War was the first comic I ever read to show the heroism of the many thousands of Irish soldiers who fought in The Great War. Hitherto we were portrayed, if at all, as ignorant savages, vilely insulting caricatures the likes of which even Punch would have hesitated to use (one notable earlier example in comics featured an Irish soldier who went into the fray with a pot of Irish stew). The artwork for Charley’s War was provided by Joe Colquhoun, one of comics’ great unsung heroes. The Gustave Doré of British comics, Colquhoun created beautiful expressive storytelling week-in week-out. Both Joe and Pat put their hearts into Charley’s War, and readers of all ages were drawn to the care evident in their work.' By Steve Earls click for full article

'We often imagine that Armageddon is a horror that awaits us sometime in the future. But Armageddon has already happened. It was World War One." Pat Mills




Charley's War are available as a series of handsome graphic novels from Titan Books.


These days the British comic industry seems to consist of 2000AD and a plethora of licenced titles with the free cover gift more important than the stories between the covers, and the days of true variety in British comics is a distant memory - The Spectator bemoaned the lack of a British comic book industry in this article HERE

Pat Mills can be found here

For a history of Warlord
For a history of Battle

Images from the front line -

The Sarge was another popular Battle character

Battle's Johnny Red

Britain - we don't need no superheroes!!!

I was a voracious comic book reader as a kid and the British comics were always my favourite but I could never understand why it was only the American comics that had the costumed superheroes and why British comics were more grounded in a kind of  comic book reality - the action was over the top but it came from heroics rather than superheroics. I remember Billy the Cat but that's all really and while Judge Dredd could, at a stretch, qualify as a costumed superhero he doesn't really since he has no super powers other than a squarer jaw than Ben Grimm.

The superhero was an American obsession or at least that was what I thought until I read an interesting article in issue 4 of Future Publishing's Comic Heroes. Apparently British comics had its share of costumed crime-fighters with super powers. The article by comics expert Lew Stringer lists several UK superheroes and although most of them were before my time it is an illuminating article.

The Dandy comic featured a character called The Amazing Mr X in the 1940's. The character was named Len Manners and he wore a curious costume and could summon incredible strength at will. There was also a character called Powerman who apparantly gained his powers from the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. There was also a rather attractive fellow called Captain Magnet, as well as Maskman and Electro Girl.

One character I do have vague memories of was The Steel Claw but then only from reading old strips in copies of The Valiant that I've picked up over the years. The Spider is another character I remember and his adventures were still running when I was a kid, but he was more a super-villain than a superhero.
 By and large though British comics tended to focus on adventure strips - war stories, western adventures, sports stories and secret agents were always successful. Humour was also very popular in British comics and titles like The Beano, Dandy and Whizzer and Chips were dominated by humour strips.

 British superheroes just couldn't be taken as seriously as their American counterparts. Where they had Batman, we had Fishboy (Buster 1968) who was abandoned on a desert island and learned to breath underwater and grow webbed feet. Some other unlikely Brit heroes - Birdman from Baratoga (Smash 1970), Kangeroo Kid (Scorcher 1970) and Kid Chameleon (Cor 1970).

King Cobra featured in Hotspur comic and I do remember this character from my childhood but when Marvel UK launched in the UK in the early 1970's it was a massive success and the British superheroes seemed tame in comparison to all the new American characters that were cropping up. Of course most of the better known American strips such as Batman, The Fantastic Four, Spiderman and some others were already known on these shores and there had been British titles that had run the strips, but we now had entire titles dominated by the costumed heroes from across the pond. From then on UK comic publishers gave up on creating original superheroes and tended to concentrated on their strengths with titles such as Warlord and Battle Picture Weekly.

It was from this period onwards that I became aware of all the comics out there and whilst I would pick up titles like Planet of the Apes, Dracula Lives and Spiderman from time to time, my true allegiance was with the British comics such as Warlord and Battle which I absolutely adored and would never miss a single issue. It was not until 1976 when 2000AD came about that British comics were able to create characters that could compete with the likes of the Americans - characters like Judge Dredd were more than able to stand alongside the American heroes in terms of creating their own mythology.

The first truly successful British superheroes were created by the Americans - Marvel's Captain Britain made a stir with British comic book readers in the UK.

"The character was created by writer Chris Claremont and artist Herb Trimpe and originally appeared in Captain Britain Weekly, a British anthology comic that also included reprinted material featuring other Marvel Comics characters (such as Nick Fury and the Fantastic Four). The first few issues of the comic were also promoted with free gifts, including a cardboard Captain Britain mask and a Captain Britain boomerang - free gifts in the first three issues of a title were a tradition with UK comics. Chris Claremont left the series after just ten issues, midway through the 'Doctor Synne' storyline, and has since stated that this was because his view of the character and series was very different to that of the editor.Up to this point, the character had appeared exclusively in Marvel's UK comics - although some established Marvel characters such as Captain America and the Black Knight appeared, Marvel's American comics had not referenced these stories or acknowledged that Captain Britain was part of the same shared Marvel Universe.In 1978, though, Chris Claremont revisited the character and introduced him to an international audience, fully integrating him into the Marvel Universe via a story that starred Captain Britain and Spider-Man. Initially published as a black & white story in the UK's Super Spider-Man & Captain Britain comic, this was then coloured and reprinted in an American title, Marvel's long-running Marvel Team-Up series." FROM THE WIKI ENTRY

These days the American heroes are still being published in the UK by the likes of Panini and Titan, but there are still the odd British superhero popping up in titles like Clint, Judge Dredd Megazine and the long running 2000AD and it is the traditional war, sport and adventure strips that are no longer being produced and you know, I miss them.

Yesterday's papers - ACTION the sevenpenny nightmare

Action is perhaps one of the most controversial of British comics - It was actually, banned, withdrawn from sales after complaints in the media resulted in questions being asked in Parliament.

The comic was devised in 1976 by Pat Mills, a man who enjoys the status of legend these days. It was intended to reflect the social changes and issues in the UK in the late 1970's and it didn't flinch in it's depiction of violence. Several titles were bandied about for the comic Boots, Dr Martins and Action 76 were all considered until the title Action was decided upon.



Many of the stories in Action were what Mills called "dead cribs", essentially rip-offs of popular films, books, and comic heroes. Rather than being a straight copy, the "cribs" in Action had their own slant on the idea. Hook Jaw, for example, combined the graphic gore and shark anti-hero of Steven Spielberg's 1975 Jaws, whilst Hellman of Hammer Force was a Warlord/Battle-style adventure told from the point of view of a German Panzer commander and very much taking its influence from the hugely popular paperbacks of Sven Hassel.

The first issue was published on 7 February 1976,  The comic was instantly popular, particularly for its gritty tone and graphic gore. Within weeks the media had picked up on the title's violent content. The London Evening Standard  and The Sun  ran major articles on the comic, with the latter  by dubbing Action "the sevenpenny nightmare" (the cover price was 7p). Over the next few months Action was the centre of a campaign led by Mary Whitehouse to censor or ban the comic. IPC eventually started to moderate strips in order to forestall possible boycotts by newsagent chains such as John Menzies and W H Smiths
In September 1976 John Sanders appeared on the television programme Nationwide , where he tried to defend the comic from a vigorous attack by interviewer. Although Action remained popular, its days were numbered. Pressure within IPC's higher management, and alleged worries that the two major newsagent chains would refuse to stock not just Action, but all of IPC's line, led to the 23 October issue being pulped.

The title returned on 27 November (cover date 4 December), but the violence was toned down, replaced by a safer, blander feel. Stories like Hook Jaw were no longer drenched in blood and gore, but instead were full of safer and more reliable heroes, and traditional villains. Sales dropped drastically, and the last issue before merging with Battle was published on 5 November 1977 - dated 11 November. Battle became Battle Action until 1982, at which point the Action name was dropped entirely.

The use of vivid-red blood shocked moral guardians

The war strips had a gritty feel.

Even the letters page had a subversive edge. Readers were encouraged to insult the editor.

Lefty replaced Hook Jaw for the colour centre pages

Yesterday's Papers - The Lion

Lion was another long running British comic - a bit before my time really - it ran from 1952 until 1974 though I can remember reading it from time to time in its latter years. It was originally produced to compete with The Eagle. It did this well and readers were attracted to its grittier style though it's Dan Dare clone Captain Condor was something of a failure. Dare himself would appear in the comic when the Eagle was merged into the title.

The issue pictured is from August 1969 (I was heading for my third birthday then) and, as always, the letters page offers a snapshot of the time. One reader claimed to be the comic's oldest reader and at 62 , Thos Adams of Ayreshire had no-one ready to dispute his claim. Reader Christopher Herman wrote to the comic with something that had been troubling him - "I was cycling up a hill one day, with the sun shining, when I saw some puddles in the road. But as I got nearer they vanished! Is there any explanation for this?" The editor answered, "Yes they were mirages."  Whew, glad they cleared that one up! There was a voucher that would entitle the lucky ready to a free day in a Butlins Camp (think prisoner of war camps with red coats) of their choice. The reader snipped the voucher and sent it to the address given and then free tickets would be said for the reader and their mother and father. Ahh such different times, when Butlins seemed exotic.

Lion, like many British comics, was made up of mixed genres - adventure, horror, sci-fi and humour. And the comic's closing strip was Mowser the Priceless Puss which ran for the length of the comic's life and was popular enough to survive Lion's eventual merger into Valient.

Ahh, those were the days!

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED - Commando comic book interview

Commando Comics were launched by D.C. Thomson of Dundee, Scotland in 1961. The company already had a high profile in comics most noticeably with The Beano and Dandy but the Commando books were not like regular weekly comics, modelling themselves on the slightly more expensive digest size comic books of which there were many on the UK shelves. All these years later and only Commando remain.

Why when other war comics have bitten the dust does Commando continue to thrive? In 2005 when Carlton Books collected twelve of the most popular Commando comics and published them as a graphic novel, entitled The Dirty Dozen they had a best-seller on their hands and several other volumes followed...indeed, continue to follow.

The Tainted Archive slipped into combat jacket and fatigues and cornered Commados current editor Calum Laird as well as writer, David Whitehead who has written over two dozen of the books. That's nothing, David points out, when compared with writers like Ferg Handley who has done hundreds. This past week Commando published four more issues culminating with issue no 4245...and they'll be back again next week.


I put the question of the title's success to both Calum and David



CL: Although I’m delighted by it, I don’t know for sure what to put the title’s longevity down to. I think that because each story is so long we concentrate on plot more than visuals (though never at the expense of the visuals) and this gives the finished article a weight that the comics couldn’t. There’s a lot of reading in a Commando so if you’re a story fan, it gives you just what you need.

The standard of illustration has been kept high over the years, too, but the comics also had good artists — sometimes the same ones as were working on Commando.

We’ve run a very tight team for many years which keeps costs down, and that helps maintain our viability.



DW: COMMANDO saw off all its competitors simply because of the quality of its stories, artwork and general presentation, all of which were superior to the likes of WAR PICTURE LIBRARY, BATTLE, WAR AT SEA, AIR ACE and so on. But I have no idea how it has survived. A loyal, hardcore readership? Probably.


David Whitehead, when not writing Commando comic books can be found entertaining readers as western writer, Ben Bridges. I asked David if the discipline between writing comic strips and straightforward novels differed?


DW:

Not really. Writing is writing. Regardless of the genre, you approach it as professionally as possible and always try to give of your very best. Of course, more description goes into a novel, and there’s more room to examine the characters’ motives and emotions, but at the end of the day you’re telling a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and hopefully telling it to the best of your ability.

It’s assumed by those who don’t know any different that COMMANDO is aimed at kids. And therefore there is an expectation to somehow ‘write down’ to that audience. Nothing could be more wrong. For a start, I believe that the readership is young adult to adult, and that “kids” as such don’t read COMMANDO in any great numbers. I also believe that COMMANDO readers have a very genuine interest in the subject and expect, quite rightly, to read stories that are well-told, historically accurate, emotionally involving and wholly entertaining.


And David certainly does provide entertaining tales - they wouldn't get past the eagle eyes of editor, Culum Laird otherwise. I asked Calum what he looks for in a potential Commando strip?

CL: A story with the length and weight to carry a 63-page book. A mix of interesting plot and action with the pace to make the reader turn the pages. And it must be original as we’ve done all the obvious plotlines in our 48-year history.he more worldwide the conflict the better for our purposes. It gives the creator greater scope for the narrative geographically and a wider potential range of characters.


I then asked David how many of the four thousand odd books had he written?




DW: I believe my total now stands at 28 or 29 – small potatoes when you consider the outputs of long-term COMMANDO writers like Ferg Handley, whose stories are now numbered in the hundreds. I did start publishing my own comics in the 1980s, but not with any great success. I wrote the scripts and sometimes produced the artwork as well. My favourite character was called CAPTAIN CLOCKWORK, and he was a robot policeman who pre-dated Robocop.



There was a time when all the Commando books were complete self contained stories and this is still largely the case but there are now some recurring characters, such as the excellent Ferret McGlone stories, with continuity between books. I asked Calum if this was started to experiment with the format or due to reader demand?



CL: This change came about some time ago, when I wasn’t working in the office. It was, I believe, led by the team here who saw some potential in the idea. It was tested by producing some stories with recurring characters. As these were well received, it became an established part of the Commando repertoire.


The artwork for the Commando strips are handled by some of the best artists in the industry but when working on a script I wonder if the writer made little drawings. I put this to David.


DW: Yes. A story is about 130-135 pictures long. I sketch out little illustrations and scribble down all the speech balloons and panels, and when I type up the script I get a good sense of continuity between one picture and the next.


Again we aimed the offensive at Dave, asking him of any future Commando Projects.

DW:I very much regret that I haven’t been able to contribute more to COMMANDO, not least because the people at COMMANDO H Q have always been a joy to work with and I find the COMMANDO format extremely exciting. But in addition to COMMANDO I also write regular articles for BOOK AND MAGAZINE COLLECTOR and have a number of commitments to various publishers. Over the last year to eighteen months I’ve branched out into different genres. My books with Steve Hayes – FERAL, DEAD END and most recently UNDER THE KNIFE – are all psychological thrillers. THE FLUTTERING and SCARE TACTICS fall into the horror category. I write romances under my wife’s name and have also just started writing western series with both Mike Linaker and Alfred Wallon. So time is limited, but as long as I can find a good story to tell, I hope to keep my hand in with the occasional COMMANDO and would be very, very unhappy if I couldn’t.




The Tainted Archive thanks both David and Calum for their time and for helping in providing the same spills, thrill and exciting books we enjoyed growing up. And I hope this feature encourages Archive readers to check out the books. Maybe you read the books years ago and had no idea they were still out there or perhaps you're a current comic books fan and have never tried these classic British comics. They can be found in W.H. Smith's and most good newsagents. Go pick one up - you'll be glad you did.


Commando website

David Whitehead website

FANTASTIC MIGHTY WORLD OF MARVEL

When I was a kid we had our own British versions of Marvel comic strips - these were usually in black and white and were always reprints from the original American strips. These days Marvel are published in the UK in full colour and in better quality books than the originals but this was how we once caught our super-hero action.












FANTASTIC COMIC ISSUE 65 - June 1968














Mighty World of Marvel was a long running title - today Panini comics also publish a Mighty World of Marvel.














The Hulk was always the main star of The Mighty World of Marvel and later on other titles would be merged into the magazine before vanishing forever.













And nice to see Charles Atlas had some competition.

TIGER AND JAG 27TH DEC 1969

Tiger comic was still around when I was a kid but I don't remember Jag - a quick WIKI search reveals that Football Family Robinson was it's most popular strip. It was carried over after it's merger into Tiger.











This issue is from 1969 and it struck me as odd that there is no price on the cover - it list all the commonwealth countries in small print with their prices but there is no British price - strange.













The front cover starts off this issues Skid Solo story while the back cover features a poster of the Middlesbrough Football Team.













That was the thing with British comics - they always used to print posters on back covers and many of us would mutilate the comics and decorate our bedroom walls with the posters. This has resulted in many of the comics being very rare. Mind you the UK comics, being printed on the same paper as the average newspaper, were not as sturdy as their American counterparts and by and large have never been considered as collectable.















Roy of the Rovers follows Skid Solo - eventually Roy Race would become the Tiger's favourite character which would prompt his transfer to his own weekly comic. But by then it didn't matter because Tiger had the awesome Billy's Boots. Billy's Boots had come from the comic Scorcher when the title was merged into Tiger. Ironic then that when Tiger folded, Billy's Boots would move to a few other titles before ending up in Roy of the Rovers.













Now Tiger was chiefly a sports comic but that didn't stop them bringing in a little action with the wonderfully named Phillip Driver, the golf playing spy. And Johnny Cougar - who was of course another wrestling comic book star (see previous post) - I'd forgotten about him.
















The comic also contained several humour strips - this issue features Nosey, The Mighty Smiths and Typhoon Tracy. But the emphasis was on sport and there were several posters scattered through the issue - more reason for kids to mutilate those comics.














These days the British comic book scene is a mere fraction of what it was. Only a few old stalwarts hang in there, Beano, 2000AD, Dandy and of course the excellent Commando series.















It's a pity really as when I was a kid the comic book scene was really vibrant and there was always one title or another waiting to tempt you to part with your last pennies. We may have not had shoes on our feet or arses in our trousers but we had an infinite choice in comic books.
















We also had bedroom walls plastered with posters and a pile of ripped comic books.

LION 21ST Feb 1970

I only vaguely remember Lion comic - it were a bit before me time, you see - and I was surprised when I checked Wiki to see that it ran from 1952 - 1974. At it's demise it was, as was the tradition with ailing British comics, merged with a stronger selling title. This it merged with Valiant which itself was swallowed up by Battle a couple of years later.






This issue is from 1970 and features a cover story starring wrestlers, Stringbean and Hambone. The first story inside the covers is Carson's Cubs which is a football story about a team managed by Joe Carson. Next we have Spellbinder and that is followed by our cover stars Stringbean and Hambone. Sports strips were always popular in British comics but I can't think of another story with wrestling as it sport - no doubt someone out there will know of a few.















Zip Nolan of the Highway Patrol follows and then we are back in Saxon England for a story entitled, Flame of the Forest.













Then from the past into the future for a SF strip entitled, The Fugitive from Planet Scor - it seems to deal with a plot to destroy the Earth. Ahh such great times.










General Johnny is up next and this is followed by Paddy Payne warrior of the seas. Robot Archie is next and I remember Archie from the Valiant which I used to read from time to time. Another sports story follows with Oddball Oates and then we have Dan Dare. I was surprised to find Dare here as I thought he'd only ever appeared in The Eagle and 2000AD before getting his own comic years later, but then I discovered that the Eagle had merged with Lion a few months previous of this issue. The Eagle is mentioned nowhere on the cover of this issue so obviously the title had been faded out. I suspect that Dan Dare was the only character to survive thus far.




The comic ends with Mowser the Cat which again I remember reading from various