(GARTH ANNUAL 1976)
By Jim Edgar & Frank Bellamy (Fleetway/IPC)
No ISBN/book number 85037-204-6
When Frank Bellamy was drawing the Daily Mirror strip Garth, it caught the public attention in a way seldom seen. I even recall having passionate conversations with school friends who normally sneered or at best uncomprehendingly accepted my strange addiction to comics over the two unmissable strips of the day (the other being Maurice Dodd and Dennis Collin’s unbelievably wonderful The Perishers – also in the Mirror and which I must get around to covering). Was it less the mind-melting adventure stories with eye-popping graphics and more that the stories contained, without exception, the most beautiful women ever seen in pictures, and that they were usually naked?
Whatever the reason for first looking, the strips soon made dedicated fans out of many who previously weren’t; a fact the publishers seemed to acknowledge with a couple of reprint editions during the traditional Christmas Annuals release period.
Whereas the first of these – The Daily Mirror Book Of Garth 1975Â – was an A-4 format, full-sized book in the traditional manner, the second volume switched to a landscape edition with only two tiers of strip per page, possibly to bring it more into line with other cartoon-reprint paperbacks such as The Gambols, Fred Bassett or the aforementioned Perishers. For fans that meant fewer stories in the book.
This volume collects The Mask of Atacama and The People of the Abyss (both of which I’ve covered in Titan Books’ Garth: Book 2 – The Women of Galba, ISBN: 0-907610-49-8) but sandwiched between them is the rare and spectacular space-thriller ‘The Beast of Ultor’, which originally ran from February 19th to June 5th 1974. In it a pot-holing Garth discovers a strange egg deep underground that hatches into a stunning (and yes – naked) alien woman who reunites him with the Goddess Astra in a battle against Cosmic Evil on a faraway world.
Visually this is one of the most exciting stories Bellamy drew in his too short career, and is worth any difficulty you might have in tracking it down. But even if Personal Shoppers or Private Detectives are out of your reach perhaps enough chatter might induce a publisher (such as Titan – who have so successfully brought back other classic British comics masterpieces in recent years) to finally bring the British Superman back for good.
© IPC Magazines 1975.