Category: Best of British

By Jim Edgar and Frank Bellamy, with John Allard (Titan Books)
ISBN: 0-90761-034-X

The British Superman Garth first appeared in the Daily Mirror on Saturday, July 24th 1943, the creation of professional cartoonist Steve Dowling and BBC producer Gordon Boshell, at the behest of the editor who wanted an adventure strip to complement their other comic strip features, Buck Ryan, Belinda Blue Eyes, Just Jake and the immortal, morale-boosting Jane.

A blond giant and physical marvel, Garth washed up on an island shore and into the arms of a pretty girl, Gala, with no memory of who he was, but nevertheless saved the entire populace from a brutal tyrant. Boshell never had time to write the series, so Dowling, already producing the successful family strip The Ruggles, scripted Garth until a new writer could be found.

Don Freeman dumped the amnesia plot in ‘The Seven Ages of Garth’ (which ran from September 18th 1944 until January 20th 1946) by introducing the studious jack-of-all-science Professor Lumiere whose psychological experiments Regressed the hero back through some past lives. In the next tale ‘The Saga of Garth’ (January 22nd 1946 – July 20th 1946) his origin was revealed. As a child he’d been found floating in a coracle off the Shetlands and adopted by a kindly old couple. When grown he became a Navy Captain until he was torpedoed off Tibet in 1943.

Freeman continued as writer until 1952 (‘Flight into the Future’ was his last tale), and was briefly replaced by script editor Hugh McClelland (who only wrote ‘Invasion From Space’) until Peter O’Donnell took over in February 1953 (‘Warriors of Krull’). He wrote 28 adventures until he resigned in 1966 to devote more time to his own strip Modesty Blaise, and his place was taken by Jim Edgar; a short-story writer who also wrote such prestigious strips as Matt Marriott, Wes Slade and Gun Law.

Dowling retired in 1968 and his long-time assistant John Allard took over the strip until a suitable permanent artist could be found. He completed ten tales until Frank Bellamy began his legendary run with the 13th instalment of ‘Sundance’ (which ran from 28th June to 11th October 1971). Allard remained as background artist and assistant until Bellamy took full control during ‘The Orb of Trimandias’.

One thing Professor Lumiere had discovered and which gave this strip its distinctive appeal – even before the fantastic artwork of Bellamy elevated it to dizzying heights of graphic brilliance – was Garth’s involuntary ability to travel through time and experience past and future lives. This simple concept lent the strip an unfailing potential for exotic storylines and fantastic exploits, pushing it beyond its humble beginning as a British response to Siegel and Shuster’s American phenomenon Superman.

In ‘Sundance’ Garth is sucked back to 1876 to relive his life as an officer of George Custer’s 7th Cavalry on the Eve of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. He has a brief but passionate love affair with the squaw Falling Leaf before dying valiantly for his beliefs and their love. It is an evocative, powerful tale that totally captures the bigotry, arrogance and futility of the White Man and the tragic demise of the Indian way of life.

‘The Cloud of Balthus’ shows the open, simple elegance of the narrative concept in Garth. Whilst vacationing in the Caribbean the hero becomes embroiled in an espionage plot involving freelance super-spies and a US space station, but even that is mere prelude to fantastic adventure and deadly terrors when he and his delectable, double-dealing companion Lee Wan are abducted by nebulous energy beings in a taut, tension-fraught thriller.

‘The Orb of Trimandias’ sends Garth back in time to the Venice of the Borgias, when he re-lives his life as English Soldier-of-Fortune Lord Carthewan, a decent man battling an insane and all-powerful madman for the secret of a supernaturally potent holy relic. This gripping, exotic yarn is replete with flamboyant action, historical celebrities, sexy women and magnificently stirring locales. It’s a timeless treasure of adventure that has the added fillip of briefly reuniting Garth with his star-crossed true love, the ethereal Goddess Astra.

This lovely volume concludes with a high-octane gothic horror story. In ‘The Wolfman of Ausensee’ Garth becomes the reluctant companion of movie starlet Gloria Delmar on a shoot at the forbidding Austrian Schloss (that’s a big ugly castle to you) of a playboy whose family was cursed by witches. Despite the title giving some of the game away this is still a sharp and savvy spook-fest that would sit easily amongst the best Hammer Horror films, and just gets better with each rereading.

Garth is the quintessential British Action Hero – strong, smart, good-looking with a big heart and a nose for trouble. His back-story gives him all of eternity and every genre to play in and the magnificent art of Frank Bellamy also made his too-brief tenure a stellar one.

Comic-strips seldom get this good, and even though this book and its sequel are still relatively easy to come by, it is still a crime and a mystery that all these wonderful tales have been out of print for so long.

© 198Mirror Group Newspapers. All Rights Reserved.

By Hunt Emerson (Knockabout)
ISBN: 0-86166-142-7

This slim collection of cartoons and strips is possibly the most innovative and surreal work that national treasure Hunt Emerson has ever produced. Surreal to the point of abstraction, these are purely visual statements and bon mots which run the gamut from slapstick to satire, shaggy dog story to barbed social commentary, and like all the great surrealist artists, these works aspire to instantaneous creation but in actuality have been crafted with extreme diligence and terrifying skill.

Somewhere strange creatures roam, little more than mouths on legs. In those cavernous maws are dwellings. Parks, villages, housing developments, even city-states. In mostly wordless displays Emerson examines society, progress and even the absurd nature of reality. He also quite clearly had vast amounts of mind-liberating fun, and so will you when you track down this pictorial delight.

© 2000 Hunt Emerson. All Rights Reserved

By various, compiled by Mike Higgs (Hawk Books)
ISBN 0-948248-06-8

The Daily Mirror has been home to a number of great strips over its long history – beginning with one of the Empire’s greatest successes Tiger Tim, who debuted there in 1904 and culminating with the likes of the war-winning nymphette Jane, The Perishers, Garth and Andy Capp. The latter two feature in this beautiful compilation from Mike Higgs’ Hawk Books which has done so much over the years to keep British cartoon history alive.

This particular effort collects sample selections from the newspaper’s back catalogue in a spiffy hardback that is stuffed with fun, thrills and quality nostalgia.

Garth is the first star featured in an adventure from 1957 by series originator and longest serving creator Steve Dowling (1943-1969 – succeeded by his assistant John Allard, then Frank Bellamy and finally Martin Asbury). Garth is a hulking physical specimen, a virtual human superman with the involuntary ability to travel through time and experience past and future lives. This simple concept lent the strip an unfailing potential for exotic storylines and fantastic exploits.

‘The Captive’ – written by Peter O’Donnell and illustrated by Dowling and Allard – is a contemporary tale with our hero abducted from Earth as a prize in a galactic scavenger hunt instigated by bored hedonistic aliens who don’t realise quite what they’ve gotten themselves involved with… A second adventure, ‘The Man-hunt’, is the last that Frank Bellamy worked on. The astounding Bellamy died in 1976 whilst drawing this story of beautiful alien predators in search of prime genetic stock with which to reinvigorate their tired bloodlines. Written by Jim Edgar, the strip was completed by Asbury who took over with the 17th instalment. This tongue-in-cheek thriller is full of thrills and fantastic action, yet never loses its light humorous touch.

Andy Capp is a drunken, skiving, misogynistic, work-shy, wife-beating scoundrel who has somehow become one of the most popular and well-loved strip characters of all time. Created by jobbing cartoonist Reg Smythe to appeal to northern readers during a circulation drive, he first saw the light of day – with long-suffering wife Florrie in tow – on August 5th 1957. The volume reprints 37 strips from the feature’s 41 year run, which only ended with Smythe’s death in 1998, but the sheer magic of this lovable rogue is as inexplicably intoxicating as it always was, defeating political correctness and common decency alike: A true Guilty Pleasure.

Romeo Brown began in 1954, drawn by Dutch artist Alfred “Maz” Mazure, and starred a private detective with an eye for the ladies and a nose for trouble. The feature was a light, comedic adventure series that added some glamour to the dour mid-1950s, but really kicked into high gear when Maz left in 1957 to be replaced by Peter O’Donnell and the brilliant Jim Holdaway, who would go on to create the fabulous Modesty Blaise together. The strip ended in 1962 and is represented here by a pair of romps from their penultimate year. ‘The Arabian Knight’ and ‘The Admiral’s Grand-daughter’ combine sly, knowing humour, bungling criminality and dazzlingly visuals in a manner any Carry-On fan would die for.

Useless Eustace was a gag-panel (a single-picture joke) that ran from January 1935 to 1985. Created by Jack Greenall, its star was a bald nondescript everyman who met the travails of life with unflinching enthusiasm but very little sense. Greenall produced the strip until 1974, and other artists continued it until 1985. The selections here are from the war years and the 1960s. Another comedy panel was Calamity Gulch, a particularly British view of the ubiquitous “Western” which invaded our sensibilities with the rise of television ownership in the 1950s. Created by Jack Clayton, it began its spoofing and sharp-shooting on 6th June 1960, and you can see 21 of the best right here, Pardner.

A staple of children’s comics that never really prospered in newspapers was the sports adventure. At least not until 1989 when those grown up tykes opened the Daily Mirror to find a football strip entitled Scorer, written by Barrie Tomlinson and drawn by Barry Mitchell, and eventually John Gillatt. Very much an updated Roy of the Rovers, the strip stars Dave ‘Scorer’ Storry and his team Tolcaster F.C. in fast, hot, sexy tales of the Beautiful Game that owed as much to the sports pages it began on as to the grand cartoon tradition. ‘Cup Cracker’, included here is by Tomlinson and Gillatt from 1994, and shows that WAGS (Wives And GirlfriendS, non-sports fans) were never a new phenomenon.

Not many people know this, but before I review an old book (which I arbitrarily define as something more than three years old) I try to locate copies on the internet. It’s a supreme disappointment then for me to admit that this wonderful and utterly British tome is readily available in France, Germany – most of Europe in fact (and you could order it from Amazon.fr for example), but not in any English-speaking nation that I could find. Perhaps that’s a testament to the book’s quality and desirability, and if that’s the case maybe The Mirror Group should expedite a new edition – or even a few sequels…

© 1998 Mirror Group Newspapers, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

By Charles Chilton, Jack Daniel & Frank Humphris (Hawk Books -1990)
ISBN: 0-948248-07-0

In the 1950s Cowboys and Indians ruled the hearts and minds of the public. Westerns were the most popular subject of books, films and comics. The new medium of television screened both recycled cowboy B-movies and eventually serials and series especially created for the stay-at-home aficionado. Some examples were pretty good and became acknowledged as art – as is always the way with popular culture – whilst most others faded from memory, cherished only by the hopelessly nostalgic and the driven.

One medium I didn’t list was radio, an entertainment medium ideal for creating spectacular scenarios and dreamscapes on a low budget. But the BBC (the only legal British radio broadcaster) even managed a halfway decent Western/music show called Riders of the Range. It was written by producer/director Charles Chilton and ran from 1949 until 1953, six series in total.

At the height of its popularity it was adapted as a comic strip in Eagle, which already featured the strip exploits of the immensely successful radio star P.C. 49. The hugely successful comic had already tried a cowboy strip Seth and Shorty, but promptly dropped it. Riders of the Range began as a full colour page in the first Christmas edition (December 22nd 1950, volume 1, No. 37) and ran until 1962, outlasting its own radio show and becoming the longest running western strip in British comics history. In all that time it only ever had three artists.

The first was Jack Daniel, an almost abstract stylist in his designs who worked in bold almost primitive lines, but whose colour palette was years ahead of his time. Crude and scratchy-seeming, his western scenarios were subversive and subliminal in impact. He had previously worked on the newspaper strip Kit Conquest.

Author Chilton had a deep and abiding fascination with the West and often wrote adventures that interwove with actual historical events, such as ‘The Cochise Affair’ reprinted here. This was the second adventure and had heroic Jeff Arnold and sidekick Luke branding cattle for their “6T6” ranch near the Arizona border when they find a raided homestead. A distraught, wounded mother begs for help and reveals that Indians have stolen her little boy. Taking her to Fort Buchanan, Arnold becomes embroiled in a bitter battle of wills between Chief Cochise and Acting Cavalry Commander Lieutenant George N. Bascom. The lean sparse scripts are subtly engaging and Daniel’s unique design and colour sense – although perhaps at odds with the more naturalistic realism of the rest of Eagle‘s drama strips – make this a hugely enjoyable lost gem.

Angus Scott took over from Daniel with ‘Border Bandits’ (September 7th 1951), but was not a popular or comfortable fit and departed after less than a year. With only a single page of his art reprinted here, it’s perhaps fairest to move on to the artist most closely associated with the strip.

Frank Humphris was a godsend. His artwork was lush, vibrant and full-bodied. He was also as fascinated with the West as Chilton himself and brought every inch of that passion to the tales. From July 1952 and for the next decade Chilton and Humphris crafted a thrilling and even educational western saga that is fondly remembered to this day. His tenure is represented here by ‘The War with the Sioux’.

In 1875 gold was discovered in the Black Hills of Dakota and the resultant rush of prospectors resulted in the Cavalry being dispatched to protect them from the incensed Indians. Jeff and Luke are hired as intermediaries and scouts, but are helpless as the situation worsens, resulting in the massacre at Little Big Horn. There have many tales woven into this epochal event, but the patriotically dispassionate creativity of two Britons have united here to craft one of the most beautiful and memorable.

The day of the cowboys’ dominance has faded now but the power of great stories well told has not. This is a series and a book worthy of a more extensive revival. Let’s hope someone with the power to do something about it agrees with me. We’d all be winners then…

Riders of the Range © 1990 Fleetway Publications. Compilation © 1990 Hawk Books.

By various (Carlton Books)
ISBN: 978-1-84442-121-3

DC Thomson is probably the most influential comics publisher in British history. The Beano and Dandy revolutionised children’s comedy comics, the newspaper strips Oor Wullie and The Broons (both created by the legendary Dudley D. Watkins) have become a genetic marker for Scottishness and the uniquely British “ordinary hero” grew from the prose-packed pages of Adventure, Rover, Wizard, Skipper and Hotspur.

In 1961 the company launched a half-sized title called Commando. Broadly the size of a paperback book, it had 68 pages per issue and an average of two panels a page. Each issue told a complete war story (usually of World War I or II – although all theatres of conflict have featured since) and told tasteful yet gripping stories of valour and heroism in stark black and white dramas which came charged with grit and authenticity. The full painted covers made them look more like novels than comics and they were a huge and instant success. They’re still being published at the rate of eight every month.

This volume collects an even dozen of these mini-epics, selected by series editor George Low, and although much of the collection’s marketing concentrates on the nostalgic element by exhorting the reader to remember dashing about the playground shouting “Achtung” or “Donner und Blitzen” and saluting like Storm-troopers, these tales – subtitled “The Toughest 12 Commando Books Ever” are fine and compelling examples of comic storytelling.

Because of company policy these tales are all uncredited, (and I’d rather not prove my vast ignorance by guessing who did what), so you’ll have to be content with the work itself, although the many fan-sites should be able to provide information for the dedicated researcher. So if you’re looking for a more British comics experience, well-written and wonderfully illustrated, check out ‘Guns on the Peak’, ‘The Fighting Few’, ‘Bright Blade of Courage’, ‘The Haunted Jungle’, ‘Tiger in the Tail’, ‘The Specialists’, ‘Mighty Midget’, ‘VLR: Very Long Range’, ‘Flak Fever’, ‘Fight or Die!’, ‘Fearless Freddy’ and ‘Another Tight Spot…’ in this brilliant compilation.

Let’s make it as traditional as watching The Great Escape on a bank holiday.

™ & © 2006 DC Thomson & Co. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.