Category: Comic Strip Classics

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Charley’s War – The Definitive Collection volume 2: Brothers in Arms


By Pat Mills & Joe Colquhoun & various (Rebellion)
ISBN: 978-1-78108-620-9 (TPB/Digital edition)

This book includes Discriminatory Content included for dramatic effect. If any incidence of such slurs, epithets, terms, behaviours or treatments might offend you, you really should not be reading this book or – arguably – maybe you need it more than most.

The Great War officially started today in 1914. I can’t tell you how glad I am that we got all that jingoism, racism, seductive superiority, addictive violence and nationalistic avarice out of our collective systems back then. It’s a much calmer, nicer world now, right?

Meanwhile, here’s more of the best story – bar none in any medium – to translate those appalling, internationally insane, diplomatically deranged and pointlessly self-destructive days into scenarios we can accept if not understand: evocatively and emotionally depicting not only the mud and mire and military madness and mass mortality of that conflict, but also shared with the young and impressionable its impact on the poor and the mighty who survived into the totally different world that came after. You must read it and the other two collected volumes. Message ends.

When Pat Mills & Joe Colquhoun began their tale of a patriotic working-class kid who broke the rules to proudly fight for his country just in time for the disastrous Somme campaign, I suspect they had, as always, the best of authorial intentions but no real idea that this time they were making comics history.

The landmark feature was originally published in British anthology Battle (AKA Battle Picture Weekly, Battle Action, etc.). A surprise hit, the serial proper launched in #200, eventually running from January 1979 to October 1986, recounting in heartrending harrowing detail, and with amazing maturity and passion for a Boys’ Periodical, the life of an East End teenager in the British Army reinforcements setting out to fight the Hun in 1916.

The strip contingent in this second stunning collection covers episodes #87-176/1st November 1980 through 10th July 1982 and comprises one of the most powerful and influential characterisations of the oh-so-ironic “war to end all wars”. Lovingly researched, lavishly limned and staggeringly authentic, the stories touch upon many diverse aspects of the conflict and even reveal the effects on the Home Front, all delivered with a devastatingly understated dry sense of horror and cruel injustice, albeit constantly leavened with gallows humour as trenchant as that legendarily “enjoyed” by the poor trench-bound “Tommies” of the time.

In the previous book “the Story of a Soldier in World War One” followed 16-year-old London Bus Company worker Charley Bourne who lied about his age to illegally go “over there” only to discover unending, enduring horrors on the muddy, blood-soaked battlefield of The Somme. He also experienced the callous ineptitude of upper-class idiots running the war and believing their own men utterly expendable.

Military life was alternately hard and unremittingly dull – except for brief bursts of manic aggression and strategic stupidity which ended so many lives. Closely following the recorded course of the war, Mills & Colquhoun placed young Charley in the Westshire Regiment and added a rapidly changing cast constantly whittled away by various modes of combat attrition.

The weekly hellscapes showed lesser known, far from glorious sides of the conflict readers in the 1980s had never seen in any other war comic. Each episode was punctuated by a narrative device of the simple lad’s letters to his family in “Blighty” whilst also cleverly utilising reproductions of cartoons and postcards of the period.

With Boer War veteran Ole Bill Tozer as his mentor, Charley narrowly survived shelling, mudslides, digging details, gas attacks, the Trench Cat, rats, snipers, smug stupidity of commanding officers – although there are examples of good “brasshats” too – and the far too often insane absurdity of a modern soldier’s life.

On July 1st 1916 The Battle of the Somme began and Charley and his comrades were ordered “over the top”: expected to walk steadily into mortars and machine gun fire of entrenched German defenders. When his commanding officer was unable to stand the stupidity and ordered them to charge at a run, it saved the squad but ultimately led to Lt. Thomas being executed by firing squad. Charley and former musical hall ventriloquist Weeper Watkins refused to shoot him and were extensively punished by sadistic military policeman Sergeant “the Beast” Bacon over and over again…

When Charley and his crooked brother-in-law Oliver Crawleigh were caught in the first tank battle in history and the dreadful German response, chancer “Oiley” offered to pay Charley to either protect him or wound him in some minor way that would get safely back to Britain. When Charley refused, Oiley misused a tank to earn his “Blighty” passage home…

As previously stated, Charley’s War closely follows key events, using them as a skeleton to hang specific incidents upon, but this was not the strip’s only innovation. Highly detailed research concentrated more on character development than fighting – although there’s much shocking action – and declared to the readership (which at time of publication was categorically assumed to be boys aged 9-13) that “our side” was as monstrous and stupid as “the Boche.” Mills also fully exercised his own political and creative agendas on the series and was constantly amazed at what he got away with and what seeming trivialities his editors pulled him up on (more fully expanded upon in the author’s informative ‘Strip Commentary’ which concludes this edition)…

No longer a fresh-faced innocent but a weary, battle-scarred veteran, Charley and the strip marched beyond the cataclysmic Somme Campaign into the conflict’s most bloody events. Charley was wounded again and sent home, albeit via torturous routes involving amnesia and U-Boat warfare. Mills & Colquhoun delivered acerbic social criticism as the recuperating lad experienced fresh horrors when the troop ship carrying him and Bill Tozer was torpedoed…

When the perilous North Sea odyssey at last brought Charley back to Silvertown in London’s West Ham, it was in the wake of a real-world catastrophic disaster wherein 50 tons of TNT detonated at a munitions factory, killing 70 workers and injuring a further 400.

No longer comfortable around civilians and with no stomach for the jingoistic nonsense of the stay-at-homes or the lies of boastful “war-hero” Oiley, Charley hangs out in pubs with the Sarge but is caught up in enemy air raids (giving the creators room to explore the enemy side of the conflict via the zealous actions of devoted family man Kapitan Heinrich von Bergmann who leads a squadron of Zeppelins in night sorties against the hated English)…

London was under constant threat, not just from increasingly common aerial bombing raids which provoked mindless panic and destruction at the very heart of the British Empire, but also profiteering British industrialists and greedy munitions magnates who cared more for profit than the safety of their workers or even the victory of their homeland…

During one raid Charley realised his mum was still in the local works as her boss refused to sound air raid evacuation alarms because he had profits and contracts to consider. Charley’s view of the land he was fighting for barely survived his valiant efforts to save his mum and took an even bigger hit when an unscrupulous army recruiter (earning bonuses for every volunteer signed up) attempted to entrap his underaged but conflict-obsessed little brother Wilf Bourne…

This magnificent (mostly) monochrome mega-compilation resumes the saga, opening in March 1917 with another devilish deviation: the testimony of a charismatic deserter. ‘Blue’s War’ was an experimental story within a story with the strip’s titular character reduced to an avid and appalled listener…

Through eerie blacked-out bombed London Streets Red Caps (military police) hunt deserters, led by a pitiless, fanatical dying-of-wounds officer dubbed The Drag Man. He is most interested in a desperate character called Blue. The knife-wielding fugitive encounters Charley by breaking into the Bourne house. Blue is actually looking for Oiley: a cowardly spiv and petty criminal, inexplicably married to Charley’s sister Dolly. When the crook appears Charley learns the cowardly shirker has graduated from thievery and looting to selling passage abroad and fake papers to absconders from the military…

Disgusted with Oiley and his thuggish stooge Snips Parsons but unwilling to force anyone back into the war, Charley agrees to say nothing and instead asks the charismatic stranger the hows & whys of his situation. In return he hears a staggering tale of combat, cruelty, bravery and army ineptitude.

Blue is an Englishman who joined the French Foreign Legion before serving with the French Army, surviving through the hell of Verdun (longest battle of the WWI, lasting from February 21st to December 18th 1916). The astonishing revelations of this forgotten siege commandeer the strip as episodes of Blue’s War describe Verdun’s many and varied horrors as related by a true outsider hero and British rebel (and based on real-world “Monocled Mutineer” Percy Toplis).

The unfolding flashback account is counterpointed by Blue’s – and now Charley’s – tense and dramatic flight from the Drag Man and his brutal minions across the East End and culminates in the rebel’s escape and Bourne’s grudging return to the Western Front. Just before that though, Charley scuppers Oiley’s latest scam – defrauding bereaved soldiers’ mothers via a fake spiritualist – and exposes another thread of bigotry regarding munitions workers like his poor old mum, reaffirming how then and now the feature was one of the most sophisticated and adult dramas ever seen in fiction, let alone the pages of a kids’ war comic.

Mills & Colquhoun’s comic strip condemnation of the Great War (and war-mongering and profiteering in general) slips into sardonic high gear as the recuperating boy-soldier settles his affairs in London before returning to the terrifying trenches and insane warlords on both sides of No-Man’s Land….

In April 1917 he is a veteran of the front, posted to the Salient before the Third Battle of Ypres and caught up in daily skirmishes, sudden deaths, more arrant stupidity and a simmering feud as fellow early volunteers Grogan and Zippo ruthlessly bully newly conscripted troops like college graduate “Scholar” for being cowardly slackers forced to do their duty. Bourne’s efforts to stay alive and do his job become more difficult when arrogant old enemy and ruthless aristocrat Captain Snell – who thinks the war a terrific lark – returns as commanding officer and appoints Charley his manservant/dogsbody…

Snell constantly undermines and crushes the spirit of the riffraff cannon fodder under his command and loves making their lives intolerable, a practise mirrored by increasingly out-of-control Grogan. When he finally flips and dies, his pal Zippo holds Charley responsible…

By May the infantry are marching in scorching heat and the creators wallow in bizarre historical accuracy and intriguing gallows humour, capitalising on the lengthy build-up of troops which forced a long period of tedious inactivity upon the already bored soldiery. Life in the trenches was always hard and unremittingly dull: a fact reiterated here by such insanity as a cricket match played out whilst shells rain down, Tommies destroying their own equipment and a dozen other daily insanities of the military mind exposed with devastating effect.

As the Third Battle of Ypres soggily unfolds in August and the build-up to the Battle of Passchendaele intensifies, Snell’s unit is posted to an engineering detail short of manpower. Bourne and his pals endure backbreaking toils as “clay-kickers”, risking cave-ins, flood, gas, explosions and Germans above them digging into their tunnels. This push will complete a year-long project undermining a vast ridge of solid rock that is the enemy artillery emplacement on the Messine Ridge. If they don’t die, Charley and co. will pack the explosives for the biggest manmade explosion the world has ever experienced…

In the build-up to that astounding detonation almost everyone dies, but at least Snell also goes to his infernal reward, with the pitiful survivors despatched to “The Bullring” at Etaples: a brutal retraining centre testing the lower ranks to their limits whilst cossetting commissioned officers. It brings Charley into murderous contact with an organised band of deserters – the Sandbaggers – and reunites him with many lost comrades, whilst in England Oiley gets his revenge by facilitating war-mad Wilf Bourne’s enlistment years before he is legally able to. The older Bourne will spend agonised months trying to find out what happened to Wilf…

The mounting tensions, barbarous treatment and institutionalised class injustice at Etaples leads to a British army mutiny (all but written out of our historical record ever since) in September, before triggering the most shameful moments of Charley’s life when he is forced to join another firing squad…

The mutiny goes on for days, emptying stockades and allowing the settling of many old scores, but Charley’s war is even more complicated after meeting the Sandbaggers’ leader who he recognises as someone he never thought to see again. Bourne is even more astonished by the Army’s capitulation to the mutineers’ terms, and totally unprepared for inevitable retaliations. In response he transfers to the most dangerous job in the army to expiate his guilt…

To Be Concluded…

Lifted to dizzying heights of excellence by the phenomenal artwork of Joe Colquhoun – much of it in colour as the strip alternated between the prized cover spot and almost as prestigious centre-spread slot – these are masterpiece of subversive outrage within the greater marvel that is Charley’s War. Included in this volume are a full cover gallery and restored colour sections (reproduced in monochrome for earlier collections but vibrantly hued here to vivid effect) plus Mills’ amazingly informative chapter notes and commentary on the episodes.

This is a highpoint and benchmark in the narrative examination of the Great War in any artistic medium and exists as a shining example of how good “Children’s Comics” can be. It is also one of the most powerful pieces of fiction ever produced for readers of any age. I know of no anti-war story that is as gripping, as engaging and as engrossing, no strip that so successfully transcends its mass-market origins and popular culture roots to become a landmark of fictive brilliance. I’d bribe Ministers to get these wonderful books onto the National Curriculum. We can only thank our lucky stars no Hollywood hack has made it a “blockbuster” inescapably undercutting the tangibility of the “heroes” whilst debasing the message. There is nothing quite like it and you are diminished by not reading it.
© 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985 & 2018 Rebellion Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved. Charley’s War is ™ & © Rebellion Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Moon Mullins: Two Adventures


By Frank H. Willard (Dover)
ISBN: 978-0-4862-3237-9 (TPB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced during less enlightened times.

An immensely popular newspaper strip in its day and a remarkably long-lived one, Moon Mullins grew out of gentle if bucolically rambunctious Irish immigrant ethnic humour to become THE comedy soap opera (one of the very first of its kind) that absolutely everybody in America followed.

Create by Frank Willard – a 2-fisted, no-nonsense type with a cracking ear for dialogue, an unerring eye for swingeing social faux pas and an incorrigible sense of fun – the strip debuted on June 19th 1923. Willard wrote and drew both monochrome dailies and sparkling Sunday colour segments until his death in 1958, whereupon his assistant Ferdinand “Ferd” Johnson (who started working with Willard scant months after the strip’s launch, and continued there even whilst working on his own strips Texas Slim and Lovey-Dovey) assumed complete authorship until his own retirement in 1991 – a gloriously uninterrupted tenure of 68 years.

The feature was marketed around the globe by the mighty Chicago Tribune/New York News Syndicate, and recounted daily the rowdily raucous, ribald, hand-to-mouth lowbrow life and tribulations of Moonshine Mullins, lovable rogue and unsuccessful prize-fighter who was just getting by in tough circumstances…

The doughty rapscallion spent his time in bars, on the streets (sometimes the gutters) and most tellingly at the pokey boarding house of Emmy Schmaltz, located at 1323 Wump Street. Mullins was amiable and good-natured, liked to fight, loved to gamble, was slick with the ladies and had the worst friends imaginable…

He also had an iconic little brother, named Kayo, who was the visual prototype for every one of those tough-kid heroes in Derby hats (“bowlers” to us Brits) and tatty pants populating Simon & Kirby’s early work.

Brooklyn and Scrapper and all those other two-fisted, langwitch-manglin’ cynical, sassy tykes took their cues from the kid in the funny papers who so often had the very last word. The other mainstay of the strip was lanky landlady Emmy; a nosy interfering busybody with inflated airs and graces and a grand line in infectious catchphrases.

Other enticing regulars included Uncle Willie – Moon’s utterly dissolute bad relation; saucy, flighty flapper (Little) Egypt – our hero’s occasional girlfriend and a dead ringer for silent film sensation Louise Brooks (and, incomprehensibly, Emmy’s niece), plus Mushmouth – a black character who will make modern readers wince with social guilt and societal horror. However, to be fair, in this strip which celebrated and venerated working class culture, he was always another unfortunate schmuck on the wrong side and far more a friend than foil, stooge or patsy.

One final regular was affluent Lord Plushbottom, whose eye for the ladies – especially Egypt – constantly brought him sniffing around the boarding house. At the period of the tales in this volume he is a jolly English bachelor, completely unaware that a spidery spinster has set her cap for him. In 1933, after a decade of hilarious pursuit, she finally got her man…

Surprisingly still readily available as a paperback book (surely, if ever anything was crying out to be suitably and permanently digitally archived it’s vintage strips like these!), Moon Mullins: Two Adventures is still readily available and reprints two marvellous extended romps originally reformatted from newspapers and released in 1929 and 1931 by Cupples & Leon – a publishing company which specialized in reprinting popular strips in lush, black-&-white tomes; very much a precursor of both comic books and latterday graphic novels.

In the first yarn Mullins is given a car in payment for $30 he foolishly lent Emmy’s ne’er-do-well brother Ziggy, utterly unaware that the vehicle is stolen. This is a delightful shambolic, knockabout sequence with striking slapstick and clever intrigues resulting in the entire cast behind bars at one time or another.

It should be remembered that the cops in these circumstances and during those tough days were always everybody’s enemy and fools unto themselves…

The second tale describes how Plushbottom treats Emmy and Egypt to a Florida holiday, unaware that he’s also paying for Moon and Mushmouth to join them on a brilliantly inventive and madcap road-trip…

Each adventure is delivered via the incredibly difficult method of one complete gag-strip per day combining to form an over-arching narrative… and they’re all wonderfully drawn and still funny. If you’re a fan of classic W.C. Fields, The Marx Brothers and other giants of vintage screwball comedy you must see this stuff…

Moon Mullins was one of the key foundational strips in the development of both cartooning and graphic narrative: hugely influential, seditiously engaging, constantly entertaining and perfectly drawn. With such a wealth of brilliant material surely, it’s only a matter of time until some sensible publisher with a sense of history releases a definitive series of collected editions?
© 1929, 1931 The Chicago Tribune. All rights reserved.

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Mac Raboy’s Flash Gordon volume 3


By Mac Raboy & Don Moore (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 978-1569719787 (TPB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced during less enlightened times.

By almost every metric, Flash Gordon is the most influential comic strip in the world. When the hero debuted on Sunday January 7th 1934 (with equally superb Jungle Jim running as a supplementary “topper” strip), it was a slick, sophisticated answer to Philip Nolan & Dick Calkins’ revolutionary, ideas-packed, inspirational, but quirkily clunky Buck Rogers (which had also launched on January 7th – albeit in 1929), with two fresh elements added to the wonderment: Classical Lyricism and Poetic Dynamism. The newcomer became a weekly invitation to stunningly exotic glamour and astonishing beauty.

Where Buck merged traditional adventure with groundbreaking science concepts, Flash reinterpreted fairy tales, hero epics and mythology, draping them in the spectacular trappings of contemporary futurism, with the varying “rays”, “engines” and “motors” of modern pulp sci fi substituting for trusty swords and lances. There were also plenty of those too – and exotic craft and contraptions stood in for galleons, chariots and magic carpets. Look closely, though, and you’ll see cowboys, gangsters and of course, flying saucer fetishes adding contemporary flourish to the fanciful fables. The narrative trick made the far-fetched satisfactorily familiar – and was continued with contemporary trends and innovations by Austin Briggs and Don Moore before Mac Raboy, (with Moore and Robert Rogers) took over the Sunday strips in a tenure lasting from 1948 to 1967.

The sheer artistic talent of Raymond, his compositional skills, fine linework, eye for clean, concise detail and just plain genius for drawing beautiful people and things, swiftly made this the strip that all young artists swiped from literally all over the world. When original material comic books began a few years later, many talented kids used Gordon as their model and ticket to future success in the field of adventure strips. Almost all the others went with Raymond’s stylistic polar opposite: emulating Milton Caniff’s expressionist masterwork Terry and the Pirates (and to see one of his better disciples check out Beyond Mars, limned by wonderful Lee Elias).

Flash Gordon began on present-day Earth (which was 1934, remember?) with a wandering world about to smash into our planet. As global panic ensued, polo player Flash and fellow passenger Dale Arden narrowly escaped disaster when a meteor fragment downed their airliner. They landed on the estate of tormented genius Dr. Zarkov, who imprisoned them in the rocket-ship he had built. His plan? To fly the ship directly at the astral invader and deflect it from Earth by crashing into it!

Thus began a decade of sheer escapist magic in a Ruritanian Neverland: a blend of Camelot, Oz and a hundred other fantasy realms promising paradise yet concealing vipers, ogres and demons, all cloaked in a glimmering sheen of sleek scientific speculation. Worthy adversaries such as utterly evil yet magnetic Ming, emperor of the fantastic wandering planet; myriad exotic races and shattering conflicts offered a fantastic alternative to drab and dangerous reality for millions of avid readers around the world.

With Moore handling the majority of the scripting, Alex Raymond’s ‘On the Planet Mongo’ ran every Sunday until 1944, when the artist joined the Marines. On his return, he forsook wild imaginings for sober reality: creating gentleman-detective Rip Kirby. The public’s unmissable weekly appointment with wonderment perforce continued under the artistic auspices of Austin Briggs – who had drawn the monochrome daily instalments since 1940.

In 1948, eight years after beginning his career drawing for the Harry A. Chesler production “shop”, comic book artist Emmanuel “Mac” Raboy took over illustrating the Sunday page. Moore remained as scripter and began co-writing with the new artist.

Raboy’s sleek, fine-line brush style – heavily influenced by his idol Raymond – had made his work on Captain Marvel Jr., Kid Eternity and especially Green Lama a pinnacle of artistic quality in the early days of the proliferating superhero genre. His seemingly inevitable assumption of Flash Gordon’s extraordinary exploits led to a renaissance of the strip and in a rapidly evolving post-war world, it became once more a benchmark of timeless, hyper-realistic quality escapism which only Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant could match. This third 260-page paperback volume – produced in landscape format, printed in stark monochrome and still criminally out-of-print and long overdue for a fresh edition – opens after a gripping and informative appraisal of Raboy in Bruce (Incredible Hulk, Arena, Silverheels, Ka-Zar the Savage) Jones’ Introduction ‘The Body Aerodynamic’. Then it’s blast-off time. again…

Sequence 68 ‘Missiles from Neptune’ began on January 19th 1958 and closed the previous cliffhanging volume barely weeks in. It resumes here with the episode for February 30th and carries on until March 9th, revealing how the oppressive Tyrant of Neptune seeks to impress and cow into submission his already-captive populace by testing deadly new Weapons of Interplanetary Destruction against hapless planet Earth.

The callous campaign prompts Flash to go and discourage him, but after superbly succeeding the conquering hero is lost in the interplanetary void and forced to build a survival nest inside an asteroid. His ingenuity as a ‘Robinson Crusoe in Space’ (16th March – 27th April) once more demonstrates the compelling power of straight, hard science storytelling (especially at a time when America was locked in a space race of its own), but it’s back to fantastic empires and extragalactic terror for his next exploit as Earth is menaced by ‘The Z Bomb Cloud’ (4th May – 15th June).

Long after a far-distant civilisation destroys itself, the deadly fallout of its doomsday weapon drifts into Earth orbit, threatening all terrestrial life. When Zarkov’s desperate plan to intercept the cloud goes wrong, someone must sacrifice themself to save us all…

Obviously, just this once it isn’t Flash, but the potent drama peaks with appropriate tragedy and sentiment anyway, before sequence S071 taps into the sheer burgeoning wonderment of the era as Flash and Dale help big game hunter Brian Farr prove the existence of uncanny unseen cryptids he calls ‘Stratosphere Beasts’ (22nd June – 17th August). These invisible beasts apparently dwell far above Earth’s highest mountain tops, so the endeavour takes the humans to the top of Everest where the unknown isn’t the only trial they face…

From 24th August to October 12th S072 told how the ace space pilot was embroiled in a commercial show-race to the outer planets. However, the ‘Rocket Derby’ is apparently less about proving whose ship is best and more about rich, spoiled obsessive competitors Morgan Bates and Babara “Bobcat” Kathryns realising how close hate is to love…

Along the way, Dale is dragged into the competition after hearing macho males telling Bobcat that space is no place for women, even as hired gun Flash suffers numerous sabotage attempts. It’s almost like there’s an unknown fifth element acting on their own agenda…

It’s back to dramatic basics for ‘Moon Wreck’ (S073, running from 19th October to December 14th) wherein Gordon attempts to rescue an arrogant playboy and his latest dalliance from a self-inflicted crash and subsequent marooning on Luna. The pilot’s every valiant effort is hampered by the autocrat’s privilege, greed, stupidity and cowardice, vain starlet’s Elyse Elan’s venality, and the deadly environment they both refuse to take seriously…

Gordon’s piloting skills land him in more trouble in ‘The Ship of Gold’ (S074: December 21st 1958 to January 2nd 1959) when he captains a transport of mining machinery and tons of cash to Mars, only to have the ship stolen out from under him with Dale trapped aboard. The evil mastermind is old college colleague Nicky Hamilton, but when the boastful villain abandons current girlfriend Jet in a ruthless attempt to loose Flash in the airless wastes of Titan, he seals his own fate and accidentally exposes a major threat to Earth in succeeding saga ‘The Skorpi’ (February 8th – April 5th)…

Left for dead, Flash and Dale fall through Titan’s surface to discover an insectoid alien invasion force. Skorpi can become copies of humans and are well advanced in a plot to infiltrate Earth, but aren’t quick enough to outwit Flash, especially once he befriends captive telepathic ET Brunn. His gigantic kind are Gorgins and with their allies The Dhreen have been battling Skorpi for 30,000 years. Together, the new pals whip up a plan to defeats this particular incursion…

Brunn then adapts a ship to Faster-Than-Light drive and accompanies Flash on a ‘Flight for Help’ (S076: April 12th – June 7th), beseeching Dhreen’s Council of Elders for military aid. Instead, the embassage is covertly targeted by their other client vassals – like Brunn’s own Gorgin race – who fear their share of aid will be diminished if the benign overlords help yet another endangered species…

Plots become assassination attempts, but only accidentally expose Skorpi infiltration, leading Brunn and Gordon to further corruption, exile and ultimately capture by a hidden race who dwell unsuspected in a ‘City of Glass’ (S077: June 14th to August 23rd). Condemned to death for breaking the metropolis’ sacrosanct isolation, the wanderers are only saved by lovely, sympathetic Flara, who aids the human’s escape back to the Solar system but keeps adorable Brunn by her side…

The Earthman only makes it as far as the second rock from the Sun and S078 (August 30th – November 1st) radically changes pace for a ‘Venus Mystery’ wherein human colonists face disaster as their Bajo crop is targeted by “swamp devils”. In an early lesson in green land management, crash-landed Flash aids ecologist Dirk Van Meer in proving to the furious farmers how badly wrong they have got things, what is actually to blame for all the chaos and carnage and how to fix it…

Immediate emergency over, Flash finally reaches Earth to find Zarkov impatiently waiting. Before he can catch his breath the steadfast starman is dragooned into a dangerous new experiment with cyberneticist Dr. Else Neilson having him ride along as a fallback option as she “road-tests” her ‘Robot Spaceship’ (S079: November 8th 1959 to 17th 1960). Fully automated – and what we’d call AI – the ship has human safety as its core drive, but of course, human and mechanical opinions on what exactly that means differ extensively…

Thanks in large part to Flash Gordon, spaceship technology has rapidly advanced and he is selected to pilot the first human-built FTL drive ship. The Columbus will ferry ‘The Star Miners’ (S080: January 24th – March 27th) to another star system, reap mineral wealth and set up a colony. However, the directives of chief advisor Dr. Zarkov are constantly challenged and ultimately overruled by gang-boss Mr. Birk, who can only think of glory and a big fat bonus promised for prompt completion and delivery…

Arriving on unexplored planet Karst, Zarkov again urges patience and caution, but is first sidelined and then arrested once Flash undertakes his secondary mission of exploration. By the time the hero returns the entire expedition is close to extinction and only drastic measures can save them all…

On returning to Earth, welcome shore-leave ends in catastrophe when Flash is shanghaied by “entrepreneurs” Roni and Captain Graz: kidnapped into space and ordered to pilot their ship or die. They need someone able to deliver potentially ‘Deadly Cargo’ (S081: April 3rd to June 12th) and navigate through the asteroid belt to mineral-rich big rock Juno, where a huge diamond strike has created urgent demand for explosives. It’s also a race setting competitive old rivals at each other’s throats and costs plenty of nefarious lives before Gordon gets ramshackle freighter Pollux down (relatively) safely…

Subsequent attempts to get off Juno turn wild and dangerous in ‘The Soil Divers’ (S082: June 19th – August 28th) when Flash is suckered into an ongoing resource war on the mining asteroid. Scientist Ben Corelli has devised a means of passing through solid matter, but fallen under the spell of avaricious faithless Roni and her new heavy Snapper Kaye, sparking violent conflict amongst those desperate diggers stuck using old methods of extracting mineral wealth. Soon, the attempts to seize Corelli’s breakthrough tech leads to murder and worse…

A self-aggrandising, fame-hungry documentary filmmaker obsessed with his legacy makes trouble for Dale – and therefore Flash – next. Charles Q. Charlston brings ‘Dead Worlds’ (S083: September 4th to November 20th) and lost civilisations to the masses, but has no qualms or scruples about breaking all the rules of space conduct: cheating, lying, stealing and even killing to ensure his own glory… until Gordon steps up. He and Dale are then called to the ringed planet and a reunion and to assist Brian Farr, now ‘Game Warden on Saturn’ (S084: November 27th 1960 to February 19th 1961)…

His job is currently complicated by the system’s most successful poacher – cunning sadist Von Brandt – who seeks the joy of hunting and intends making millions selling the skins of a rare indigenous lifeform. He’s also happy to excise interfering busybodies for free…

A maritime tang and epic approach flavours ‘The Trail of Orpheus’ (S085: February 26th – May 28th) when Flash joins oceanologists Henry and Veronica Weeks on a submarine to map the unique and spectacular “Devils Spring” environmental phenomenon making the watery world so hazardous to rocket ships. Their undersea voyage reveals fantastic truths about the past rulers of the planet and changes the solar system forever…

It’s a welcome return to space opera and pulp overtones as S086 sees an orbital agriculture satellite accidentally invaded by space gremlins and transformed into a ‘Death Farm in Space’ (June 4th to September 3rd) until Zarkov and Flash investigate and act, all followed by comedic whimsy as a band of backward-looking human bandits revolt against ecological progress in ‘Desert Prince’ (S087: September 10th to December 10th)…

When Earth loses the final dusty miles of once-barren Sahara to water reclamation projects, reactionary tribal chieftain Al Maarri refuses to take up farming and instead leads his raiders on a wave of sorties. The campaign of resistance culminates in his stealing a rocket ship to carry his entire bandit horde and their families to Mars where civilisation is scarce, law is poorly enforced and beautiful sandy wastes are abundant. Soon, armed with modern weapons, he’s making life difficult for genuine colonists, forcing under-resourced Flash to solve the problem creatively. That means infiltrating the tribe with the assistance of the long-suffering wives, children and oldsters the rowdy raiders forcibly dragged along with them…

Law & order was the theme of the next tale as readers gained insights into future traffic management solutions in the crowded orbital paths above Earth. The revelations came thanks to Flash visiting old pal “Ape” Rice, an officer of the ‘Spaceways Patrol’ (S088: December 17th 1961 to April 1st 1962).

Sadly, it’s not a friendly visit: Gordon works for the World Space Patrol and is on an official inspection of the Police satellite. Silly cultural satire – observing how dumb the private citizens “driving” in space are – quickly gives way to taut drama when recently-ousted national despot Generalissimo Sanre and his entourage seize the station through subterfuge, planning to blackmail the world with its arsenal of atomic weapons…

With only Flash and Ape free to act, tragedy inevitably follows the deadly fight that ensues before the planet is free from the threat of global tyranny…

The same blend of expansive wonder and human frailty permeates the saga of a blonde, blue-eyed hero found in a block of arctic ice – a tale told in full in S089, spanning April 8th through July 15th 1962. Incidentally, The Avengers #4 was released on January 3rd 1964, reintroducing Captain America to the world. I’m just saying…

Here, the ‘Living Fossil’ is found by researchers testing magnetic fields in Greenland and only involves Flash when defrosted berserker Ragnor goes on a rampage that brings him to the airfield Gordon is trying to land on. A renewed assault traps the Viking aboard (with Flash and a crew that includes handy Scandinavian scholar Eva) on a flight to Venus: a world far more in keeping with the barbarian’s culture of warriors, trolls, goblins, dwarves… and dragons…

This third astounding visit to a historical future closes with another technological nightmare and disaster-movie precursor spanning July 22nd to October 14th 1962. ‘Falling Moon’ (S090) reveals how massive artificial satellite Deepspace-One – jumping-off point for all outgoing Earth space travel – is struck by a meteor. Deflected and doomed, it slowly falls, leaving Flash only five hours to evacuate its resort contingent and find a way to save Earth from impact and atomic fallout…

As the adventures never ended, we close the collection with the opening of another exploit and pause on a moment of cliffhanging suspense. ‘Sons of Saturn’ (S091: in its original entirety running from October 21st 1962 to January 20th 1963) stops here with the December 9th episode. Prior to that point, a hitherto unsuspected super-civilisation thriving in the clouds of the Sixth Planet is revealed when an Earth probe provokes the current dictator to determine human nature and resource by sending super-criminal outcast Baldr to plague, punish and test them. That results in the indestructible giant breaking into Flash’s ship and going on a rampage…

To Be Continued…

Each week as he toiled on the strip, Raboy produced ever-more expansive artwork filled with distressed damsels, deadly monsters, incredible civilisations, increasingly authentic space hardware and locales, and all sorts of outrageous adventure that continued until the illustrator’s untimely death in 1967. Perhaps it was a kindness. He was the last great Golden Age romanticist illustrator and his lushly lavish, freely-flowing adoration of perfected human form was beginning to stale in popular taste. The Daily feature had already switched to the solid, chunky, He-Manly burly realism of Dan Barry and Frank Frazetta, but here at least the last outpost of ethereally beautiful heroism and pretty perils still prevailed: a dream realm you can visit as easily and often as Flash, Dale & Zarkov popped between planets, just by tracking down this book and the one which follows…
© 2003 King Features Syndicate Inc. ™ & © Hearst Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.

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TinTin’s Moon Adventure/Tintin on the Moon/Adventures of Tintin: Destination Moon & Explorers on the Moon



By Hergé, Bob De Moors and others, translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper & Michael Turner (Egmont UK/Farshore)
ISBN: 978-1-40520-815-4 (HB Destination) 978-1-40520-627-3 (TPB Destination)
ISBN: 978-1-40520-816-1 (HB Explorers) 978-1-40520-628-0 (TPB Explorers) Tintin’s Moon Adventure (Magnet/Methuen) ISBN: 978-0-41696-710-4 (TPB)
Tintin on the Moon (Egmont) ISBN: 978-1405295901 (HB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced during less enlightened times.

Georges Prosper Remi, known all over the world as Hergé, created a true masterpiece of graphic literature with his tales of a plucky boy reporter and entourage of iconic associates. Initially singly and later with stellar assistants including Edgar P. Jacobs, Bob de Moor and the Hergé Studio, Remi completed 23 splendid volumes (originally produced as episodic instalments for numerous periodicals) which have grown beyond their popular culture roots and attained the status of High Art.

Like Dickens with The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Hergé died working, so final outing Tintin and Alph-Art remains a tale without an official conclusion, but is still a fascinating examination and a pictorial memorial of how the artist worked. It’s only fair though, to ascribe a substantial proportion of credit to the many translators whose diligent contributions have enabled the series to be understood and beloved in more than 70 languages. The subtle, canny, witty and slyly funny English versions are the work of Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper & Michael Turner.

On leaving school in 1925, Remi worked for Catholic newspaper Le XXe Siècle where he apparently fell under the influence of its Svengali-like editor Abbot Norbert Wallez. The following year, the young artist (himself a dedicated boy scout) produced his first strip series – The Adventures of Totor – for monthly Boy Scouts of Belgium magazine. By 1928, he was in charge of producing the contents of Le XXe Siècle’s children’s weekly supplement Le Petit Vingtiéme. Remi was unhappily illustrating The Adventures of Flup, Nènesse and Poussette and Cochonette (written by a staff sports reporter) when Wallez urged the auteur to create an entirely new adventure series. Perhaps a young reporter who would travel the world, doing good whilst displaying solid Catholic values and virtues? Perhaps he might also highlight and expose some of the Faith’s greatest enemies and threats?

Having recently discovered word balloons in imported newspaper strips, Remi opted to incorporate this simple yet effective innovation into his own work, and produced a strip that was both modern and action-packed. Beginning on January 10th 1929, Tintin au pays des Soviets AKA Tintin in the Land of the Soviets changed the comics world. Happy 95th Anniversary, Young Man!

The strip appeared in weekly instalments in Le Petit Vingtiéme, running until May 8th 1930: meaning Tintin remains one of the very first globally successful strip characters, barely preceded by Tarzan and Buck Rogers (both January 7th 1929) and pipping Popeye who only shambled into view on January 17th of that year…

The boy-hero – a combination of Ideal Good Scout and Remi’s own brother Paul (a soldier in the Belgian Army) – would be accompanied by his dog Milou (Snowy to us English speakers) and report back all the inequities from the “Godless Russias”. The strip’s prime conceit was that Tintin was an actual foreign correspondent for Le Petit Vingtiéme and opens with the pair arriving in Russia. The dog and his boy were constantly subject to attacks and tricks by “the Soviets” to prevent the truth of their failed economic progress, specious popular support and wicked global aspirations being revealed to the Free World.

Some of the history beyond that first epic trek is quite dark: During the Nazi Occupation of Belgium, Le Vingtiéme Siècle was closed down and Hergé was compelled to transfer the strip to daily newspaper Le Soir (Brussels’ most prominent French-language periodical, and thus appropriated and controlled by the Nazis). Remi diligently toiled on for the duration, but following Belgium’s liberation was accused of collaboration and being a Nazi sympathiser.

It took the intervention of Belgian Resistance war-hero Raymond Leblanc to dispel the cloud over Hergé, which he did by resolutely vouching for the cartoonist and providing cash to create a new magazine – Le Journal de Tintin – which Leblanc published and managed.

The anthology swiftly achieved a weekly circulation in the hundreds of thousands and enabled the artist and his team to remaster past tales: excising material dictated by and added to ideologically shade war time adventures, as well as generally improving and updating great tales that were about to become a global phenomenon. With WWII over and his reputation restored, Hergé entered the most successful period of his career. He had mastered his storytelling craft, commanded a dedicated audience eager for his every effort and was finally able to say exactly what he wanted in his work, free from fear or censure.

In 1949 he returned to unfinished yarn Tintin au pays de l’or noir – abandoned when the Nazis invaded Belgium. The story had been commissioned by Le Vingtiéme Siècle, running from 28th September 1939 until 8th May 1940 when the paper was shut down. Set on the eve of a European war, the plot revolved around Tintin hunting seditionists and saboteurs tampering with Middle East oil supplies. Before being convinced to update and complete the tale as Land of Black Gold, Hergé briefly toyed with taking his cast into space…

Collected albums Objectif Lune and On a marché sur la Lune were colossal hits after initial serialisation in LJdT  from 30th March 1950 – 7th September 1950  and – after what must have been an intolerable wait for readers – from 29th October 1952 – 29th December 1953.

The tale was produced after discussions between Hergé and his friends Bernard Heuvelmans (scientist, author and father of pseudo-science Cryptozoology) and Jacques Van Melkebeke (AKA George Jacquet: strip scripter, painter, journalist and frequent if unacknowledged contributor to Tintin’s canon). The sci fi epic which became a 2-volume masterpiece first made the leap to English in 1959.

On a personal note: I first read Destination Moon in 1964, in a huge hardcover album edition (as they all were in the 1960s) and was blown completely away. I’m happy to say that except for the smaller pages – and there’s never a substitute for “pictorial Big-ness” – this taut thriller and its magnificent, mind-boggling sequel are still in a class of their own in the annals of science fiction comic strips. During the 1980s the entire tale was (repeatedly) released in a combined tome as Tintin’s Moon Adventure: an utterly inescapable piece of publishing common sense. It’s just a shame that it – and all the other the Tintin books – are still not available in digital editions…

Our tale opens with the indomitable boy reporter and Captain Haddock returning to ancestral pile Marlinspike Hall only to discover brilliant but “difficult” savant Professor Cuthbert Calculus has disappeared. When an enigmatic telegram arrives, the puzzled pair are off once again to Syldavia (as seen in King Ottokar’s Sceptre) and a rendezvous with the missing boffin…

Although suspicious, Tintin soon finds the secrecy is for sound reasons. In Syldavia, Calculus and an international team of researchers, engineers and technologists are completing a grand project to put a man on the Moon! In a turbulent race against time and amidst a huge and all-encompassing security clampdown, the scheme nears completion, but Tintin and Haddock’s arrival coincides with a worrying increase in espionage activity.

Some enemy nation or agency is determined to steal the secrets of Calculus’s groundbreaking atomic motor at any cost, and it takes all Tintin’s ingenuity to keep ahead of the villains. The arrival of detectives Thompson and Thomson adds nothing to the aura of anxiety but their bumbling investigations and Calculus’ brief bout of concussion-induced amnesia provide some of the funniest moments in comics history…

As devious incidents and occurrences of sabotage increase in intensity and frequency it becomes clear that there is a traitor inside the project, but at last the moment arrives and Tintin, Haddock, Calculus, technologist Dr. Frank Wolff (and Snowy) blast off for space!

Cold, clinical and superbly underplayed, Destination Moon is completely unlike the flash-and-dazzle razzamatazz of British or American tales from that period – or since. It is as if the burgeoning Cold War mentality of the era infected even Tintin’s bright clean world. Moreover, as before, pressure of work and Hergé’s troubled private life resulted in a breakdown and forced hiatus in the serial, but this time some of that darkness transferred to the material – although it only seems to have added to the overall effect of claustrophobia and paranoia. Even comedy set-pieces are more manic and explosive: despite its fantastic premise, in many ways this is the most mature of all Tintin’s exploits…

Presumably to offset the pressures, the master founded Studio Hergé, beginning on 6th April 1950: a public company to produce The Adventures of Tintin as well other features, with Bob De Moor enthroned as chief apprentice. He became a vital component of Tintin’s gradual domination of the book market: frequently despatched on visual fact-finding missions. De Moor revised the backgrounds of The Black Island for a British edition, repeating the task for a definitive 1971 release of Land of Black Gold. An invaluable and permanent addition to the production team, De Moor supervised and administrated while filling in backgrounds and, most notably, rendering those unforgettably eerie, magnificent Lunar landscapes of the sequel volume.

If the first book is an exercise in tension and suspense, Explorers on the Moon is sheer bravura spectacle. En route to Luna the explorers discover the idiot detectives have stowed away by accident. In conjunction with Captain Haddock’s illicit whisky imbibing and the effects of freefall, Thompson & Thomson provide brilliant comedy routines to balance the pervasive isolation and dramatic dangers of the journey.

Against all odds the lunanauts land safely and make astounding scientific discoveries. We Boomers knew decades ago that there was water on the moon because Tintin and Snowy went skating there! However, the explorations are cut short due to the imminent threat of suffocation after the discovery of another extra passengers on the rocket. Moreover, lurking in the shadows is the very real threat of a murderous traitor to be dealt with…

This so-modern yarn is a high point in the entire Tintin canon, blending heroism and drama with genuine moments of irresistible emotion… and side-splitting comedy. The absolute best of the bunch in my humble opinion, and still one of the most realistic and accurately depicted space comics ever produced. If you only ever read one Hergé saga it simply must be the translunar Adventure of Tintin.
Destination Moon: artwork © 1953, 1959, 1981 Editions Casterman, Paris & Tournai. Text © 1959 Egmont UK Limited. All Rights Reserved. Explorers on the Moon: artwork © 1954, 1959, 1982 Editions Casterman, Paris & Tournai. Text © 1959 Egmont UK Limited. All Rights Reserved.

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Tarzan and the Adventurers (Complete Burne Hogarth Comic Strip Library volume 5)


By Burne Hogarth & Rob Thompson with James Freeman, Dan Barry, Nick Cardy, Bob Lubbers & various (Titan Books)
ISBN: 978-1-78565-380-3 (landscape album HB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced during less enlightened times.

The 1930 and 1940s were decades of astounding pictorial periodical adventure. In the age before mass television, newspaper strips (and their bastard spawn comic books) were the only form of visually-based home entertainment for millions of citizens young and old, consequently shaping the culture of many nations. Relatively few strips attained nigh-universal approval and acclaim. The Gumps, Little Orphan Annie, Flash Gordon, Mandrake the Magician, Terry and the Pirates and Prince Valiant were in that rarefied pantheon but arguably the most famous was Tarzan.

Evolving from mock melodrama comedic features like Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs or Carl Ed’s Harold Teen, the full-blown dramatic adventure serial truly started on January 7th 1929 with Buck Rogers and Tarzan debuting that day. Both were skilful adaptations of pre-existing prose properties and their influence changed the shape of the medium forever. The following years saw an explosion of similar fare, launched with astounding rapidity to huge success. Not only strips, but also actual fictive genres were born in that decade, still impacting today’s comic books and all our popular entertainment forms.

In terms of art quality, adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ immensely successful novels starring jungle-bred John Clayton, Lord Greystoke by Canadian commercial artist Harold “Hal” Foster were unsurpassed. The strip soon became beloved by the masses, supplementing and nurtured by the movies, books, radio show and ubiquitous advertising appearances.

As detailed in previous volumes of this sublime oversized (330 x 254 mm), monochrome/full -colour hardback series, Foster initially quit at the end of a 10-week adaptation of first novel Tarzan of the Apes. He was replaced by Rex Maxon, but at the insistent urging of author Burroughs, returned when the black-&-white daily expanded to include a lush, full colour Sunday page offering original adventures. Maxon was left to capably handle the weekday book adaptations, as Foster crafted the epic and lavish Sunday page until 1936: 233 consecutive weeks. He then left again for good: moving to King Features Syndicate and his own landmark weekend masterpiece Prince Valiant in the Days of King Arthur which debuted in February 1937. Once the 4-month backlog of material he had built up was gone, Foster was succeeded by a precociously brilliant 25-year old neophyte.

Burne Hogarth was a passionate graphic visionary whose superb anatomical skill, cinematic design flair and compelling page composition revolutionised action/adventure narrative illustration. His galvanic dynamism of idealised human figures and animals can still be seen in today’s comic books: all that impossibly body-positive perfection in motion can be directly attributed to Hogarth’s pioneering drawing and, in later years, educational efforts. Burroughs was a big fan and cannily used the increasingly popular comic strip to cross-market his own prose efforts with great effect.

This fabulous fifth & final tome encompasses Sunday pages from October 1949 to September 1950 and the equivalent Daily strips (September 1947 through September 1950), with Hogarth gradually easing out of the now-onerous job and employing a legion of gifted ghosts to fulfil his obligations. During this period, commercially-led format changes reduced the size and changed the shape of the Sunday strip from tabloid to landscape framing, but the contents suffered no loss of wonder, action or drama. The transition and repercussions are discussed with some academic frontloading and fitting further explanation in the form of extended essay ‘Transforming Tarzan’s Jungle’ by Henry G. Franke III. Fully briefed for our trek, we resume the fun with ‘Tarzan and the Adventurers’: Sunday pages #973 – 1010 as seen spanning October 30th 1949 to July 16th 1950. The saga was crafted by Hogarth, writer Rob Thompson and latterly James Freeman – who was forced upon Hogarth after the syndicate fired his preferred collaborator. It sees the Ape-Man visiting old ally Masai chief N’Kola just as white explorers Baker and Cleveland arrive, seeking the tribes’ help in locating a medicinal herb which might be a malaria cure.

In truth, the scurrilous duo are hunting lost treasure sunk in kingdom-demarcating Lake Dagomba, and need help in convincing Dagomba headman Mabuli to allow them access. This chief hates Tarzan but the impasse is ended when wicked witch doctor Chaka strikes a sinister side deal that triggers valiant efforts and vile betrayal, double cross, murder and bloody civil warfare incorporating spectacular chases, fantastic duels with beasts, mortals and the very landscape, captivating readers for months until the saga ended with explosive irony and tons of TNT…

The end was near for Hogarth and the Jungle Lord, and the Sunday association closed in a short serial finished by a comic book artist slowly making strips his career. Born in 1922, Robert Bartow “Bob” Lubbers drew a host of features before WWII, but other than The Vigilante and The Human Fly after hostilities ceased, mostly settled on newspaper stars like The Saint, Big Ben Bolt, Li’l Abner, Secret Agent X-9 and his own creations Long Sam and Robin Malone. That all occurred after a stellar run assisting/replacing Hogarth.

Ostensibly crafted by – and still signed “Hogarth”, ‘Tarzan and the Wild Game Hunters’ (#1011-1019: July 23rd to September 17th 1950) saw the vine-voyaging valiant aid cowboy-turned safari man Russ Rawson in capturing a rhino and gorilla for Winchester Zoo… but only after determining that Africa would be a far better place without these pair of particularly perilous rogue beasts…

Before switching to moody monochrome and standard single tier-per-diem layouts for the dailies section, Franke III explores ‘The Daily Grind’ in another erudite prose prologue preceding the accumulated serial sequences: providing context and background on writer Thompson and artistic aids/replacements Dan Barry, Nick Cardy & Lubbers, with John Lehti and Paul Reinman also getting a worthy mention.

Monday to Saturday storylines were relentless and tough to get right. No matter how good you are, there’s only so much progress to be made in 3-4 panels at a time, and savvy creators usually combined classic themes with familiar material whenever they could. Here that notion resulted in a (very) broad adaptation/reinterpretation of ERB’s prose pulp serial Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, which had been first serialised between September 1929 and March 1930 ,before becoming the 13th canonical novel in 1932. The strips comprising ‘Tarzan at the Earth’s Core’ (#2509 to 2616, September 1st 1947 through January 3rd 1948) were supervised by Hogarth & Thompson but limned primarily by Dan Barry (1911-1997).

He also began as a jobbing comic book guy. Like his own brother Seymour “Sy” Barry – who produced The Phantom newspaper strip for three decades – Dan worked in a finely-detailed, broadly realistic style, blending aesthetic sensibility with straightforward visual clarity and firm, almost burly virile toughness: a gritty “He-man” attitude for a new era, contemporarily christened “New York Slick”.

He drew masked hero fare like Airboy, Skywolf, Boy King, Black Owl, Spy Smasher, Doc Savage and more before joining the US Air Force and, on returning after the hostilities, drew monster hero The Heap and sundry genre shorts for titles like Crimebusters whilst running his own outfit producing educational/informational comics. Dan began his  gradual withdrawal from funnybooks as early as 1947, joining Hogarth’s studio and assuming art chores on the Tarzan daily for a year, whilst still gracing DC’s crime, mystery and science fiction anthologies until as late as 1954. He was offered Flash Gordon and quickly accepted, but that’s the stuff of another review…

In deepest, darkest Africa, the Jungle Lord is tracked down by explorer Jason Gridley who has been in contact with a man named David Innes, and resolved to save that lost soul. Innes is an adventurer who joined Professor Abner Perry in a giant drilling vehicle that took them deep inside the Earth. They are now trapped in an incredible antediluvian realm more than 500 miles below the world’s crust: a land of beast men, lost empires, dinosaurs and even more incredible things…

Tarzan is largely a spectator for this sequence as ERB’s prose adventures in Pellucidar are updated and recounted for readers before Lord Greystoke joins the rescue party using another mole machine – built by boffin Dr. Dana Franklin – to reach the exotic underworld. Adding romantic interest is Franklin’s glamourous daughter/assistant Doris as they voyage deep into a myriad of incredible adventures.

As well as saving Innes and Perry and reuniting the former with his own true love Dian the Beautiful, the newcomers face sentient pterodactyl tyrants (Thipdars if you’re au fait with the books), clash with cavemen and ape beasts (Sagoths), fight a macabre menagerie of long-extinct monsters, war with lizard warriors (Horibs) and get utterly lost and reunited in a land where time does not pass and night never comes…

The series is a paean to primitivism and is a boost to all those besotted with wild kingdoms. There are even pulchritudinous primeval pairings… Gridley to cavegirl princess Jana and Doris with Clovian cave chief Ulan…

The drama is divided into individual overlapping adventures until all the players eventually reunite for a big, big finale. With the aforementioned ghost artists deployed to augment Barry & Thompson, the saga concludes with episodes #2617-2640 of ‘Tarzan at the Earth’s Core’ (January 5th – 31st January 1948) as all the plot threads cleave together and those who want to return to the surface do so…

Although he was still involved in a mostly administrative capacity, Hogarth’s signature had been missing for some time when ‘Tarzan and Hard-Luck Harrigan’ #3361-3414: 22nd May – 22nd July 1950) began. The strip sported the name of new illustrator Nick Cardy; AKA strip veteran Nicolas Viscardi, who had drawn Lady Luck and other features for Will Eisner, and post-war became a DC mainstay on Gang Busters, Congo Bill, Aquaman, Teen Titans, Bat Lash, Batman/The Brave and the Bold and so much more. The tale itself was lighter fare with humorous overtones as Greystoke encountered a decrepit and devious old western prospector/snake oil peddler who had foolishly hitched his wagon to an African adventure… The affable scoundrel initially tried to capture Tarzan’s monkey pals before attempting to catch and sell the Ape-man himself before learning the error of his ways…

Sadly, old habits died hard. When the odd companions encountered desert raider El Mahmud dying of wounds, they were forced by the bandit’s devoted lieutenant Rambul to “cure” him with Harrigan’s bottled nostrum. That’s when the literal gold-digger spots the treasure the raiders possess and reverts to type, determined to enjoy one last lucky strike, no matter who he must betray…

Again demarcated by an artist change, ‘Tarzan and Hard-Luck Harrigan’ concluded with episodes #3415-3420 (24th – 29th July 1950) signifying the beginning of Lubbers 3½ year tenure, with a rowdily raucous big battle and the old coot’s redemption before moving briefly on to final inclusion ‘Attack of the Apes’ (#3421-3462: 31st July – 16th September 1950) with Lubbers benefitting from Hogarth’s last moments of oversight in a spooky yarn where a renegade troop of Great Apes (the fictious subspecies that reared Tarzan) begin attacking native villages…

After investigating in the primal manner of the lord of the forests, Tarzan gains a new anthropoid assistant in brutal Bay-At, learns who, why and what the true culprits are and renders his own judgement…

And that was that for Hogarth’s Tarzan until a flurry of new material appeared as graphic novel prototypes in the 1970s, which helped usher in a more mature view of the comics medium itself.

Tarzan is a fictive figure who has attained immortal reality in a number of different creative arenas, but none offer the breathtaking visceral immediacy of Burne Hogarth’s comic strips. These vivid visual masterworks are all coiled-spring tension or vital, violent explosive motion: stretching, running, fighting, surging rushes of power and glory where even backgrounds and landscapes achieve a degree of dramatic interactive expressionism. It’s a dream come true that these majestic exploits are available in full for ours and future generations of dedicated fantasists to enjoy.
Trademarks Tarzan® and Edgar Rice Burroughs® owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. and Used by Permission. Copyright © 2018 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Batman: Silver Age Dailies and Sundays volume 1: 1966-1967


By Whitney Ellsworth, Joe Giella, Sheldon Moldoff, Carmine Infantino, Bob Powell, Werner Roth, Curt Swan & various (Library of American Comics)
ISBN: 987-1-61377-845-6 (HB)

Last century in America the newspaper comic strip was the Holy Grail all cartoonists and graphic narrative storytellers aspired to and hungered for; syndicated across the country and the planet. Always a prime tool of circulation-building, strips won millions of readers and were regarded (in most places) as a more mature and sophisticated form of literature than comic books.

They also paid better, and the Holiest of Holies was a full-colour Sunday page, so it was always something of a poisoned chalice if comic book characters became so popular that they swam against the tide and became a syndicated serial strip. After all, weren’t funnybooks invented just to reprint the strips in cheap accessible form?

Both Superman and Wonder Woman made the jump soon after their debuts and many features have done so since. Due to numerous war-time complications, the Batman and Robin newspaper strip was slow getting its shot, but when the Dynamic Duo finally hit the comics section of papers, the feature proved to be one of the best-regarded, highest quality examples of the trend, both in Daily and Sunday formats (and we’ll be covering what collections there are of those landmarks quite soon in this Dark Knight anniversary year).

The 1940s strips never achieved the circulation they deserved, but the Sundays were latterly given a new lease of life when DC began including selected episodes in the 1960s Batman 80-Page Giants and Annuals. Those exceedingly high-quality adventures were ideal short stories, adding an extra cachet of exoticism for youngsters captivated by simply seeing their heroes in tales that were positively ancient and redolent of History with a capital “H”.

Such was not the case as the decade proceeded when, for a relatively brief moment, humanity went bananas for superheroes in general but most especially went “Bat-Mad”…

Comic books’ Silver Age utterly revolutionised a creatively moribund medium cosily snoozing in unchallenging complacency, bringing a modicum of sophistication to the returning genre of masked mystery men. For quite some time the changes instigated by Julius Schwartz in Showcase #4 (October 1956) had rippled out to affect all National/DC Comics’ superhero characters but generally passed by Batman and Robin. Fans buying Detective Comics, Batman, World’s Finest Comics and latterly Justice League of America read exploits that – in look and tone – were largely unchanged from safely anodyne fantasies that had turned the Dark Knight into a mystery-solving, alien-fighting costumed Boy Scout after the 1940s turned into the 1950s.

By the end of 1963, however, Schwartz having – either personally or by example – revived and revitalised the majority of DC’s line (and, by extension and imitation, the entire industry) with his reinvention of the Superhero, was asked to work his magic with the creatively stalled nigh-moribund Caped Crusaders.

Shepherding his usual team of top-notch creators, the Editor stripped down the core-concept, downplaying the ETs, outlandish villains and daft transformations, bringing cool modernity to the capture of criminals and overseeing a streamlining rationalisation of the art style itself. The most apparent change to us kids was a yellow circle around the Bat-symbol but, far more importantly, the stories similarly changed as a subtle aura of genuine menace had crept back in. At the same time Hollywood was in production of a television series based on Batman and, through the sheer karmic insanity that permeates the universe, the studio executives were basing their interpretation upon the addictively daft material DC was emphatically turning its editorial back on rather than the “New Look Batman” currently enthralling readers.

The Batman TV show premiered on January 12th 1966 and ran for three seasons of 120 episodes, airing twice weekly for the first two. It was a monumental, world-wide hit and sparked a wave of imitation. Resulting media hysteria and fan frenzy generated an insane degree of Bat-awareness, no end of spin-offs and merchandise – including a movie – and introduced us all to the phenomenon of overkill. No matter how much we might squeal and foam about it, even 60 years later, to a huge portion of this planet’s population Batman is always going to be that “Zap! Biff! Pow!” buffoonish Boy Scout in a mask…

“Batmania” exploded across the world and almost as quickly became toxic and vanished, but at its height sparked a fresh newspaper strip incarnation. The strip was a huge syndication success and even reached fuddy-duddy Britain, not in our papers and journals but as the cover feature of weekly comic Smash! (with the 20th issue onwards).

Overwhelmingly successful, Batman’s TV show ended in March 1968. As it foundered and faded away, the global fascination with “camp” superheroes – and no, the term had nothing to do with sexual orientation no matter what you and Mel Brooks might suspect about Men in Tights – burst as quickly as it had boomed and the Caped Crusader was left with a hard core of dedicated fans and followers who now wanted their hero back…

From the time when the Gotham Guardians could do no wrong comes this superb collection re-presenting the bright and breezy, intentionally zany cartoon classics, augmented by a wealth of background material, topped up with oodles of unseen scenes and detail to delight the most ardent Baby-boomer nostalgia-freaks.

It opens with an astonishingly informative and astoundingly picture-packed, candidly cool introduction from comics historian Joe Desris entitled ‘A History of the Batman and Robin Newspaper Strip’, stuffed with a wealth of newspaper promotional materials, premiums and giveaways, sketches, comic book covers and the lowdown on how the strip was coordinated to work in conjunction with the regular comic books. The Dailies and Sundays were all scripted by former DC writer/editor – and the company’s Hollywood liaison/producer – Whitney Ellsworth (Tillie the Toiler, Congo Bill) and initially illustrated by Bob Kane’s long-term secret art collaborator Sheldon Moldoff, before inker Joe Giella was tapped by the TV studio to provide a slick, streamlined modern look in the visuals – frequently as penciller but ALWAYS as embellisher.

Since the feature was a 7-day-a-week job, Giella often called in few comicbook buddies to help lay-out and draw the strip; luminaries such as Carmine Infantino, Bob Powell, Werner Roth, Curt Swan and more…

Back then, black-&-white Dailies and full-colour Sundays were usually offered as separate packages with continuity strips often generating different storylines for each. With Batman the strip started out that way, but switched to unified 7-day continuities in December 1966.

For convenience, this collection begins with the Sunday-only yarns. As on TV, the first villain du jour was a certain top-hatted raucous raptor…

‘Penguin Perpetrated a Prank’ (May 29th – July 10th 1966) saw the Fowl Felon and masked moll Beulah go on a rather uninspired crime spree, after which ‘The Nasty Napoleon’ (July 17th – October 16th) introduced a pint-sized plunderer with larcenous intent and delusions of military grandeur. Moldoff was replaced by Giella &Infantino at the end of August, if you were wondering…

Contemporarily “Swinging England” was almost as big a craze as Batman so it was no surprise the Dynamic Duo would hop across The Pond to meet well-meaning but bumbling imitators ‘Batchap and Bobbin’, fighting crime in the sleepy hamlet of Lemon Regis (October 23rd – December 18th) after which the Sundays were incorporated into the working week storylines.

Monochrome Dailies launched on May 30th: Ellsworth & Moldoff kicking off with a healthy dose of sex & violence as ‘Catwoman is a Wily Wench’ (running to July 9th 1966) saw the sultry bandit easily captured only to break out of jail and go on a vengeance-fuelled spree intended to end Batman’s career and life. Next came ‘Two Jokers and a Laughing Girl’ (July 11th – September 24th) wherein the Clown Prince of Crime is paroled into the custody of Bruce Wayne, whilst covertly robbing Gotham blind by employing a body-double. As Giella took over the art chores, it took a guest shot from Superman to iron out that macabre miscreant’s merry muddle.

Claiming to have been robbed of his rightfully stolen loot, the Wily Bird brigand became ‘Penguin the Complainant’ (September 26th – October 8th), demanding his greatest enemies and the Gotham police catch a modern-day pirate plaguing him. That led in turn to a flotilla of fists and foolishness as Batman & Robin began ‘Flying the Jolly Roger’ (October 10th – December 9th), after which Daily and Sunday segments unified as our courteous but severely outmatched Chivalrous Crusaders faced their greatest challenge from a trio of college girls: The Ivy League Dropouts. The co-ed crooks and their floral field commander seen in ‘The Sizzling Saga of Poison Ivy’ (December 10th 1966 – March 17th 1967) were unrelated to the psychotic poisoner created by Robert Kanigher in Batman #181 (June 1966) in all but name…

Like its TV counterpart, the strip began increasingly featuring real-world guest stars and the bad girls’ scheme to plunder hospitality magnate Conrad Hilton‘s latest enterprise – The Batman Hilton – led to comedic cross-dressing hijinks, a doomed affair for Bruce and plenty of publicity for all concerned…

The guest policy was expanded in ‘Jack Benny’s Stolen Stradivarius’ (March 18th – April 30th) as the infamously penny-pinching comedian promised Gotham’s Gangbusters a $1000-an-hour stipend (for charity, of course) to recover his fiddle and insisted on accompanying them everywhere to ensure they worked at top speed…

A major character debuted in ‘Batgirl Ain’t your Sister’ (May 1st – July 9th) with a masked mystery woman prowling the night streets. She was beating up plenty of baddies but their loot never seemed to be recovered…

With no clues and nothing to go on, all Batman & Robin could do was masquerade as crooks and rob places in hopes of being caught by the “Dominoed Daredoll”, but by the time they found each other The Riddler had involved himself, planning to kill everybody and keep all that accumulated loot for himself…

Riding a wave and feeling ambitious, Ellsworth & Giella began their longest saga yet as ‘Shivering Blue Max, “Pretty Boy” Floy and Flo’ (July 10th 1967 – March 18th 1968 and ending in the next book) saw a perpetually hypothermic criminal pilot accidentally down the Batcopter and erroneously claim the underworld’s million dollar bounty on Batman & Robin. The heroes were not dead, but the crash had caused the Caped Crusader to lose his memory. As Robin and faithful manservant Alfred sought to remedy his affliction, Max collected his prize and jetted off for sunnier climes. With Batman missing, neophyte crimebuster Batgirl tracked down the heroes – incidentally learning their secret identities – and was instrumental in restoring him to action… if not quite his full functioning faculties.

When underworld paymaster BG (Big) Trubble heard the heroes had returned he quite understandably instituted procedures to get his money back, forcing Max to return to Gotham where he stupidly fell foul of Pretty Boy before that hip young gunsel and his sister Flo kicked off a murderous scheme to fleece a horoscope-addicted millionaire…

To Be Continued and concluded, Bat-Fans…

Supplementing the parade of guilty pleasures is a copious, comprehensive and fabulously educational section on ‘Notes on Stories in this Volume’ – also generously illustrated with covers, photos and show-&-strip arcana – as well as a fascinating behind-the-scenes display highlighting editorial corrections and alterations to the strips required by those ever-so-fussy TV studio people. Everything then ends for now with a schematic key to ‘The Batman Cast’ as depicted on the back cover.

The stories in this compendium reflect gentler times and an editorial policy focusing as much on broad humour as Batman’s reputation as a manhunter, so the colourful, psychotic costumed super-villains are in a minority here, but if you’re of a certain age or open to fun-over-thrills this a collection well worth your attention.

Batman: Silver Age Dailies and Sundays 1966-1967 was the first of huge (305 x 236 mm) lavish, high-end hardback collections starring the Gotham Gangbusters, and another crucial addition to the superb commemorative series of Library of American Comics which has preserved and re-presented in luxurious splendour such landmark strips as Li’l Abner, Tarzan, Little Orphan Annie, Terry and the Pirates, Bringing Up Father, Rip Kirby, Polly and her Pals and many other cartoon icons. Hopefully one day they will all be available digitally too…

If you love the era, or simply the medium of serial graphic narratives, these stories are great comics reading, and this is a book you must have.
© 2014 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. Batman and all related characters and elements ™ & © DC Comics.

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Mandrake the Magician: Dailies volume 1 – The Cobra


By Lee Falk & Phil Davis (Titan Books)
ISBN: 978-1178276-690-2 (HB)

Time for another – belated – Birthday briefing as we celebrate 90 glorious years for another golden Age stalwart…

Regarded by many as comics’ first superhero, Mandrake the Magician debuted as a daily newspaper strip on 11th June 1934 – although creator Lee Falk had sold the strip almost a decade previously. Initially drawing it too, Falk replaced himself as soon as feasible, allowing the early wonderment to materialise through the effective understatement of sublime draughtsman Phil Davis. An instant hit, Mandrake was soon supplemented by a full-colour Sunday companion page from February 3rd 1935.

Falk – as a 19-year old college student – had sold the strip to King Features Syndicate years earlier, but asked the monolithic company to let him finish his studies before dedicating himself to it full time. Schooling done, the 23-year-old born raconteur settled into his life’s work: entertaining millions with astounding tales. Falk also created the first costumed superhero in moodily magnificent generational manhunter The Phantom, whilst spawning an entire comic book subgenre with his first creation. Most Golden Age publishers boasted at least one (but usually many) nattily attired wizards in their gaudily-garbed pantheons: all roaming the world(s) making miracles and crushing injustice with varying degrees of stage legerdemain or actual sorcery.

Characters such as Mr. Mystic, Ibis the Invincible, Sargon the Sorcerer, and an assortment of  “…the Magician” ’s like Zatara, Zanzibar, Kardak proliferated ad infinitum: all borrowing heavily and shamelessly from the uncanny exploits of the elegant, enigmatic man of mystery gracing the world’s newspapers and magazines.

In the Antipodes, Mandrake was a suave stalwart regular of Australian Women’s Weekly and became a cherished icon of adventure in the UK, Australia, Italy, Brazil, Germany, Spain, France, Turkey and across Scandinavia: a major star of page and screen, pervading every aspect of global consciousness.

Over the years he has been a star of radio, movie chapter-serials, a theatrical play, television and animation (as part of the cartoon series Defenders of the Earth). With that has come the usual merchandising bonanza of games, toys (including magic trick kits), books, comics and more…

Falk worked on Mandrake and “The Ghost who Walks” until his death in 1999 (even on his deathbed, he was laying out one last story), but also found a few quiet moments to become a renowned playwright, theatre producer and impresario, as well as an inveterate world-traveller.

After drawing those the first few strips Falk united with sublimely polished cartoonist Phil Davis. His sleekly understated renditions took the daily strip, especially that expansive full-page Sunday page (collected in a sister volume), to unparalleled heights of sophistication. Davis’ steadfast, assured realism was the perfect tool to render the Magician’s mounting catalogue of spectacular miracles.

Those in the know are well aware that Mandrake was educated at the fabled College of Magic in Tibet, thereafter becoming a suave globe-trotting troubleshooter, always accompanied by his faithful African friend Lothar and beautiful companion (eventually, in 1997, bride) Princess Narda of Cockaigne, co-operatively solving crimes and fighting evil.

Those days, however, are still to come as a wealth of fact-filled features begins here with college Classics Professor Bob Griffin vividly recalling ‘From Fan to Friend: My Memories of Lee Falk’. Mathematics lecturer and comics historian Rick Norwood traces comic book sorcerers and sources in ‘Mandrake Gestures Hypnotically’ before the strips section of this luxury monochrome landscape hardback opens on the hero’s first case.

A classy twist on contemporary crime dramas and pulp fiction, ‘The Cobra’ (June 11th – November 24th 1934) exhibits the eponymous criminal mastermind menacing the family of US ambassador Vandergriff… until a dapper, haunting figure and his colossal African companion insert themselves into the affair. Initially mistrusted, Mandrake & Lothar guide the embattled diplomat through a globe-girdling vendetta against a human fiend with mystic powers and a loyal terrorist cult. Employing their own miracles, wonders and common sense, the heroes defeat every scheme leading to a ferocious final clash in the orient and the seeming destruction of the wicked evil wizard.

At their ease in Alexandria, Mandrake & Lothar are targeted by criminal mastermind ‘The Hawk’ (November 26th 1934 – February 23rd 1935) and meet distrait socialite Narda of Cockaigne, who employs her every wile to seduce and destroy them. Thwarting each plot, Mandrake learns her actions are dictated by a monstrous stalker blackmailing Narda’s brother Prince Sigrid. With his true enemy revealed, the Mage sets implacably to work to settle the villain’s affairs for good…

With an impending sense of further entanglements to come, the wanderers leave Narda, eventually fetching up in the Carpathians and encountering a lonely, embattled woman tormented by crazed Professor Sorcin and ‘The Monster of Tanov Pass’ (February 25th – June 15th 1935). This time, there’s a fearsomely robust and rational explanation for all the terror and tribulations…

Mandrake & Lothar meet weary policeman Inspector Duffy and clash with a brilliant mimic and master thief in Arabia. ‘Saki, the Clay Camel’ (June 17th – November 2nd 1935) is driving the occupying British authorities to distraction but an offer of mystic assistance brings danger, excitement and a surprise reunion with Narda before the faceless fiend and his army of desperate criminals are defeated…

Heading into the frozen north, magician and strongman encounter persecuted Lora, saving her from her own unscrupulous and cash-crazed family and ‘The Werewolf’ (November 4th 1935 – February 29th 1936) before this first volume concludes with ‘The Return of the Clay Camel’ (March 2nd – July 18th 1936): a rip-roaring romp showing off Falk’s deft gift for comedy…

It begins with our heroes curing a raging, obsessive sportsman of the urge to hunt, before expanding into a baffling mystery as the long vacationing Sir Oswald returns home to England only to discover someone has been perfectly impersonating him for months…

Devolving into a cunning robbery and comedy of mistaken identity, Mandrake and the false faced Saki test wits and determination, but even with the distraction of an impending marriage being hijacked too, its certain that the canny conjuror is going to come out on top…

Closing with ‘The Phil Davis Mandrake the Magician Complete Daily Checklist 1934-1965’ this thrilling tome offers exotic locales, thrilling action, bold belly laughs, spooky chills and sheer elegance in equal measure. Paramount taleteller Falk instinctively knew from the start that the secret of success was strong and – crucially – recurring villains to test and challenge his heroes, and make Mandrake an unmissable treat for every daily strip addict. These stories have lost none of their impact and only need you reading them to concoct a perfect cure for the 21st century blues.
Mandrake the Magician © 2016 King Features Syndicate. All Rights Reserved. All other material © 2016 the respective authors or owners.

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Spider-Man Newspaper Strips volume 1: January 3rd 1977 – January 28th 1979

4 images (2 covers + 1 illo and a spare combined covers if the preferred don’t match up)


By Stan Lee & John Romita, with Frank Giacoia & various (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-8561-1 (TPB/Digital edition)

It’s been a year since we lost genial giant John Romita. His work and life were inextricably woven into the Marvel canon: permeating and supporting the entire company’s output from top to tail, from before the House of Ideas even existed to the stellar Sixties to right now…

By 1977 Stan Lee had all but surrendered his role as editor and guiding light of Marvel Comics for that of a roving PR machine to hype-up the company he had turned into a powerhouse. In that year two events occurred that catapulted Marvel’s standout, signature character into the popular culture mainstream. One was the long-anticipated debut of The Amazing Spider-Man live action TV show (a mixed blessing and pyrrhic victory at best) whilst the other, and one much more in keeping with his humble origins, was the launch of a syndicated newspaper strip with the same hallowed title.

Both mass-audience outreach projects brought the character to a wider audience, but the latter offered at least a promise of editorial control – a crucial factor in keeping the wondrous wallcrawler’s identity and integrity intact. But even this closely-aligned creative medium dictated some tailoring of the Merry Marvel Madness before the hero was a suitable fit with the grown-up world of the “Funny Pages”.

Which is just my longwinded way of saying that completists, long-time fans and lovers of great artwork will absolutely enjoy this collection of periodical strips, as will any admirer of the stunning talents of the senior John Romita (latterly inked by the great Frank Giacoia) even though the stories are tame, bowdlerised and rather mediocre. Deprived of the support network of an overlapping Marvel Universe, they often struggled to find their wallcrawling feet and might feel a tad toned down and simplistic for readers familiar with the wider cast or long history. Those completists, however, might be keen on catching lost adventures featuring Wolverine, Doctor Strange and Daredevil, and it was always easier to import supervillains like Mysterio, The Kingpin and Doctor Doom into the alternate adventures of this Amazing Spider-Man.

Marvel Multiversal Continuity eventually caught up with the feature and it’s now designated Earth-77013 and a regular component of the “Spider-Verse” strand…

The strip was first posited and peddled around the papers in 1970 (Lee & Romita’s initial proposal and two weeks of trial continuities are included at the back of this book) but The Amazing Spider-Man only began on January 3rd 1977. It ran as a property of the Register and Tribune Syndicate until 1985, briefly switching to Cowles Media Company before becoming part of the King Features Syndicate in 1986. The strip went on hiatus following Lee’s death with the final new strip appearing on March 23rd 2019. Lee was still credited as writer even though Roy Thomas had been its ghost writer since 2000. It soon reappeared as reruns – until October 21st 2023 – before being replaced in syndicate packages by Flash Gordon.

One of the industry’s most polished stylists and a true cornerstone of the Marvel Comics phenomenon, the elder John Romita began his comics career in the late 1940s (ghosting for other artists) before striking out under his own colours, eventually illustrating horror and other anthology tales for Stan Lee at Timely/Atlas.

John Victor Romita was Brooklyn born and bred, entering the world on January 24th 1930. From Brooklyn Junior High School he moved to the famed if not legendary Manhattan School of Industrial Art, and graduated in 1947. After spending six months creating a medical exhibit for Manhattan General Hospital he moved into comics in 1949, working for Famous Funnies. A “day job” toiling at Forbes Lithograph was abandoned when a friend found him various inking and ghosting assignments, until he was drafted in 1951. Showing his portfolio to a US army art director, after boot camp at Fort Dix New Jersey, Romita was promoted to corporal, and stationed on Governors Island in New York Bay doing recruitment posters. He was allowed to live off-base in Brooklyn. During this period he started doing the rounds and struck up a freelancing acquaintance with Stan Lee at rapidly expanding genre factory Atlas Comics…

Romita illustrated horror, science fiction, war stories, westerns, Waku, Prince of the Bantu in Jungle Tales, a superb run of inviting cowboy adventures starring The Western Kid and was handed 1954’s abortive revival of Captain America and more, before an industry implosion derailed his – and many other – blossoming careers. He eventually found himself trapped in DC’s romance comics division – a job he hated – before – in 1965 – making a reluctant jump back to the resurgent House of Ideas. As well as steering the career of the wallcrawler and so many other Marvel stars, his greatest influence was felt when he became Art Director in July 1973 – a job he had been doing unofficially since 1968. He had a definitive hand in creating or shaping many key characters, such as Mary Jane Watson, Peggy Carter, The Kingpin, The Punisher, Luke Cage, Wolverine, Satana, ad infinitum. One story goes that it was Romita who suggested Gwen Stacy’s murder to Spidey scripter Gerry Conway…

Working from full scripts (not the acclaimed “Marvel Method”), Romita illustrated The Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip for its first four years, after which Stan’s brother Larry Lieber (Rawhide Kid, Ant-Man, Iron Man, Thor) took on the pencilling. Unhappy with the deadline pressures, he soon left, and was replaced by Fred (Airboy, Captain Britain) Kida who soldiered on from August 1981 to July 1986. A brief interim with Dan (Flash Gordon, Airboy, Tarzan) Barry led to Leiber’s return, and he drew the feature for the next 32 years with a variety of inkers and ghosts such as Alex Saviuk.

Since 2015 the stories have also been collected in IDW’s The Library of American Comics as The Amazing Spider-Man: The Ultimate Newspaper Comics Collection with five lavish hardback volumes released to date. This collection – available in landscape paperback and digital formats – is a modified rerelease of a hardback tome from 2008, offering extra editorial and commentary as it re-presents the first two years of the strip, with traditional single tier monochrome dailies accompanied by full-colour, full page Sunday strips. If the reader is steeped in the established folklore of the comic book Spider-Man, the serials here – solidly emphasising Peter Parker‘s personal relationships in the grand manner of strip soap opera drama – begin by introducing Dr. Doom and Dr. Octopus in heavy-handed potboilers light on action but intrinsically riffing on what has gone before in comic books.

However, for the presumed millions of neophyte readers the yarns must have been a tad confusing: presented as if all participants are already fully-established, with no development or real explanation of backstory. After the full-on Marvel villains are successively trounced, serpentine new baddie The Rattler stalks the city in search of increased powers, followed in turn by the more appropriate and understandable (for strips at least) gangster The Kingpin, who combines seditious politics with gun-toting thuggery.

Only then do the creators finally get around to a retelling of the origin, albeit one now based on that aforementioned TV show rather than the classic Lee/Ditko masterpiece. It’s safe to say that in those early years television informed the strip much (too much) more than monthly comic books.

A suitably revised Kraven the Hunter debuts next, presenting an opportunity to remove glamourous but shallow good-time girl Mary Jane Watson from the strip in favour of a string of temporary girl-friends, more in line with the TV iteration. This also signalled a reining-in of super-menaces in favour of less-fantastic or far-fetched opponents such as a middle-Eastern terrorist.

The launch of a Spider-Man movie (surely the most improbable of events!) then takes photojournalist Peter Parker to Hollywood and into a clash with a new version of deranged special-effects genius Mysterio, before Dr. Doom returns, attempting to derange our hero with robot pigeons and duplicates of Parker’s associates..

This is followed by an exceptional, emotionally-stirring run of episodes as three street thugs terrorise senior citizen Aunt May for her social security money, after which Spider-Man must foil a crazed fashion-model who has discovered his identity and blackmails him…

These drama-framed and human-scaled threats are a far more fitting use of the hero in this ostensibly more grown-up milieu – which pauses here with a protection racket romp set in the (feel free to shudder) discotheque owned by young entrepreneurs Flash Thompson and Harry Osborn, courtesy of newly-returned corpulent crimelord Kingpin…

To Be Continued…

Adding to the time capsule of arachnid entertainment is that aforementioned proposal by Lee & Romita, archival interviews with both creators conducted by John Rhett Thomas and Alex Lear plus a gallery of six Sunday title panels (used to summarise events and set the tone for readers who only read the sabbath colour strips), as well as a classic Romita pin-up page starring the artist and his greatest co-creations…

Happily, although goofy stories predominate in this oddball collection, and time has not been gentle with much of the dialogue, the stunning artwork of John Romita in his prime helps to counteract the worst of the cultural excesses. Moreover, there remains a certain guilty pleasure to be derived from these tales if you don’t take your comics too seriously and are open to alternative existences…
© 1977, 1978, 2019 Marvel. All rights reserved.

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Beyond Mars – The Complete Series 1952-1955


By Jack Williamson & Lee Elias (IDW Publishing)
ISBNs: 978-1-631404-35-1 (HB/Digital edition)

The 1950s saw the last great flourish of the American newspaper strip. Invented and always used as a way to boost circulation and encourage consumer loyalty, the inexorable rise of television and spiralling costs of publishing gradually ate away at all but the most popular features as the decade ended. However, the post-war years saw a final, valiant, burst of creativity and variety as syndicates looked for ways to recapture popular attention and editors sought ways to maximise every fraction of a page-inch for paying ads, rather than fritter away column inches on expensive cost-centres. No matter how well produced, imaginative or entertaining, if strips couldn’t increase sales, they weren’t welcome…

The decade also saw fantastic social change as commercial boomtimes and technological progress created a new type of visionary consumer – one fired up by the realization that America was Top Dog in the world.

The optimistic escapism offered by the stars above led to a reawakening in the science fiction genre, with a basic introduction for the hoi-polloi offered by the television industry through such pioneering (if clunky) programmes as Tom Corbett, Space Cadet or Captain Video, cinema serials like King of the Rocket Men and major movies from visionaries like Robert Wise (Day the Earth Stood Still) and George Pal (Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, War of the Worlds and others).

Most importantly, for kids of all ages, conceptual fancies were being tickled by a host of fantastic comic books ranging from the blackly satirical Weird Science Fantasy to affably welcoming, openly enthusiastic and optimistic Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space. In the gradually expiring pulp magazines, master imagineers like Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, Sturgeon, Dick, Bester and Farmer were transforming the genre from youthful melodrama into a highly philosophical art form…

With Flying Saucers in the skies and headlines, Reds under every Bed and refreshing adventure in mind, the multifarious Worlds of Tomorrow were common currency and newspapers wanted in on the phenomenon. Established strip features such as Buck Rogers, Brick Bradford and Flash Gordon were no longer enough and editors demanded bold new visions to draw in a wider public, not just those steady fans who already bought papers for their favourite futurians.

John Stewart “Jack” Williamson was one of the first superstars of American science fiction writing, a rurally raised, self-taught author with more than 18 short story collections, 50 books, and even volumes of criticism and non-fiction to his much-lauded name. Arizona-born in 1908, he was reared in Texas and sold his first story to Amazing Stories in 1928. He created a number of legendary serials such as the Legion of Space, The Humanoids and Legion of Time. Williamson is credited by the OED with inventing the terms and concepts of “terraforming” and “genetic engineering” and was one of the first literary investigators of anti-matter with his Seetee novels.

“See Tee” or “Contra Terrene Matter” is also at the heart of the strip under discussion here, completely collected in a magnificent full colour volume available in positive matter Hardback and the ethereal pulses technique we dub digital publication.

Following a damning newspaper review of Seetee Ship – which claimed the book was only marginally better than a comic strip – Williamson’s second novel in that sequence moved the editor of a rival paper to engage Williamson and artist Lee Elias to produce a Sunday page based in the same universe as the books.

Leopold Elias was born in England in 1920, but grew up in the USA after the family emigrated in 1926. He studied at the Cooper Union and Art Students League of New York before beginning his professional comics illustration career at Fiction House in 1943. He worked on Captain Wings and latterly western classic Firehair. His sleek, Milt Caniff-inspired art was highly prized by numerous publishers, and Elias contributed to the lustre of The Flash, Green Lantern, Sub-Mariner, Terry and the Pirates and, most notably, the glamourous Black Cat series at Harvey Comics.

Elias briefly left the funnybook arena in the early 1950s after his art was singled out by anti-comic book zealot Dr. Fredric Wertham. He traded up to the more prestigious newspaper strips, ghosting Al Capp’s Li’l Abner before landing the job of bringing Beyond Mars to life. He returned to comic books after the strip’s demise, becoming a DC mainstay in the 1960s, Marvel in the 1970s and Warren in the 1980s. He died in 1998, having spent his final years teaching at the School of Visual Arts and the Kubert School.

The glorious meeting of minds is preceded here by an effusive and informative Introduction from Bruce Canwell –‘When “Retro” Was Followed by “Rocket” – packed with cover art, original pages and illustrations setting the scene and sharing lost secrets of the strips genesis and Armageddon.

With Dick Tracy strip maestro Chester Gould as adviser at the start, Beyond Mars ran exclusively and in full colour in the New York Daily News every Sunday from February 17th 1952 to May 13th 1955: a glorious high-tech, high-adventure romp based on and around Brooklyn Rock in 2191 AD. This bastion was a commercial space station bored into one of the rocky chunks drifting in the asteroid belt “Beyond Mars” – an ideal rough-&-tumble story venue on the ultimate frontier of human experience.

Although as the series progressed, a progression of inspired extraterrestrial sidekicks and svelte, sultry, sexy women beloved of the era’s movies increasingly stole the show, but the notional star is Spatial Engineer Mike Flint, an independent charter-pilot based on the rock. The first tale begins with Flint selling his services to plucky Becky Starke who has come to the furthest edge of civilisation in search of her missing father. A student of human nature, she cloaks that motivation as a quest for a city-sized, solid diamond asteroid floating in the deadly “Meteor Drift”…

Soon Mike and his lisping ophidian Venusian partner Tham Thmith are contending with Brooklyn Rock’s crime boss Frosty Karth: a fantastic raider dubbed The Black Martian, a super-criminal named Cobra and even more unearthly menaces in a stirring tale of interplanetary drug dealers, lost cities and dead civilisations. There’s even a fantastic mutation in the resilient form of a semi-feral Terran boy who can breathe vacuum and rides deep space on a meteor!

With that tale barely concluded the crew, including that rambunctious space boy Jimikin, plunge deep into another mystery: Brooklyn Rock has gone missing!

Tough guy Flint has no time to grieve for the family and friends left behind as he intercepts an inbound star-liner and discovers both an old flame and a smooth-talking thug bound for the now-missing space station. One of them knows where it went…

Unknown to even this mastermind, the Rock – stolen by pirates – is out of control and drifting to ultimate destruction in a debris field, but no sooner is that crisis averted than the heroes are entangled in a “First Contact” situation with an ancient alien from beyond Known Space. Perhaps it might actually be more correctly deemed becoming snared by the devilish devices he/she/it left running? Ultimately, Mike, Tham, Jimikin and curvaceous Xeno-archaeologist Victoria Snow narrowly escape alien vivisection from robotic relics before the tragic, inevitable conclusion…

Snow’s brother Blackie is a fast-talking ne’er-do-well, and when he shows up, Karth takes the opportunity to settle some old scores, leading Flint into a deadly trap on Ceres in a slick saga of genetic manipulation, eugenic supermen and mega-wealth. Meanwhile on an interplanetary liner, a new cast member “resurfaces” in the shape of crusty coot/Mercurian ore prospector Fireproof Jones, just in time to help Flint and Sam mine their newfound riches.

As ever, Karth is looking to make trouble for the lads but he wins some for himself when his young daughter suddenly turns up on the Rock, accompanied by gold-digging Pamela Prim. Suddenly, murderous raider Black Martian returns to plague the honest pioneers of the Brooklyn frontier…

Glamour model Trish O’Keefe causes a completely different kind of trouble when she lands, looking for her fiancé. Naturally, Tack McTeak isn’t the humble space-doctor he claims to be but a cerebrally augmented criminal mastermind, with plans to snatch the biggest prize in space inevitably leading to a sequence of stunning thrills and astonishing action.

Focus switches to Earth as the cast visit “civilisation” and find it far from hospitable, with the chance to battle manufactured monsters and mysterious Dr. Moray on his private tropical island something of a welcome – if mixed – blessing…

By this time, the writing must have been on the wall, as the strip had been reduced to a half page per week. Even so, the creators clearly decided to go out in style. Sheer bravura spectacle was magnificently ramped up and all the tools of the sci fi world were utilized to ensure the strip ended with a bang. Moray’s plans are catastrophically realised when the villain employs an anti-gravity bomb to steal Manhattan; turning it into a deadly Sword of Damocles in the sky…

The series abruptly ended when the New York Daily News changed its editorial policy: dropping all comics from its pages. The decision was clearly unexpected, as the saga finished satisfactorily if quite abruptly on Sunday 13th March 1955.

Beyond Mars is a breathtaking lost gem from two master craftsmen successfully blending the wonders of science and the rollicking thrills of Westerns with broad, light-hearted humour to produce a mind-boggling, eye-popping, exuberantly wholesome family space-opera the likes of which wouldn’t be seen again until Star Wars put fun back into futuristic fiction.

Thankfully, after years of frustrated agitation by fans, the entire saga is available in this fabulous oversized (244 x 307 mm) edition no lover of stars & strife can afford to be without.
© 2015 Tribune Content Agency LLC. All rights reserved. Introduction © 2015 Bruce Canwell.

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Pogo – Bona Fide Balderdash: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips volume 2


By Walt Kelly, edited by Carolyn Kelly (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-584-6 (HB/Digital edition)

By golly, we finally got us an election, and in these moments of elation and trepidatious uncertainty, it’s only natural to turn to the steadfast things in our lives such as the total conviction that this guy knew all about liars, chancers, opportunists and self-serving, utterly unqualified dissimulators suddenly paying really close attention to what the public has been telling them for years…

It doesn’t hurt that his creator was one of the greatest cartoonists and humourists of all time and that his comics are timelessly wonderful. Read this book and all the others – it may well be your last chance to do so…

Walter Crawford Kelly Jr. was born in 1913 and started his cartooning career whilst still in High School, as artist and reporter for the Bridgeport Post. In 1935, after relocating to California he joined the Disney Studio, working on short cartoon films and such major features as Dumbo, Fantasia and Pinocchio. When the infamous animator’s strike began in 1941 Kelly refused to take sides, and moved back East and into comic books – primarily for Dell Comics who at that time held the Disney funnybook license, amongst so many others.

Despite glorious work on such popular people-based classics as the Our Gang movie spin-off, he preferred and particularly excelled with anthropomorphic animal and children’s fantasy material.

For the December 1942-released Animal Comics #1 this other Walt created Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum: sensibly retaining copyrights in the ongoing saga of two affable Bayou critters and their young African-American pal Bumbazine. Although the black kid soon disappeared, the animal actors stayed as stars until 1948 when Kelly moved into journalism, becoming art editor and cartoonist for hard hitting, left-leaning liberal newspaper The New York Star. On October 4th 1948, Pogo, Albert and an ever-expanding cast of gloriously addictive characters began their second careers, on the far more legitimate funny pages, appearing in the paper six days a week until it folded in January 1949.

Although ostensibly a gently humorous kids feature, by the end of its run (reprinted in full at the back of Pogo: the Complete Syndicated Comic Strips volume 1 link please) the first glimmers of an increasingly barbed, boldly satirical masterpiece of velvet-pawed social commentary began to emerge. When The Star closed, Pogo was picked up for mass distribution by the Post-Hall Syndicate, and launched in selected outlets on May 16th 1949. A colour Sunday page debuted January 29th 1950: both produced simultaneously by Kelly until his death in 1973 (and even beyond, courtesy of his talented wife and family). At its height the strip appeared in 500 papers in 14 countries with book collections – which began in 1951 – eventually numbering nearly 50 and collectively selling over 30 million copies – and all that before this Fantagraphics series began…

In this second volume the main aspect of interest is the personable Possum’s first innocently adorable attempts to run for Public Office. This became a ritual inevitably and coincidentally reoccurring every four years, whenever America’s merely human inhabitants got together for raucous caucuses and exuberant electioneering. It’s remarkable – but not coincidental – to note that by the close of the 2-year period contained herein, Kelly had increased his count of uniquely Vaudevillian returning characters to over one hundred. The sordid likes of Solid MacHogany, sloganeering P.T. Bridgeport, Tamananny Tiger, Willow McWisper, Goldie Lox, Sarcophagus MacAbre, bull moose Uncle Antler and three brilliantly scene-stealing bats named Bewitched, Bothered and Bemildred, amongst so many others, would pop up with varying frequency and growing impact over following decades

This colossal and comfortingly sturdy landscape compilation (356 pages) offers monochrome Dailies from January 1st 1951 to December 31st 1952, plus the Sundays – in their own full-colour section – from January 7th 1951 to December 28th 1952: each faithfully annotated and listed in a copious, expansive and informative Table of Contents. Supplemental features include a Foreword from pioneering comedy legend Stan Freberg, delightful unpublished illustrations and working/developmental drawings by Kelly, extra invaluable context and historical notes in the amazing R.C. Harvey’s ‘Swamp Talk’ and a biographical feature ‘About Walt Kelly’ from Mark Evanier.

In his time, satirical mastermind Kelly unleashed his bestial spokes-cast on such innocent, innocuous sweethearts as Senator Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, The John Birch Society, Richard Nixon and the Ku Klux Clan, as well as less loathsome louts like of Lyndon B. Johnson, Hubert Humphrey and – with eerie perspicacity – George W. Romney (US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development) Governor of Michigan and dad of a guy named Mitt…

This particular monument to madcap mirth and sublime drollery naturally carries the usual cast: gently bemused Pogo, boisterous, happily ignorant alligator Albert, dolorous Porkypine, obnoxious turtle Churchy La Femme, lugubrious hound Beauregard Bugleboy, carpet-bagger Seminole Sam Fox, pompous (doesn’t) know-it-all Howland Owl and all the bestial rest: covering not only day-to-day topics and travails like love, marriage, weather, fishing, the problem with kids, the innocent joys of sports, making a living and why neighbours shouldn’t eat each other, but also includes epic and classic sagas: the stress of Poetry Contests, hunting – from a variety of points of view – Christmas and other Public Holidays, incipient invasion, war and even cross-dressing, to name but a few…

Kelly spent a good deal of 1952 spoofing the electoral race, and this tome offers magical, magnificent treatment of all problems associated with grass (and moss) roots politics, dubious campaign tactics, loony lobbying, fun with photo ops, briefings (for & against), impractical tactical alliances, glad-handing, a proliferation of political promos and ephemera, how to build clockwork voters – and candidates – and of course, life after a failed run for the top job…

As the delicious Miz Ma’m’selle Hepzibah would no doubt say: “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”…

Either I heard it somewhere or I’m just making it up, but I gather certain embattled Prime Ministers and Presidents are using the cartoons as tactical playbooks and there’s a copy in every gift bag handed out at Riyadh and Davos. Gosh, how I hope so…

Kelly’s uncontested genius lay in a seemingly effortless ability to lyrically and vivaciously portray – through anthropomorphic affectation – comedic, tragic, pompous, infinitely sympathetic characters of any shape or breed, all whilst making them undeniably human. He used that blessed gift to blend hard-hitting observation of our crimes, foibles and peccadilloes with rampaging whimsy, poesy and sheer exuberant joie de vivre.

The hairy, scaly, feathered slimy folk of the surreal swamp lands are, of course, inescapably us, elevated by burlesque, slapstick, absurdism and all the glorious joys of wordplay from puns to malapropisms to raucous accent humour into a multi-layered hodgepodge of all-ages delight. Tragically, here at least, we’ve never looked or behaved better…

This stuff will certainly make you laugh; it will probably provoke a sentimental tear or ten and will certainly satisfy your every entertainment requirement. Timeless and magical, Pogo is a weeny colossus not simply of comics, but of world literature and this magnificent collection should be the pride of every home’s bookshelf, right beside the first one. Or, in the popular campaign parlance of the critters involved: “I Go Pogo!” and so should you.
POGO Bona Fide Balderdash and all POGO images, including Walt Kelly’s signature © 2012 Okefenokee Glee & Perloo Inc. All other material © 2012 the respective creator and owner. All rights reserved.