{"id":18756,"date":"2018-07-21T08:00:08","date_gmt":"2018-07-21T08:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=18756"},"modified":"2018-07-20T15:14:55","modified_gmt":"2018-07-20T15:14:55","slug":"albion-origins-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2018\/07\/21\/albion-origins-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Albion: Origins"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nBy Tom Tully<\/strong>, Scott Goodall<\/strong>, Ken Mennell<\/strong>, Solano Lopez<\/strong>, Eric Bradbury<\/strong> & various (Titan Books)
\nISBN: 978-1-84576-172-1<\/p>\n

Here’s a truly superb collection of British comic strips from the glory days of the 1960s courtesy of Titan Books and originally released to support and cash in on the profile-raising American Albion<\/strong> miniseries and collection.<\/p>\n

In this stunning, non-nonsense monochrome hardback are four complete early exploits of some of Britain’s weirdest comic strip heroes.<\/p>\n

Kelly’s Eye<\/em> featured ordinary, thoroughly decent chap Tim Kelly<\/em> who came into possession of the mystical \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Eye of Zoltec\u00e2\u20ac\u009d: a fist-sized gem that kept him free from all harm\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 as long as held on to it.<\/p>\n

You won’t be surprised to discover that, due to the demands of weekly boys’ adventures, Tim lost, dropped, misplaced and was nefariously deprived of that infernal talisman pretty darned often – and always at the most inopportune moment\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

The moody and compelling artwork of Argentinean Francisco Solano Lopez was the prime asset of this series, with the story reprinted here being about a Seminole Indian uprising threatening modern Florida. Complete with eerie evil witch doctor, supernatural overtones from a demonic drum and consumer America imperilled, this story is a classic. Tom Tully & Scott Goodall were the usual scripters for this little gem of a series.<\/p>\n

And yes, due to the pressure of these weekly deadlines, occasionally fill-in artists had to pinch-hit in most British strip-series every now and then. Such was the breakneck pacing though, that us kids hardly even noticed and I doubt you will either. Still. If you are eagle-eyed, you might spot such luminaries as Reg Bunn, Felix Carrion, Carlos Cruz, Franc Fuentesman, and Geoff Campion in this volume. But you probably won’t\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

House of Dolman<\/em> was a curious and inexplicably absorbing blend of super-spy and crime-buster strip from Tully and utterly wonderful master illustrator Eric Bradbury. Dolman’s cover was as a shabby ventriloquist (I digress, but an awful lot of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153our\u00e2\u20ac\u009d heroes were tatty and unkempt – we had \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Grunge\u00e2\u20ac\u009d down pat decades before the Americans made a profit out of it!) who designed and constructed an army of specialised robots which he disguised as his puppets.<\/p>\n

Using these as his shock-troops, the enigmatic Dolman waged a dark and crazy war against the forces of evil\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Featured here are a number of his complete 4-page thrillers wherein he defeats high-tech kidnappers, rascally protection racketeers, weapons thieves, blackmailers and the sinister forces of arch super-criminal ‘The Hawk’<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Janus Stark<\/em> was a fantastically innovative and successful strip. Created by Tully for the relaunch of Smash<\/strong> in 1969, the majority of the art was from Solano Lopez’s studio, providing an aura of eerie, grimy veracity well suited to this tale of a foundling who grew up in a grim orphanage only to become the greatest escapologist of the Victorian age.<\/p>\n

The Man with Rubber Bones also had his own ideas about retribution and justice and would joyously sort out those scoundrels the Law couldn’t or wouldn’t touch. A number of creators worked on this feature, which survived until the downsizing of the publisher’s comics division in 1975 – and even beyond – since Stark escaped oblivion by emigration.<\/p>\n

When the series ended in Britain it was continued in French publications – even unto Stark’s eventual death and succession by his son. Here though, we get to see his earliest feats and I for one was left hungry for more. Encore!<\/p>\n

The last spot in this sturdy hardback treasury falls to the Spooky Master of the Unknown Cursitor Doom<\/em>. This series is the unquestioned masterpiece of Eric Bradbury – an artist who probably deserves that title as much as his visual creation.<\/p>\n

Writer Ken Mennell, who usually invented characters for other writers to script, kept Doom for himself and the result is a darkly brooding Gothic thriller quite unlike anything else in comics then or since. If pushed, I’ll liken it most to William Hope Hodgson’s Karnacki the Ghost Breaker<\/strong> novelettes – although that’s more for flavour than anything else and even that doesn’t really cover it.<\/p>\n

Doom is a fat, bald, cape-wearing foul-tempered know-it-all who just happens to be humanity’s last-ditch defence against the forces of darkness. With his strapping and rugged young assistant Angus McCraggan<\/em> and Scarab<\/em>, a trained raven (or is it, perhaps, something more?), Cursitor crushed without mercy any threat to humanity’s wellbeing.<\/p>\n

Re-presented here is the ‘Dark Legion of Mardarax’<\/em> wherein a cohort of Roman soldiers extracted from the mists of antiquity rampages across the British countryside, intent on awaking an ancient and diabolical monstrosity from the outer Dark!<\/p>\n

Perhaps these tales are a thrill for me because I first read them when I was just an uncomprehending nipper, but I don’t think so. It’s a tremendous thrill now to realise that despite all the age, wisdom, and sophistication I can now muster, that these strips really were – and are – as great if not better, than most of the comics I’ve seen in fifty-plus years of reading. Don’t take my word for it: track down this book and see if you’re not as hungrily avid for more of the same\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6
\n\u00c2\u00a9 2005 IPC Media Ltd. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Tom Tully, Scott Goodall, Ken Mennell, Solano Lopez, Eric Bradbury & various (Titan Books) ISBN: 978-1-84576-172-1 Here’s a truly superb collection of British comic strips from the glory days of the 1960s courtesy of Titan Books and originally released to support and cash in on the profile-raising American Albion miniseries and collection. In this … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Albion: Origins”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[191,42,66,132,107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","category-best-of-british","category-horror-stories","category-older-kids","category-science-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-4Sw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18756\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}