30/04/2012 by admin.

No, don’t worry, they haven’t added any colour to it! (Mind you, if Commando sales are increasing and if The Phoenix can establish a bridgehead, could a re-launch of The Victor, “The new colour weekly from the makers of Commando!” be an outside possibility?), instead they have improved the printing dramatically.

A while ago, DC Thomson closed down their in-house printing operation to save money (this also bought about the end of the Beano and Dandy libraries). The new outside printers seemed to have trouble with Commando, with issues becoming creased along the spine.

An old “in house” issue, a new printer issue and one of the latest.

As you can see, the most recent change has made the issues much thicker, with a good, square spine and no creasing! In fact the 64-page Commando issues are now as thick as 96-page issues of The Boys’ Friend Library from the 20’s and 30’s!

Alongside a BFL from 1937.

The paper the new printers had been using was also slightly “crinkly”, but they have now switched back to a more ‘pulp’, newsprint type that really allows the ink to stand out.

An old issue, note the creasing up at the centre and shiny paper.

Now, much better!

Commando is not included in the ABC sales figures (in these dark times for British comics, they are eagerly scruitnised and speculated over!), probably because it’s “four every two weeks” schedule is “weird”. But according to information from the Commando CO there has been an increase in sales recently - no doubt due to the reprint books, publicity surrounding the 50th anniversary and the National Army Museum exhibition. Commando pages also work perfectly on the screens of digital readers such as iPads, where it has also proved popular. Perhaps the profit from the digital version is being invested back in the paper editions? It’s an encouraging sign.

Also encouraging is the fact that, on a few recent occasions, I have complained about the “stupid” WH Smith staff only putting out three of the four issues. But when I went to buy the most recent batch I actually got the last issue of the (non reprinted) Falklands War story. They weren’t failing to put out certain issues - they were selling out! In fact on occasion, when I have gone into Smith’s on the ‘other week’ there has been only 2-3 comics left in the box! May be feel some cautious optimism?

Incidentally another batch of 3-in-1 reprint books has been released. But I appear to have accidentally deleted the picture I’d taken of them!

Posted in British comics industry, 2010's, DC Thomson, Commando | 1 Comment »

03/10/2011 by admin.

Bad news from newcomer Comic Football, it has been sent for an early bath after a stellar performance.

It was a game of three halves… erm

Despite giving 110% out on the pitch, at the end of the day that old injury to football comics told and it looks like the kid will be out for the forseeable future. The manager does, however, hint at a return in the future for the plucky upstart. We can only hope we haven’t seen the last of this promising talent.

Well I’m not gonna tell any old person my address XD

In transfer news the first subscription issue of The Dandy got transferred to my house. Remember, it now has under 8,000 people on the terraces but if you buy online the tickets are only £1! Get them now and secure your place right behind the goal.

Posted in Comic Football, Dandy, 2010's, DC Thomson | 1 Comment »

16/09/2011 by admin.

Again.

There’s been quite a lot written about the decline in Dandy sales lately, a lot of it in the form of mouth-foaming ravings on blog comments. These basically split into the “the artwork isn’t that great” camp and the “it’s just what the modern style is like and besides sales of everything are dropping” camp. (The third camp being bewildered casual fans wondering what on earth provoked such fury, such as me). If you ask me in amongst all the molten lolva flowing from the trollcano there were some valid points. However neither side seemed willing to accept the other viewpoint at all, meeting it with circular arguments and personal attacks. (NB: I’ll spare you the links as they were all full of swearing and I want to keep this blog clean, it’s part of my self-publishing site… at the moment the only working part!)

All of this actually made me stop caring about the Dandy. But then I thought why let that get me down? I’m jingoistic and patriotic and usually champion century-old story papers nobody’s even heard of. Of course I should be standing up for our longest-running comic!

What can we do?

Comments from people who work on the Dandy, and parents of children who get it regularly, seem to suggest that actually kids do like it as it is at present. Of course there may be room for improvement and perhaps they’d like it even better if it had 1960’s style Dudley D Watkins artwork. BUT if it goes to the wall it will never have a chance to improve. Lets get the sales up first and worry about the details afterwards.

How can we get the sales up? Well DC Thomson haven’t exactly got Marvel or DC money behind them, they can’t afford mass advertising campaigns to raise awareness of their titles. These are often poorly distributed (not seen the Dandy in Tesco for a while now, for instance) or buried under a ton of stupid toy-covered tie-in rubbish. So, let’s not rely on DC Thomson buying adverts, lets use the oldest trick in the book…

It was ancient when this was printed!

What trick is that? The trick that they had to rely on when newspapers and magazines were full of ads for quack remedies, there was maybe 3 radio receivers in the whole world and television was a charming theory…

Yes, lets advertise the comic ourselves! Lets assume out of the 7,500-odd readers that 6,500 are “regulars” and the others might get it one week and not the next. It’s possible that the regulars will know the irregulars and may be able to persuade them to get it more often. And of course there are the friends at school who may not get any comics. If anybody from the Dandy is out there it’s certainly worth a go!

And for those of us “rather beyond” the target age group, we must know somebody with young children! Comic fans are the best-placed to remind new parents that combined words and pictures help develop to literacy. You could even mention that you are trying to learn a foreign language and want to buy comics in that language, then idly add “it’s how I learned English in the first place!”

Koko, then something about listening… erm…

And then of course there are other comic forums populated by people who may live in Britain but who primarily read American, Franco-Belgian or Japanese comics. Are you a member? Try and get people to rally around one of their home-grown icons!

Finally there’s a slightly more unorthodox tactic. Ever hear of guerrilla gardening? What about guerrilla comic placing? I may have subscribed to the Dandy now (£15 for 15 issues and free delivery!) but, well, I don’t exactly have much room…

 -  - 

Oh dear

…nor am I really that interested in modern comedy comics, preferring 100 year old adventure papers. So once I’ve read the Dandy’s I’ll be leaving them in places that kids or parents might find them. Because if they read it themselves and decide they want more, the job’s done! (Mind you, make sure that your “guerrilla comic placing” doesn’t get confused with “littering”! )

And before I go, that subscription link again!

http://www.dcthomsonshop.co.uk/Group-Dandy.aspx

Posted in Dandy, 2010's, DC Thomson | 3 Comments »

05/09/2011 by admin.

On Monday I had the day off and decided to go to the National Army Museum in London to see the Commando exhibition. Because it wasn’t a weekend (like it is when I go to comic conventions) the Underground was actually working! The museum itself is a fair walk from the station, past the Royal Chelsea Hospital. The houses round that way are nice mind you.

When I rule my own country this is what the narrowest streets will look like.

Anyway after the walk I reached the museum, which has a banner outside advertising the exhibition. It did start on the first of this month though, the banner may not stay until the end! The museum itself is deceptively small on the outside, the inside is full of maze-like small rooms crammed with informative exhibits. The actual army exhibition part goes forwards in time as you climb the stairs, the first hall is about the New Model Army, for instance, whilst the one closest to the exhibition (on the top floor) is about 40’s and 50’s National Service.

The Commando exhibition itself is actually quite small, and confined to one room. It’s primarily original cover artwork, which is no bad thing as the work of Ken Barr, Jose Maria Jorge et al is beautiful! There’s a mixture of ages too. DC Thomson are great at keeping their original artwork, which allows for top-notch reprints. They even have the original art for the very first issue, which will be reprinted shortly. You aren’t supposed to take pictures, and a small bloke who might have been a Gurkha caught me XD. But here’s one of the ones I managed to smuggle across the lines!

50 years old and it looks like the paint’s barely dry!

Apart from the cover artwork there’s actually disappointingly little else, but only so much of a “serious” museum can be turned over to “mere” comics. There’s a very brief history of boys’ adventure comics mentioning The Boys’ Own Paper (with a 1916 monthly issue on display), examples of Commando’s IPC competitors, a mention of The Victor and a copy of “Battle Action Force”. This latter was an odd choice, Battle Picture Weekly (later Battle Action) is regarded as one of the greatest British comics ever, but Battle Action Force was just a stupid toy catalogue disguised as a comic (though unfortunately a sign of things to come).

There’s also one small cabinet featuring some authentic Commando equipment such as a silenced Sten Gun, a Commando knife, a few berets (and a helmet with a nasty-looking hole!). Behind it is a painting of the famous Saint Nazaire raid, which virtually immobilised Germany’s best battleships for the rest of the war.

Unfortunately there’s almost no interior artwork (I’d love to see the fine lines of Jose Maria Jorge up close!) but there is some more curious items - examples of the “transparencies” that used to be laid over the artwork. These have the comics logo, the knife and the title painted on them. They also have the cover of issue 11 “Closer Than Brothers” assembled with it’s transparencies, as it would have been back in 1961 for the printers! Of course today all of that is added to the art digitally instead.

One final important detail is that a couple of the descriptions lament the fact that comics are not taken seriously in Britain, and that the hard work of writers and artists deserves to be recognised and remembered much better than it is. Hopefully this display will be a small step in that direction!

In the museum’s shop the 50 Years a Home for Heroes book is on sale. It will be in bookshops at the end of the month. It’s about as thick as an annual but very large!

Like so

As well as a general history of Commando, it also contains articles on writers and artists (”general overview” articles rather than ones for individuals, unfortunately) with some amusing anecdotes and insights into their working methods.

With scattered-around bits of cover art. Here’s where keeping the originals comes in handy!

There’s also 6 reprinted stories, with 4 pages to each page at original size! Plus the covers are reproduced in colour (unlike the various other reprint books).

Why yes he does have a story in there!

Finally the reprinted stories have introductions with big blow-ups of the cover art and detail on the stories, such as how they were developed with the writer, editor and artist. These pages look magnificent, and the whole book is printed on thick, heavy matte paper that really shows off the art.

Must be about the original size of the paintings!

Despite it’s small size this exhibition is well worth visiting. The nearest underground station is Sloane Square. From there go left down the street in the picture above, then left again and right at the crossroads past the Royal Chelsea Hospital, then just go straight! Entry is free and there’s plenty else to look at in the building too.

Posted in 2010's, DC Thomson, Commando | 1 Comment »

02/08/2011 by admin.

I saw this story in the paper a week ago:

runn01.jpg

Which is refusing to post in clickable thumbnail mode

For anybody who can’t be bothered to scroll around the image, it is an article about a runner called John Tarrant who throughout the 50’s became infamous as “The Ghost Runner”. He had been banned from competing in athletics tournaments in Britain due to having once been paid for sport - as a boxer when he was young and desperate. Despite this he would pop up at major events anyway, leaping the barriers to join a race just as it was starting. It sounds just like a story from a comic… In fact it sounds just like two stories from a comic! Possibly the most famous athletics stories ever written. Just look at this:

Does that remind you of anybody?

From The Hornet via the Great British Comics book… phew

The one and only Wilson! This great character first appeared in The Wizard in July 1943. It chronicled the story of this mysterious athlete who became known when he leapt into a race, until then a foregone conclusion, and trounced the opposition. From then onwards he would crop up at different events up and down the country, not so much breaking records as tearing the book to pieces!

As you may notice the story is called “The Truth About Wilson”, and what was this truth? It was the fact he was born in 1795 and had lived all those years thanks to a simple life living on the moors, sleeping in a cave and eating various herbal recipes that were actually the elixir of life! At many points throughout the story, chronicled by the journalist W.S.K. Webb, supposedly during the year before World War 2, Wilson would refer to old records from the early 19th century thought to only be legends. He would then set out to break these “impossible” records, which were far in advance of the accepted modern ones - and usually manage it! Of course later it is revealed that he was actually alive when all these supposedly legendary records were set up, without the aid of stopwatches!

The Wilson stories were initially “explained away” by the fact that they all took place before World War 2, and so Wilson’s amazing records were “forgotten” because of the war. But DC Thomson had created a juggernaut and couldn’t just stop at one series. So Wilson, supposedly “last seen” in a burning spitfire over the Channel, returned to “seek champions” in the late 1940’s for Britian’s olympic efforts. After this he discovered a lost Ancient Greek civilisation in Africa and competed in their olympics, before going elsewhere in Africa to compete in a Zulu warlord’s “black olympics”. Still later he made the transition from text stories to comic strips in The Hornet, moving eventually to The Victor. Also in DC Thomson’s more “hard hitting” 80’s comic Spike, he was bought back as the mysterious “man in black”. Readers were going to be let in to his identity and background story only at the end of the serial - however their dads, remembering Wilson from the old days, spoiled it for them after episode 1!

However, Wilson is not the only comic strip hero to defy the authorities and take to the track on his own terms. Over in The Rover a story called The Tough of the Track began in 1949. This featured Alf Tupper, a much more down to earth character who worked as a welder and ate cod n’ chips!

This could be Alf Tupper! (Except he did reach the Olympics eventually)

Alf, too, was thrown out of professional athletics. But his fault was to catch out an upper-class cheat, and then to be too quick with his fists.

 Again from the later comic strip. Alf Tupper also first appeared in text stories.

And he also decided to join in a race uninvited, and “ran ‘em” all!

Alf also had a long life. He started in 1949, but I have issues of The Victor from the late 80’s where he’s still going strong - and there’s also stories of his apparent childhood which is clearly set in the 70’s! The ageing patterns only comic characters (and James Bond) can manage! The final Alf Tupper story didn’t appear in a comic, but in a newspaper. It was 1992 and the Victor’s days were already numbered, the paper featured a short serialised strip showing how Alf made it to the Barcelona Olympics and “ran” the best athletes in the world to win gold!

Sadly Victor Tarrant didn’t have such a long life, dying at only 42 of stomach cancer. Like the comic strip stars he perhaps unknowingly emulated (mind you he was a working class lad in the 40’s, could he perhaps have had Wilson tucked away in his subconscious when he decided on his “pitch invasions”? We’ll never know) he was forgotten until a researcher stumbled upon his memoirs. They have finally been published as “The Ghost Runner” by Bill Jones. It is right and proper that such an unstoppable and eccentric character should be remembered. But what of the comic and story-paper versions? These tales entertained generations of readers for decades yet ask the average convention goer at Bristol and they won’t have a clue who you are on about. We have, in the words of Show of Hands, “lost more than we’ll ever know”.

Oi DCT, reprint this!

Posted in Life Imitating Art, Wizard, Alf Tupper, Rover, Spike, Hornet, 1960's, Victor, 1940's, 1970's, 1990's, 1980's, DC Thomson, 1950's | 1 Comment »

02/08/2011 by admin.

In keeping with my timely updates on current comics, this one is actually going off sale tomorrow, but oh well. DC Thomson have teamed up with the National Trust to bring a Beano with several stories featuring the characters visiting famous locations around Britain.

Once again I’ve been taking photos of the glossy pages with the flash rather than scanning them -_-

I must remember it’s okay to scan modern comics it’s only crumbling 100 year old ones you have to be careful with!

 This has given the artists a chance to show off their skills with renditions of these grand stately piles…

While we’re here I may as well mention that the Beano has recently been running a two-page “Retro Beano” spread with classic reprints. After the shock demise of Classics From the Comics this was a welcome addition. Also the stories are presented with their original colour.

89-90 eh? I just missed these! Started getting it in 1991

There is also other reprints in the issue as Roger The Dodger and Minnie The Minx are reprints from the 80’s too at the moment, but those are “disguised” reprints with new colouring and occasionally updated dialogue (what is clearly a tape player becomes a “ipod” for instance!).

There’s also been a series of activity pages called “Where’s Dennis?”, reprinted from a big book from 1999. Unfortunately they have decided to “update” these too, by pasting on the face of the modern “TV Dennis” (who is seemingly not going to be with us much longer anyway, things are moving towards the old one being bought back). However the pasted-on artwork is at a higher resolution and sticks out a mile.

Also he’s near the middle of the picture where people will look first anyway.

Harrumph! Grrrumph! I bet it’s all PC these days anyway. Back in my day they’d give away free bows and arrows with the comic, you wouldn’t get that these days…

Oh.

Posted in Beano, 2010's, DC Thomson | 1 Comment »

02/05/2011 by admin.

who? Well here he is in the latest Dandy, being cheeky to Her Majesty…

And here he is, having  jumped comic, publisher and century, in Chums in 1899!

Posted in 2010's, Dandy, Chums, Cassell & co, DC Thomson, 1890's | 1 Comment »

21/04/2011 by admin.

O_O

Posted in Life Imitating Art, Wizard, 2010's, DC Thomson | 1 Comment »

31/03/2011 by admin.

It’s actually probably close to going off-sale now, but the science fiction Commando comic “Space Watch”, reviewed by me right back at the start of this blog, has been reprinted!

Mildly-changed cover. The fading of the original printing is most likely due to age and not older printing techniques!

However if you remember my review I was actually pretty disappointed with it. But of course you are regularly buying Commando anyway in order to support the very last Boys’ Own comic, right?

On one forum I go to people speculated if it was a  ”rejected” issue of Starblazer. It isn’t, it was originally part of a series of stories, all (except this one) with “Challenge” in their name and most set in simulations of past conflicts.

Posted in 2010's, DC Thomson, 1990's, Commando | 1 Comment »

26/10/2010 by admin.

Is how they may have advertised a re-launch 100 years ago (which would have been a full 27 years before the first issue came out, but there you go). But this isn’t 1910, it’s 2010! - and the ALL-NEW, ALL-STRIP Dandy is out tomorrow! Or was today if you looked in the right places. Reaction on Comics-UK has, from my skim-reading to avoid actually reading it (heh) looks very very positive! So get buying and show the money-men that we like this kind of thing!

Posted in Dandy, 2010's, DC Thomson | 2 Comments »