This week in 1971: COUNTDOWN No.32

It's been a while since I did one of these flashback features so here's a few pages from the issue of a comic that went on sale this weekend 44 years ago. It's Countdown No.32, dated September 25th 1971, which would have been published on Saturday Sept.18th 1971. (Click on images to see them larger.)

Countdown was a glossy 24 page weekly published by Polystyle, which featured strips based on the sci-fi adventure TV shows of the day. The comic tried to be a replacement for the glory days of TV21, to the extent that it had gained the licence to do strips of Gerry Anderson shows after TV21 had dropped them. (By the time this issue of Countdown was published, the ailing TV21 had merged into Valiant.)

The cover of this issue kicks off a new UFO serial illustrated by Gerry Haylock. One of the great things about Countdown was that it credited the artists; something most British comics didn't do back then.

The centrespread of the comic featured Doctor Who. The fantastic artist Harry Lindfield does a fine job of illustrating a very busy script but there's a lot going on to pack into two pages and it does feel like it would have benefited from spreading it over another page or two.

Eight of Countdown's 24 pages were in full colour, and although the content would vary over the comic's run, the Countdown strip itself had its two pages of 
colour every week. This was an originated strip not based on any TV show but it 
did feature spacecraft designs from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. (No spacecraft in this episode though.) Artwork by the always-astounding John Burns. 

Countdown ran a different complete 7 page story every week, and this week it was the turn of Captain Scarlet. Connecting with continuity with the movie Thunderbirds Are Go, the strip saw the return of the Martian Rock Snakes, - this time on Earth as part of a Mysteron plot. A daft story but great art by Keith Watson...

Having the licence for Gerry Anderson strips meant that Polystyle could reprint old strips from TV21, which came in handy when the budget was reduced. Although originally published in full colour, some Stingray and Fireball XL5 strips were reprinted in greyscale. Furthermore, the Fireball strips were reduced and turned at 90 degrees. However, personally speaking this didn't bother me one bit and as a 12 year old I was only too glad to revisit those classic strips I'd read when I was six. 

As you might have guessed from the competition to win a weather station, Countdown liked to mix science alongside science fiction. The back page of this issue featured a cutaway of the Apollo Lunar Module (reprinted from a book called Manned Spacecraft). 

I thought Countdown was an excellent comic, just up my street. No sports or war stories; just science fiction and fact (plus the occasional feature about UFO sightings). Sadly it seems most kids didn't take to it and with issue 59 it changed its title to TV Action, expanding its content to include TV shows such as Hawaii Five-O, and Cannon. Later, it'd incorporate pop pin-ups to compete with Look-In, but it still remained a good TV adventure comic up until its merger with TV Comic in 1973. 

Joe 90: Top Secret (1969)

Cover by Frank Bellamy.

I had this comic as a child but sold them long ago. However I recently purchased several issues in excellent condition at fairly reasonable prices so it's time to give the publication some long-overdue coverage starting with the earliest issues. 

There's always been some disagreement about the actual title of the comic. Since childhood, some of us have always thought it was called Joe 90: Top Secret due to the ever-present 'stamp' on the logo. However, in the actual comics, letters pages, etc it's only referred to as Joe 90. To add to the confusion, the one annual that the comic spawned was definitely advertised as Joe 90/Top Secret Annual but that may be because the ad was produced by a different department. However I still prefer the longer title and to my mind it'll always be Joe 90: Top Secret but for the sake of brevity I'll just refer to it as Joe 90 for the rest of this post.  

Published by City Magazines in co-operation with Century 21 it was launched on 15th January 1969. Joe 90 was a companion paper to TV21 and followed the same format of having 20 tabloid sized pages, printed in high quality photogravure. Six pages were in full colour. The cover design of the early issues was quite distinctive, leading with a documentary style opening to the Joe 90 comic strip over the page.

It has to be said that unfortunately Joe 90 was one of the weakest strips in his own comic. I suspect the editors knew this too, which may be why the comic's full colour pages were devoted to two strong and dynamic supporting strips based on American TV shows. Before we get to those though, here's a quick look at an originated strip in the comic, Ninepence + Tenpence = Sport. Perhaps someone felt Joe 90 needed a traditional sports story, and created this serial of two Inuit boys with a talent for football. Drawn by Alfredo Marculeta, who had also been the artist of Rubberman in Smash! 

The free gift in Joe 90 No.1 was a cardboard model of the 'Jet-Air Car' from the series. Nowhere near as slick as the excellent Dinky toy but it was an amusing novelty with its matchstick and rubber band 'engine'. My gift is long gone but here's the page showing the instructions for it...

Proudly running across the centrespread of every issue was a strip version of Star Trek, excellently illustrated by Harry Lindfield. The one big drawback was... the TV series wouldn't premiere on British television for several more months (July 1969), even though it had been on American TV since 1966. Yes, for us as kids back then the weekly comic strip was our first knowledge of Mr.Spock, the USS Enterprise and Captain Kurt...

Wait. Did I say Captain Kurt? Yep, that's what he was called in the first two episodes of the comic strip! Presumably someone in editorial mis-heard the name. No videos or DVDs for reference in those days of course. 

Things got even stranger in Joe 90 No.2, where the script called for Harry Lindfield to draw a scene showing the Enterprise landing on a planet! Lindfield chose to have the starship hover just above the ground rather than add wheels to it.

Joe 90 seemed to be aiming to be more of a traditional tv comic than the shared-universe theme in TV21. Living up to the 'Top Secret' aspect was The Champions, based on the British secret agent TV series. Art by Jon Davis.

The other strip that was awarded the full colour treatment was Land of the Giants, based on the popular Irwin Allen show. Great artwork by Gerry Haylock. The first three issues adapted the first episode. Considering how accurate it was I'm sure Gerry Haylock must have had access to numerous photographic stills from the episode. Here's the full adaptation from issues 1 to 3 of Joe 90...

Towards the end of Joe 90's short run of just 34 issues it became obvious that the title character wasn't the selling point, so Land of the Giants and Star Trek took turns to appear on the covers. In September 1969 Joe 90 merged into TV21 and restarted as TV 21 and Joe 90 with a new No.1 (although the merged comic was more like Joe 90 than its parent title). 

I'll take another look at some issues of Joe 90 soon, with a focus on the Joe 90 strip itself. In the meantime, here are the covers to issues 2 and 3. Click on them to see them full size...

Christmas Comics: EAGLE (1965)

Reg Parlett's Fidosaurus makes an appearance on the masthead of this Christmas edition of Eagle from 1965, relating to the cover strip about the poor dogs who were forced into a human's war. Those dogs did good work and I'm not sure if the story of them receiving a party in 1945 is true or not but they certainly deserved it. 

This issue's 20 pages featured a variety of adventure strips, not all of them festive, so I've only chosen some of the Christmas-themed ones. Here's a lighthearted Can You Catch a Crook? episode, drawn by Paul Trevillion. Can you spot the clues?

Next up, Fidosaurus by Reg Parlett. These strips were reprinted a few years later in Buster, and retitled Pongo The Prehistoric Pooch...

To place this issue in some sort of historical context, here's an ad it contained for the first film Norman Wisdom did in colour, The Early Bird...

A seasonal true war story in Bids for Freedom. I don't recognise the art style so I can't tell you who drew it unfortunately. If anyone out there knows, please post a comment.

The Guinea Pig, with artwork by Gerry Haylock, has nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas until the final panel when suddenly it's party time! I suspect some slight editorial amendment to the script was involved...

Finally, the back page strip isn't festive whatsoever, but it's such a barmy plot that I couldn't resist including it here. I haven't read too many episodes of Blackbow the Cheyenne but I don't recall this Western strip having science fiction elements in it before. A giant plant-hand tears its way through town, - and that 'Professor Relson' is a dead ringer for William Hartnell's Doctor Who! Brilliant artwork by Frank Humphries. 

Where's the next stop for the Blimey-Timey Christmas Time Machine? Find out soon!