This week in 1965...

I haven't done one of these for a while, where I look back at several comics from years ago that were published in the same week. Above is my photo of how a newsagents counter may have looked this week exactly 50 years ago when all of these issues were on sale! Half a Century ago! Blimey!

Let's start off with the issue of Valiant that went on sale Saturday 20th February 1965. Cover by Mike Western which looked back on other events of this week in times past...

Inside, the dark, tense artwork of Solano Lopez with the latest Kelly's Eye chapter. These old strips certainly knew how to deliver a great cliffhanger!

As the topline on the cover promised, this issue saw the start of a new adventure with The Wild Wonders, drawn by Mike Western...

A good horror/mystery serial in Valiant at that time was Jack O'Justice, drawn by Tom Kerr... 

That issue also carried a half page ad for that week's Buster and The Big One which featured a free gift...

Monday 22nd February 1965 saw the publication of The Dandy No.1214 with a very amusing Korky the Cat strip drawn by Charlie Grigg...

Inside, Dudley D. Watkins proved what a master comic artist he was with a Desperate Dan strip with 17 panels on one page...

The Smasher was up to mischief as usual, drawn by Hugh Morren. Note the advert at the foot of the page, heralding the start of Greedy Pigg the following week! (Greedy Pigg would replace George Martin's Sunny Boy which ended that week.)

The Dandy carried a regular feature page back then called My Home Town. Humour illustrations by Frank McDiarmid, with the 'straight' artwork by Thomson staff artist Alan Gibson. (Thanks to Ray Moore for correcting me on that.) Note the ads for that week's Bimbo and Diana at the bottom of the page...

The same day saw the publication of Wham! No.37, with a cover by Graham Allen doing his best to 'ghost' Leo Baxendale's style...

This issue of Wham! saw the debut of two new strips. In actuality they were both reprints from Swift. Western serial Johnny Straight by Don Lawrence was a re-lettered reprint of Wells Fargo...

...whilst The Bouncers by Peter Maddocks was also reprinted from Swift.

The rest of Wham! was still all-new though, and worth every penny. Especially with Leo Baxendale's glorious centre-spread strip Eagle Eye: Doomsday School...

This week in 1965 saw the publication of TV21 No.6. (Apologies for my copy having a bit missing from the cover.)

An important issue as it saw Mike Noble's arrival to TV21, taking over the art duties on Fireball XL5...

On the back page, The Daleks were proving to be more devious and cunning than they'd be portrayed in some of their TV appearances. Artwork by Richard Jennings...

Sparky was also on issue No.6 that week. Cover by Ron Spencer. My apologies if anyone is offended by the strip. Presented as it was in different times. Thankfully things have moved on since.

The centre pages featured another adventure with Dreamy Dave and Dozy Dora with artwork by George Ramsbottom. (Thanks to Ray Moore for that info.) One of the weirdest things about this strip was that every week the sleepy siblings shared the same dream! 

On the back page, another nice Moonsters strip by Bill Ritchie...

Just a few examples of the wide variety of strips from the many British comics that were available 50 years ago. It was a great time to be a child!

Sparky firsts!

A couple of weeks ago for the comic's 50th anniversary I showed a selection of early pages from Sparky on this blog. I mentioned I didn't have issue 1 but Blimey reader Jimmy Tweed has kindly sent me scans of the front and back covers. Sparky strip artwork is by Ron Spencer. 

Obviously I can't show a strip like that without comment. The interesting, and alarming, thing about this first Sparky strip is that the character is talking in that stereotypical way that was becoming outdated even by 1965 when this saw print. A small compensation is that from the following week, when Sparky moved to the front cover, his dialogue was in perfect English. Too bad his visual design remained based on that of 1930s character Sooty Snowball. It may seem hard to believe today that this strip debuted in the same time period that the Civil Rights movement was often in the news. Yet sadly this sort of caricature was still seen in strips, and in gag cartoons in newspapers and joke books in the sixties. 

I'm sure no one was being intentionally racist. People are products of their times, and Sparky, like Stymie and his Magic Wishbone of decades earlier, wasn't intended as a malicious caricature. All the same, I can't help wondering how young black readers felt, already struggling to be accepted as equals, to see this over-exaggerated grass-skirted character on the covers of a new comic interacting with all-white characters who were drawn semi-realistically. 

Race relations became a huge and important talking point in the sixties of course and eventually caricatures like Sparky were considered out of touch. The character was gradually phased out of the comic by the end of the decade. Sparky became a much better comic without him.

My thanks again to Jimmy Tweed for sending me these fascinating scans of comics history. 

SPARKY: The Early Years

This week marks the 50th anniversary of DC Thomson's Sparky weekly, which enjoyed a respectable 12 year run from January 1965 to July 1977 before merging with The Topper. I'm just going to focus on its very early days in this post.

Some of Sparky's most fondly remembered strips didn't arrive until a few years into its run. Fan favourites such as I-Spy, The Sparky People, L Cars, Puss 'n' Boots, and Spoofer McGraw were relatively late arrivals that were part of the comic's gradual evolution into a different type of comic. The Sparky that most fans remember was a wilder, wittier, comic, but when it started it was a much more conservative title and seemed to be pitched at a slightly younger readership than its sister papers Dandy and Beano. 

My copy of Sparky No.1, purchased 50 years ago, was thrown away back then, and I've misplaced the earliest issue in my collection (No.6) so these are a few pages from 1966 and 1967. 

Like Bunty, the title of the comic Sparky was also the cover star. Quite a controversial one in this case. Any article on the early days of Sparky comic can't avoid the fact that Sparky himself was an outdated racist caricature, with his distorted features and grass skirt. Indeed he was basically a revival of Sooty Snowball, an old 1930s character from the short-lived Magic Comic. (http://www.britishcomics.com/Magic/) 

If I remember correctly (and I'm thinking back 50 years here so I could be mistaken), the first strip had Sparky arrive via a flying saucer, suggesting that he was an alien, rather than an immigrant. (Can anyone verify that? Have I imagined it?) However, the physical similarity to black caricatures and to the old Sooty Snowball character would dispute that. I think what made the Sparky strips even more alarming was that although Sparky himself was a distorted caricature, most of the white characters in the strip did not have exaggerated features. Also, why was Sparky dressed that way when he lived in 1960s suburban Britain?  

Sparky occupied the cover strip for a while, then was shunted to the back page to give the presumably more popular Moonsters the cover position. A far better strip in my opinion, with nice work by Bill Ritchie.

It didn't last unfortunately. In 1967 Sparky was back on the cover again, and would remain so at least until towards the end of 1968. Thankfully by 1969 he was gone, surviving only as a head shot on the jokes page, and eventually phased out altogether.

As I said earlier, the content of the early years of Sparky was a little younger in tone than DC Thomson's other humour comics. Strips such as Cuckoo In The Clock for example, seemed to have a tone somewhere between Bimbo comic and The Beano...

Likewise, Winnie the Witch, a mostly forgotten character today...

Dreamy Dave and Dozy Dora was another whimsical strip that had almost a fairy tale aspect to it...

However, Sparky also revived some classic 1930s DC Thomson characters such as Peter Piper, Hungry Horace, Pansy Potter, and Keyhole Kate. These would prove to be more enduring than any Cuckoo In The Clock and would become the mainstays of the comic...

Sparky also featured a few adventure strips, with the robot Big Klanky being one of its best remembered characters...

I've only barely touched upon Sparky's long history of course, but if you want to find out more, Alan Smith did a very thorough research of the comic which he posted over on the Crikey! Forum a few years ago. Click here:
http://crikey.forumotion.com/t148-the-sparky-file

Christmas Comics: SPARKY (1973)

Sparky No.466, dated 22nd December 1973 kicked off with a marvelous wraparound cover drawn by Bill Ritchie. 

Turn the page, and there's The Sparky People, a great strip set in the Sparky office. (Although as far as I know, none of the characters were based on actual people.) Art by Jim Petrie...

Sparky had its own distinct style, often wittier and more modern than The Dandy and The Beano at the time. Here's the Christmas episode of the popular L Cars with art by Bill Hill...

Snip and Snap had a very distinct art style that I liked. It was drawn by Mike Green, who later went on to do Weedy Willy for Oink!...

Ali's Baba made good use of spot colour by having the guardian angel Ali only appear in red line. Art by Malcolm Judge...

By 1973 Puss an' Boots had proven so popular with the readers that they now occupied the full colour centre pages. Not bad for a strip that began as a half pager in black and white. Artwork by the excellent John Geering...

Dreamy Daniel was about a boy with a vivid imagination, very much a forerunner to Les Pretend from The Beano. Art by Gordon Bell...

Where will the Blimey-Timey Time Machine land next? Find out soon!