Cover story

There's a discussion on Facebook at the moment about this annual cover so I thought I'd expand upon it here. This memorable cover to The Beano Book 1970 was painted by Dave Sutherland, who was the regular cover artist on the Beano annuals at that time (and for many years afterwards). He still draws The Bash Street Kids in The Beano every week of course, and this year will be his 53rd year on the strip!

The interesting thing about this annual cover is that the week the book was published, that week's Beano comic (No.1416, dated September 6th 1969) tied in with it, showing what happened next! A rare British comics crossover. Although the book cover was by Dave Sutherland, the strip on the weekly was by Biffo's regular artist Dudley Watkins. Sadly, by the time this saw print, Mr.Watkins had passed away suddenly the previous month. 

That same issue also carried an ad for the latest Dennis the Menace annual on the back page, with a vague link to that week's Dennis strip drawn by Davey Law. 

T.V. Fun No.1 (1953)

T.V. Fun No.1. Cover date: September 19th 1953. 
Price: 3d (1p). Every Monday (but probably out the previous Saturday.)
Publisher: The Amalgamated Press Ltd.
Page count: 20, comprising of four full colour, four spot colour (red), 12 black and white.
Page size: 24cm wide by 32cm high. 
Print quality: newsprint.

The year 1953 was a turning point for The Amalgamated Press. In one fell swoop they axed their three longest running comics. Comic Cuts, Illustrated Chips, and Wonder (formerly The Funny Wonder) were all cancelled in the same week, and replaced the following week with a brand new comic, TV Fun.

Clearly A.P. were determined to appear up-to-date by jettisoning their oldest comics in favour of one that reflected the new television age. Comic Cuts and Chips had run for over 60 years. Would TV Fun prove to be a worthy successor? Sadly not. It survived for just six years, changing its title to TV Fan for its last few months and merging into the romance comic Valentine in 1960.

Truth be told though, TV Fun wasn't a bad comic by any means. It was perhaps just not as modern-looking as A.P. would have hoped, despite its full colour covers (which the extinguished comics had lacked). To its credit it did feature work by some of the top artists in British comics, so let's look at a few pages from issue one. 

On the cover (above), the Arthur Askey strip had sort of made the jump from A.P.'s Radio Fun to herald this new venture. The artwork is by Arthur Martin.

Turning the page, the first thing the reader would be confronted with was a two page text story As Midnight Chimes. Prose stories like these were still a common feature of comics of the 1950s. 

Panel shows have always been a staple part of the TV schedules (because they're relatively cheap to do) and TV Fun reflected that with Put Your Question. I thought this was the work of Cyril Price but I'm reliably informed by comic historian Ray Moore that it's by Alex Akerbladh, and the last series he drew for A.P.

TV Fun contained a good balance of humour strips, prose stories, and adventure strips. One of the latter being Call In The Yard...

No less than five prose stories appeared in the comic. One of them was a complete story featuring super-spy Valda...

An adventure strip was awarded the full colour centre pages, with chapter one of The House With Red Shutters illustrated by George Heath...

The excellent Roy Wilson had a place in the new comic too, with two strips on page 14: Who's Who in Our Zoo, and Hoofer the Tee Vee Gee Gee. Neither of which were actually TV characters but TV Fun seemed to be aiming for the essence of a TV show in some of its strips, rather than filling it with adaptations. 

However, a TV celebrity did appear on the facing page in the form of Jimmy Edwards. Artwork by Reg Parlett, packing a lot into the page...

Despite this being a new comic and the company's big new launch, the editorial didn't appear until the inside back page, tucked away at the bottom. There the editor welcomed the readers, told them of things to come, and recounted his week. Which is all well and good until he cracks a racist joke. 

On the back page, a full colour strip starring Diana Decker 'The Cutie Queen of the TV Screen'. Judging from the times Ms.Decker flashes her legs in this and subsequent strips I think it's fair to say that A.P. were aiming TV Fun at an older reader than Thomson's Dandy and Beano. It looks to me that Bertie Brown was the artist of this page, and well chosen too for his ability to draw the female figure. 

Surprisingly (to me at any rate) I won this first issue on eBay last week for just £9.99. Either not many people noticed it or interest in pre-1960s British comics is waning fast. Of course, many collectors buy for nostalgia, and anyone who had this comic as a child would be in their late sixties by now and most likely to be cutting back on their collection rather than building it up. I hope showing a few pages from it here have been of interest to readers of this blog anyway. 

As always, click on each page to see it at a larger and more legible size.

Beano bits and bobs from the 1950s

My thanks to Jimmy Tweed again for sending me more comic scans from his collection. There's some fascinating items here that I've certainly never seen before. 

Above is an early appearance of Dennis the Menace gatecrashing Biffo the Bear's cover strip in 1952. We all know that Dennis eventually gained the cover slot in 1974 but back then he was just an interior strip. Considering that Dennis the Menace had only started in The Beano the year before, I'm guessing that this 1952 strip is the first time he'd appeared on the cover. A sign of his immediate popularity perhaps, and a foreshadowing of great things to come! The brilliant Dudley Watkins drew Dennis a bit bulkier than his regular artist Davy Law did, but it's a great strip all the same.

Moving on a few years and here's a 1958 cover with Dennis making another appearance! Again, artwork by Dudley Watkins who drew him closer to the traditional version this time. (Although to be fair, like most comic characters, the design of Dennis did fluctuate a bit even under Davy Law until he settled on a comfortable design.)

As a bonus item, here's a Dennis the Menace strip by Davy Law from the back cover of The Beano from late August 1955, ending with an ad for the very first Dennis the Menace Annual. (Proving that annuals have always been published several months before Christmas, although these days they come out even earlier, in July.) 

David Leach tells it like it is

Comic artist, writer, animation artist, colourist, editor, David Leach has had quite a career and he's been interviewed by Alex Fitch about it on Resonance FM. There's a podcast of the interview now available for you to listen to here:
http://podcasts.resonancefm.com/archives/12472 

I've known David for nearly 30 years since we were contributors to Oink! comic and I count him as one of my closest friends in the comics industry. (I went to his wedding many years ago too.) So I'm pleased to see him receive some recognition on Resonance FM. The interview reveals him to be as straight talking and enthusiastic as ever - and it's funny too, so have a listen.   

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. 

Forgotten UK Superheroes: LIEUTENANT LIGHTNING

There have been many British superheroes over the years. Some of them forgotten, some of them deservedly forgettable. Case in point, Lieutenant Lightning from Smash! Annual 1969. A one-off strip exclusive to that annual, never to be revived. Spider-Man it's not, but it's an entertaining enough story and no worse than some B-list American superheroes of the time. The redeeming factor is the excellent artwork by the always-reliable Tom Kerr. An artist who always mastered whatever theme he was given, whether it was mystery, western, humour, action, - or in this case superheroes. 

Comic Oddities: MELVIN'S MONEY FUN (1981)

Some comics slip under the radar because they're not available in newsagents or the usual outlets. One such comic was Melvin's Money Fun No.1, published by the Department of National Savings, and intended to encourage children to set up an account. Apparently it was given away at promotional stands, events and suchlike. 

The 8 page glossy comic was edited by Denis Gifford and featured a fine selection of top comic artists. The cover strip, Chubby the Cub, was drawn by Chas Sinclair. One of his previous strips had been Basil Brush for TV Comic, and a few years after Money Fun he'd be drawing strips for Oink!

On page 3, Denis had commissioned the talents of veteran artist Wally Robertson to illustrate the return of classic 1950s character Sheerluck Jones...

Across the centre pages was a well illustrated adventure tale, Saved from the North Sea! drawn by Jim Baikie, perhaps best known for his artwork on Skizz for 2000AD...

Denis managed to fit in some of his own artwork too, contributing a half pager reviving his Koo Koo characters that had appeared in Whizzer and Chips in 1969...

It's curious that there were so many old characters turning up in Money Fun. In Kiss of Life Kitty, drawn by the brilliant Brian Walker, we saw the return of Laurie and Trailer, Alfie the Air Tramp and others from the pages of the original Chips. Even Weary Willie and Tired Tim cameo in the final panel...

The back page was a glorious finish to the comic by Basil Reynolds, proving that  he was a master of both realistic and cartoon styles. Again, more old characters are brought back, with the return of Skit, Skat and The Captain from the 1930s in a brand new strip...

All in all, a very nicely produced comic. The constant references to National Savings get old very fast but the appeal is in the novelty of the comic and its superb artwork. Denis sent the issue to the subscribers of his Association of Comics Enthusiasts (A.C.E.) newsletter, which is how I obtained a copy. In the accompanying newsletter, Denis explained the genesis of the project so I've reproduced that here for you to read. As with all images on this blog, click on it to enlarge...

UPDATE: Thanks for the reminder from John Wigmans that there was a second issue of Melvin's Money Fun published two years later in 1983! Peter Gray covered it on his blog several years ago...

http://petergraycartoonsandcomics.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/money-fun-comic-no2-april-1983.html