Gad, Sir! Comics!

The Best of Look-In – Junior TV Times – The Seventies, compiled and edited by Graham Kibble White, Prion Books/Carlton Publishing, 55 pages of strip (out of 144), £12.99
Features:
Crowther in Trouble by Geoff Cowan (story) and Tom Kerr (art)
Please Sir! by Angus P Allan (story) and Graham Allen (art)
On the Buses by Scott Goodall (story) and Harry North (art)
Catweazle by Angus P Allan (story) and unidentified artist
Michael Bentine’s Potty Time by Robin Tucek (story) and Arthur Ranson (art)
Les Dawson is Superflop by Geoff Cowan (story) and Arthur Ranson (art)
The Adventures of Black Beauty by Angus P Allan (story) and Mike Noble (art)
The Tomorrow People by Angus P Allan (story) and John M Burns (art)
Man About the House by Angus P Allan (story) and Bill Titcombe (art)
Flintlock by Angus P Allan (story) and Bill Titcombe (art)
ABBA by Angus P Allan (story) and Arthur Ranson (art)
The Bionic Woman by Angus P Allan (story) and John Bolton (art)
The Benny Hill Page by Geoff Cowan (story) and Bill Titcombe (art)
Sapphire & Steel by Angus P Allan (story) and Arthur Ranson (art)
Cover art by Arnaldo Putzu, montaged by Alistair McGown

Untidily spilling out of the racks in the children’s comics section of newsagents throughout Britain are publications that combine comic strips based on licensed properties from other media (including television, film and toys) with articles, puzzles, posters and competitions. They are all the spiritual children of Look-In, born in 1971 when its publisher decided to take two pitches – for a children’s magazine about TV and for a comic in the style of TV21 - and combine the two. Whether this formula proved to be the salvation of children’s publishing or cost comics their soul is a matter of opinion.

Whereas the likes of The Simpsons, Doctor Who Adventures and Transformers have a single brand to play with, Look-In had access to almost everything shown on ITV, which was then one-third of all programmes broadcast in Britain. The range of strips reproduced here, wide though it is, is only a selection. Some series were omitted because they were too adult, and one or two were licensed elsewhere. I remember being most put out when I learned that Marvel UK had obtained the rights to Planet of the Apes, because I so much preferred the artwork in Look-In.

Editor Alan Fennell, late of TV21, had hired many of the best boys’ comics artists in Britain, including some of my favourites from Countdown, such as Mike Noble, John M Burns and Martin Asbury, as well as humorous artists like Bill Titcombe, whose work I admired on Dad’s Army in TV Comic. He had also brought with him TV21 writer Angus Allan, whose stories now seem thin and perfunctory, but which appeared to my pre-teen self as being much more faithful to the television originals than the overwrought melodrama of Marvel.

If the writing for these strips doesn’t carry too much appeal for an adult thirty years on, the artwork remains a major draw. Noble, for example, makes Black Beauty a far more dynamic and visually expressive story than it ever was on television.


It’s fun to see the veterans apply their mature skill to these strips. But there is even more interest in watching future stars in development. Here is John Bolton, working chiefly in line rather than his more familiar modelled tones.


Particularly startling is the range of styles deployed by Arthur Ranson, before beginning, with Sapphire & Steel, to develop what would become the highly detailed hatched realism familiar from Button Man and Anderson, Psi Division.





Reproduction is occasionally grainy, and at least some pages have been scanned from published copies (a number of pages, particularly those in black and white, show a tell-tale darkening towards the spine). But on the whole everything looks acceptable.

And what of the magazine content? Well, the articles were always pretty thin at the time. There may be some nostalgic buzz from reading a day’s TV schedule that is no longer being broadcast, working through competitions for prizes that can no longer be won, and gazing at adverts for products that can no longer be bought, but once you’ve skimmed through that stuff once, it becomes clear that it’s the comics that have the greater and more lasting value.

But, then again, I thought that at the time.


Relevant links
Alistair McGown’s Look-In: A Tribute to the Junior TV Times
Bear Alley article about by Alistair McGown about compiling The Best of Look-In
Look-In Picture Strip Archive

The Forbidden Planet International blog reports that Nostalgia and Comics, the Birmingham comics shop, is thirty years old.


That means that it must have been about four when I started shopping there. Now, Nostalgia – as everyone I knew called it – is just around the corner from Birmingham New Street railway station; and my school was just across the road from Coventry station. Trains from Coventry to Birmingham took twenty minutes (express) or thirty minutes (local). So there was just enough time to dash out of school at lunchtime, catch a train, make a hasty purchase at Nostalgia, and still be back in time for the bell for afternoon classes.

Completely against school rules, of course, and wholly reliant on trains being fast, frequent and reliable. Golly, and I thought that I spent too much time wallowing in Nostalgia then.

Picture
Nostalgia and Comics as it was - the sign has since been replaced with one using FPI's corporate branding. Photo found on Yahoo Travel.

Another find while reshelving was The Morecambe & Wise Special from 1977. So far as I know, this was the only time anyone produced a comic strip starring Eric and Ernie, then at the height of their popularity as Britain’s leading comedy double act (though I’d love to be proved wrong).


At the time this was published, Film Fun had been dead for 15 years, having ended its 42-year run in 1962. The style of cartooning used in this strip echoed that of the older comic, as in the Laurel and Hardy panel below, drawn by Terry Wakefield’s father, George Wakefield, for a 1941 edition of Film Fun, and scanned here from Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury’s fine book Great British Comics. (At least, Gravett and Stanbury attribute this to George Wakefield - Lambiek, on the other hand, says that Terry Wakefield had taken over the strip in 1938.)


I wonder how many readers of the Morecambe and Wise Special remembered the Film Fun style? I think my only exposure to it at the time would have been from the 1971 Shire Publications book Discovering Comics, written by pioneering British comics historian Denis Gifford – who also wrote the Morecambe and Wise strip.

Update, 3 June 2007
In addition to the Reveille Extra strip mentioned by Shaqui in the comments section, I find that Denis Gifford and Terry Wakefield also collaborated on The Morecambe and Wise Comic Book! (Corgi Books' Carousel imprint, 1977) and Eric & Ernie's TV Fun Book (Arrow Books, 1978). I don't know if any of this was the same material reprinted.

The End of the World is Nigh
In the TV series Whoops Apocalypse, the new British Prime Minister, Kevin Pork, bases his defence policy on his belief that he is Superman. This is part of the chain of events that leads to global nuclear holocaust.

So it’s a little worrying that DC Comics is bringing out a Superman doll that looks like Gordon Brown.



Update
It seems that Norm Breyfogle is, after all, working on comics. He’s listed as one of the creators of the new Guardian Line range of Christian super-hero comics from Urban Ministries Incorporated.

My first memories of comics date from around 1970. I must have read nursery comics before then – or had them read to me – but, like many Brits, I find The Beano lurking at the start of my memory lane. My favourite strip was The Bash Street Kids, by the remarkable Leo Baxendale, but my favourite artist was Robert Nixon, who had taken over Roger the Dodger from Ken Reid.



I would later follow Nixon over to IPC (or Fleetway, or whatever the company was called that week), and strips like Kid Kong for the likes of Shiver and Shake and Whizzer and Chips.

Adventure comics at the time were dominated by television adaptations. The finest in my young days was Countdown, later renamed TV Action, and I was particularly taken by the artwork of Gerry Haylock on UFO and Doctor Who.



It wasn’t until a dying TV21 was swallowed by Valiant that I encountered the original characters now associated with 1970s British comics, like The Steel Claw, Kelly’s Eye, or my favourite, Janus Stark.



By the time 2000AD started up, I felt that I was too old for comics, so it was with guilty pleasure that I picked up the occasional issue. A few years later, and more secure in my tastes, I bought up a complete run to date from a younger boy.

But I hadn’t given up comics completely in the meantime. The hardbound volumes of Astérix were much more respectable than the British weeklies, and Albert Uderzo’s artwork appealed to me enormously (as did René Goscinny’s writing, although at the time I tended to attribute all virtue to the artist). I soon ran out of the English translations, and started struggling through my older brother’s copies of the French editions, whose British distributor used to enclose notes explaining all the French puns and cultural references.



And there were also newspaper strips. My father preferred the Daily Mirror, my mother the Daily Express or Daily Mail, so I was exposed to a range of strips from Andy Capp to Garth to Fred Bassett.



There were also the political cartoonists: Keith Waite, Cummings and Mac in those three papers, and, best of all, Trog (Wally Fawkes) in The Observer and Punch.



(The original of that portrait of British Prime Minister Ted Heath would have been in colour, but I have scanned it from the 1977 black and white collection, The World of Trog.)

What of American comic books and superheroes? To tell the truth, I wasn’t impressed. To be sure, I hadn’t seen them at their best, but in the weekly editions put out by Marvel UK. What had been intended as a single issue in America would have been chopped nonsensically into three or four parts to be read separately. In addition, the colour would be missing, and the artwork blown up to about half as big again as the intended size (and possibly “bodged” to fit a different shape of page), leaving it looking empty and crude.



It wasn’t until I missed a bus in 1981, and bought a US comic on a whim to pass the time, that I engaged with the real thing. The comic was Justice League of America 195, the first part of a JSA/JLA team-up by Gerry Conway and George Perez. I was instantly taken with the idea of Earth-2 and its 60-something Superman.

After a few months trying to cope with the seemingly random distribution of US comics to British newsagents, someone told me about specialist comic shops. So, during the 1980s, I was able to eat up Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Dark Knight Returns, Warrior, with its remarkable starting line-up of Marvelman, V for Vendetta and Laser Eraser & Pressbutton, Eddie Campbell’s Alec, Love & Rockets, Levitz and Giffen’s Legion of Super-Heroes, American Flagg, Escape, Watchmen … in short, I had joined the mainstream of English-language comics culture; where I am still paddling a quarter of a century later.