Childhood Comics and Annuals

[timv]

I remember 'Captain Hurricane' the huge Marine and his very small Cockney batman (army term for assistant/ personal attendant) and the semi- science fiction/ magic serial 'Kelly's Eye' from 'Valiant' in the early 1970s; there was also 'Raven On The Wing' , the Romany boy footballer in a First Division team and his manager with the latter's mini-skirted daughter Jo.

Jack O' Lantern I think first appeared in the earlier boys comic 'Eagle' and was a Regency era smuggling / spy thriller set in the Napoleonic Wars; I remember it from 'Eagle' annuals which I inherited from a cousin. Some serials used to move around a lot between comics, probably as their artists or writers moved or the comics merged, so I can't be certain at this distance in time where I read them; ones which I read in 'Lion' around 1970 seem to have been in 'Eagle' originally, and I can't be certain if others were in 'Smash' or 'Valiant'.

The standard of the artwork in these comics was very good, as was the variety of stories - a mix of thrillers, history serials, the supernatural, and mystery/ detective stories as well as the inevitable football and World War Two (which did not dominate the genre as fully as some later books on it have implied). My favourite serials included the Dark Ages thriller 'Erik the Viking' , the Gothic mystery thriller 'The Pillater Peril', and the Victorian escapologist/ crime stories about the (invented) music-hall act cum crime-fighter Janus Stark, all of these in Smash'. A lot of these were drawn not by English artists but by Spanish or South American ones, which I had no idea of at the time as hardly any of the strips were credited; it would be nice to have the often neglected achievements of these people better known. I am pleased to hear that the 'Rebellion' comicbook media company has now bought up rights and is reprinting some of them, starting with the long-running and visually spectacular 'Look and Learn' sci-fi serial 'The Trigan Empire' (my own favourite) along with some of the girls serials from 'Tammy'. You can learn a lot about the culture of an era by looking at its comics, even if the hairstyles now often look bizarre - and some of the serials made slightly forced attempts to modernise and appeal to new readers at times , eg by giving sedate 1950s school serial heroes and heroines new 1960s 'Beatnik' hairstyles!

[Lenoir]

I also read Valiant. From 1970 until about 1975.
Since then I have collected some older ones from 1969, which were new to me.

[Stephen]

During my recent convalescence at my parents' house, I was once more going through my sister's old girls comic annuals. As well as my old favourites, there were some stories I'd never read before but were still as entertaining (and unnerving) as ever. One in particular appeared at first glance to be simply a historical romance. 1790, and a rich girl from a large stately home goes riding across the moors on her horse in spite of her father's wishes. But then she gets lost. She eventually meets a girl with a light out walking who directs her to where this stately home should be. However, we then realise that this girl with the light is actually from the present day (ie 1990). She goes to her own house, tells her own parents about meeting someone who was trying to find this place, and her father explains that this stately home is just a ruin. It burnt down two hundred years previously, and there was only one survivor from the family - the daughter. The last frame shows the 1790 girl on horseback staring across the moor at her house on fire in the distance!

[Katharine]

Ooo, that gave me goosebumps just reading the synopsis!

What annual was that? I had a lot of comics as a child, but not many annuals. The only one I have a a lot of are the Twinkle ones.

[Anita Bensoussane]

I'd be interested to know which annual it was too, Stephen. My sister and I had quite a lot of annuals in the 1970s and early 1980s (mainly Jinty, Misty, Tammy and Judy but also some School Friend and Penny). We got given a lot of Diana, June and Sally secondhand as well, some dating from the 1960s, and I collected more from jumble sales etc., including Bunty, Mandy, Jackie and Blue Jeans - and one or two Debbie, Princess Tina and Girl annuals too. The artwork was great in some of them, especially Misty and Diana.

[Stephen]

I can't say for certain because I was reading annual after annual in no particular order, but I'm fairly sure it was Judy. After Misty of course, Judy seemed to have the most creepy stories!

[pete9012S]

Lost on the Moor (Pages: 40-43) Judy 1990

http://girlscomicsofyesterday.com/2019/07/judy-1990/

Could it have been this story??

[Stephen]

That's the one!

[Courtenay]

Ooo, that gave me goosebumps just reading the synopsis!

Gosh, me too! We never had comics like that in Australia when I was a kid — at least, I don't remember anything like them. The only comic books we had were cheap reprinted Disney ones with Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, Chip 'n' Dale, Winnie the Pooh and the like! Fun, but not so artistically accomplished and definitely nowhere near as creepy...

[Anita Bensoussane]

Great stuff! I have a few Judy annuals but not the 1990 one.

[Katharine]

I have a Judy annual from 1966 - the year I was born, although I don't think it was given to me then. I'm not quite sure how/where I acquired it. It was on my childhood bookshelf for many years. I can only assume I got it from a school fete. It's a long while since I read it though, so can't remember how scary the stories were.

[Judith Crabb]

My generation of Australian schoolgirls were well catered for as Schoolgirls' Picture Library imported from the UK provided masses of similar stories. I loved the historical ones though my favourites were the 'Grey Ghost' and 'The Silent Three' at very unlikely boarding schools. A later generation of schoolgirls had the 'Bunty', 'Judy' and 'Debbie' comics. I suspect that you, Courtenay, were too young even for these. As UK exports were overtaken by the US (as was our English - I'd say we're closer to American English than British these days), so popular reading for children changed.

[Courtenay]

My generation of Australian schoolgirls were well catered for as Schoolgirls' Picture Library imported from the UK provided masses of similar stories. I loved the historical ones though my favourites were the 'Grey Ghost' and 'The Silent Three' at very unlikely boarding schools. A later generation of schoolgirls had the 'Bunty', 'Judy' and 'Debbie' comics. I suspect that you, Courtenay, were too young even for these.

Must have been, since I've never heard of any of them!! (I was born in the 1980s.)

We aren't necessarily so much closer to the US than to the UK nowadays, though. Maybe things have changed since I was growing up, or maybe it's just me, but now that I've lived in both Australia and Britain, I would say Aussie culture, while it's unique in its own ways and definitely not the same as British, is still much, much closer to British culture overall than to American. Even when I first moved to the UK 10 years ago, I very quickly felt I could fit in here — the sense of humour is almost identical and so many other aspects of the culture are, if not the same as Oz, similar enough that they're compatible and we can easily understand each other. I've never felt the same way about America, even though we get a lot of their TV and their cultural influences in Australia as well. I've been over there a few times and it's a lovely and very interesting country, but the whole mentality there is just so different from both Britain and Australia. As I said, almost as soon as I set foot in Britain I knew I could live here. I couldn't say the same about America.

(No offence intended to any Americans here in the forum! But I don't think we have very many here, probably because Enid Blyton's books have never been popular over there. Whereas they always have been in Australia! )

[Judith Crabb]

Although I am quite 'unAustralian' in the small amount of travelling (even and especially within Australia) I've done, and I've never been to UK or US, I suspect that you're probably right, Courtenay, about the culture (especially the humour) but I was thinking mainly of speech. However, maybe British vernacular is as Americanized these days as it seems to me that everyday talk is in Australia. However, I'm no linguist. I must look into it.
Born in the '80s - definitely too young to have thrilled to the Daring Deeds of the comic-book heroines in the publications I was mentioning.

[pete9012S]

That's the one!

Thanks Stephen.

What a great idea for a spooky story - love it!