Tuesday, 7 August 2007

Garth Returns?

This advert appears in Comics International 203, which has just gone on sale. (Click to enlarge.)


And that’s all I know at the moment. There doesn’t seem to be anything about it on the web-site of Hayena Studios, the company listed in the legal blurb up the side of the ad, and my limited Google-fu turns up no information from searches covering them or artist Huw-J.

For those who aren’t familiar with Garth, it was an adventure comic strip that ran for over 50 years in the Daily Mirror. The set-up was fairly perfunctory – Garth was a huge, heroic muscle-man who turned up, with little or no explanation, in all sorts of different times and places. Stories would veer from a western to an outer-space adventure to a contemporary horror story without taking a breath.

Peter O’Donnell, who created Modesty Blaise, wrote Garth for a while, but it is probably best remembered for the five-year run in the early 1970s when it was drawn by Frank Bellamy, who squeezed a remarkable amount of energy and dynamism into a single tier daily strip.

The International Catalogue of Superheroes has an entry on Garth here.

Update, 8 August See John Freeman's contribution to the comments section below for more information about Garth's planned return to the Daily Mirror (sort of).

2 comments:

John Freeman said...

Just to add what I know about this: the Mirror has been planning to bring back Garth to the paper -- I'm told the plan was to run the strip on the Mirror's web site first and see what reaction it got, then begin a run in the paper itself.

Looks like the launch has been delayed.

However, Garth has started appearing on comics to mobile site ROK Comics, for those who may like that kind of thing... we're running the 1964 strip selected by the Mirror for us, "The Teenager" by Peter O'Donnell, drawn by John Allard and Steve Dowling.

Check it out at: http://www.rokcomics.com/garth.php
(First episode is free to view online)

Andy Capp and Mandy are also being re-presented on the site

http://www.rokcomics.com/andy_capp.php

http://www.rokcomics.com/mandy.php

Steve Flanagan said...

Thanks for the info, John.