Mainstream Driftwood

The broadcasting of Comics Britannia (first episode tonight, BBC4, 9pm British Summer Time) has prompted articles in two of the broadsheets (well, one tabloid and a berliner now, but you know what I mean).

The Times ran an article on British comics by Kim Newman, with some slightly muddled quotes from the documentary (at least, I hope that it is The Times, and not Leo Baxendale, who thinks that Dudley Watkins created Dennis the Menace).

The Guardian trumped that with a three-page history in comic form of British comics, by Bryan Talbot. So, naturally, I missed it, and it doesn’t seen to have been posted on either the Guardian Unlimited website or the official Bryan Talbot fanpage. I am currently on the scrounge among Guardian-reading friends. For the time being, there is a photo of the first page at the bottom of Lew Stringer’s review of Comics Britannia. (Update, 11 September: Rich Johnston has now posted scans on Lying in the Gutters.)

What Guardian Unlimited does have is Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn column about Comics Britannia. I never knew that he worked on Oink!, as both a writer and artist. Unfortunately, he has swallowed and repeated DC Thomson's inaccurate claim that The Dandy is the world's longest-running comic (Detective Comics is several months older).

Before Comics Britannia

Anyone with a specialist interest must have mixed feelings when the mass media turn their attention to it: however welcome the exposure might be, the risk of misrepresentation and mockery is high.

The BBC has now filled out most of the web-pages on the site supporting the upcoming BBC4 series Comics Britannia (thanks to the FPI blog for pointing this out).

Taking those pages with the fuller descriptions of what is in each of the three parts posted by Lew Stringer on his Blimey! It’s Another Blog About Comics, and with the review Rich Johnston wrote for his Lying in the Gutters column, based on preview discs, it would seem that the BBC has actually produced an accurate and balanced series of programmes about British comics, which is not something I’d ever have expected. I’m very much looking forward to the broadcasts.

But I still think it’s a pity that, like Keith Robson’s exhibition at the Museum of Hartlepool, the BBC has chosen to start with the publication of The Dandy in 1937 (though the captions to some of the gallery images, such as the note about Dudley Watkins’s artistic debt to Tom Browne, do lend some reassurance that earlier material will not be entirely written out of history).

I can understand why this is a tempting starting-point for a TV programme aimed at a general audience: mention The Dandy and The Beano to anyone under the age of 80, and you’ll provoke instant nostalgia. Mention Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips and you’ll get blank looks. But it seems to me that a series about British comics should attempt to consider the ways in which the British variety is distinct from those in other countries, and some significant distinctions had already taken form by the 1930s. Of course, each of these is shared with some other countries: it’s the combination which creates the unique flavour.

Short, weekly anthology formats were already the norm. This would mean that British comics would continue to concentrate on stories that could be told in one or two pages, or in one or two page instalments, unlike the longer formats favoured in the USA or Japan. Collected reprints would allow European comics, which also favoured short anthologies, to break out of this restraint, but that did not happen in Britain.

Comics were wholly for children. The older line of comics for adults, such as Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday was dead. Unlike Japan or Belgium and France, an adult readership for mass market British comics would not emerge in the post-World War Two years. The contrast with other countries would be even stronger if the growing adult readership of comics in the USA had not been nipped in the bud by the creation of the Comics Code Authority.

Comics based on other media were common. They dated back at least as far as Dan Leno’s Comic Journal of 1898, and their place in the market had been cemented by the success of Film Fun and its imitators in the 1920s. Now they make up the majority of periodicals published for children. Apart from the success of Disney, I don’t think this has been true in other major comic-producing countries, where it has, if anything, been more common for other media to borrow from comics (US television and film; Japanese anime) than vice-versa.

Common themes, stereotypes and tropes were already in place. For example, it was common for humour strips to feature people of low status (such as children or tramps) opposed to authority: contrast The Bash Street Kids, where the children of Class 2B are in conflict with Teacher, with Archie, where the pupils of Riverdale High are mostly in conflict with each other.

It may be that Comics Britannia will fill in some of this backstory once it has got viewers’ attention with more familiar comics. Whatever, when it comes to what is actually in the documentaries rather than what is not, I feel a lot less apprehensive than I did when the series was announced.


Picture
Front page of Film Fun issue 254, artist and writer uncredited, Amalgamated Press, 22 November 1924, reprinted in Alan and Laurel Clark Comics: An Illustrated History, Green Wood Publishing, 1991

Keith Robson’s History of Comics

I took advantage of the Bank Holiday weekend to take a short trip to see the free exhibition Keith Robson – The History of Comics at the Museum of Hartlepool.

Keith Robson is a Hartlepool-born comics artist, chiefly for DC Thomson, and an illustrator for TV and books. The exhibition is partly about his work and partly about British comics generally, drawing on Robson’s personal collection. Despite the unrestricted title, there is no consideration of comics from other countries.

The problem with a museum exhibition about comics is that there is no way of treating the subjects in the way their producers intended – you can’t be allowed to leaf through and read them, for fear of damage. This exhibition approached the problem in four ways. On the walls were examples of Robson’s original art for strips like “General Jumbo” (from The Beano) and “Tricky Dicky Doyle” and “Jonah” (from The Dandy). In display cases were, I’d guess, something over a hundred comics, mostly from the 1950s to the 1980s, but with a good number of earlier examples too. All of these were closed, which meant that you could only see the covers. Fortunately, a lot of British comics used to run actual strips on the cover, not just single images, so there were samples of different styles of comic to read and consider. There was a television display cycling through a slideshow of comics images. And, earlier in the exhibition’s run, Robson had worked with a number of local children to produce a new strip with and about them. The results are now on display in a cabinet.

Context for these exhibits was a little lacking. There was no soundtrack to the slideshow, so the images were unexplained. There were two pages of text on display stands – one a biography of Keith Robson, the other his potted history of British comics, which sets out his view that comics effectively started in 1937 with The Dandy and that “traditional British comics” have now died out except for The Beano. The question of whether the mixed magazines now produced for children should be classed as “comics” is one that gets people hot under the collar, but what was odd in this case was that Robson’s exhibition did not match his definition. There were several pre-1937 comics on display, as well as issues of Starblazer picture library (if libraries are part of Robson’s “tradition”, then Commando is another survivor).

If anything, it was the pre-1937 comics that were of most interest to me. Regular periodical comics have been around in Britain since the 1880s. The significance of The Dandy is that it did away with the older British custom of telling comics stories twice over – once in pictures and word balloons, and again in text captions under each frame. This was a very useful way of producing nursery comics, as it gave parents something to read to their small pre-literate children as they looked at the pictures; but it was redundant elsewhere. I had only seen these older strips in reproduction, usually much reduced, making the text captions illegible. What surprised me was how small the type was even on the originally published tabloids: I’d guess about 9 point on a 1928 edition of Merry and Bright and even smaller on a 1939 edition of Jingles.

The single most beautiful piece on display was a 1928 edition of Happy Days, with “At Chimpo’s Circus” on the cover. The colours were as sharp and bright as if it had rolled off the presses yesterday.

Well worth a visit, then, though a small demerit goes to the gift shop for not stocking any related items. It may be, however, that plans fell through. Early publicity for the exhibition said that Keith Robson would be producing a history of comics in strip form, but the first page, which was on display, was unfinished, with only three panels lettered, inked and coloured. I hope that he gets the chance to finish this for another forum, even if I don’t agree with the starting point and definition.

The exhibition only has a short time left to run, closing after Sunday 2 September. If you want to make a day of it, the Museum is also the entrance to the horribly-named “Hartlepool’s Maritime Experience”, centred around HMS Trincomalee, a restored warship from 1817.

Children of Britain

A couple more thoughts about that International Herald Tribune article.

“In Britain the comic has long been considered, well, just a bit juvenile,” it says. And quite reasonably so, given the evidence. If you look at the list of comics periodicals on the Down the Tubes site, you’ll find about 100 titles. Those that aren’t intended for juveniles can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Of those, two - 2000AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine - appeal to the same arrested adolescent taste as superheroes, which in turn make up about a quarter of the comics, graphic novels and manga on the shelves of British bookshops. Since those manga are almost all shonen or shojo – originally intended for teenagers, not adults - that leaves quite a thin sliver of even the book market that the Herald Tribune addresses remaining as anything other than “just a bit juvenile”.

Mind you, adults aren’t entirely adverse to comic strips, provided that they are comical. The cubicles of England (how drearily they stand) are just as likely to be decorated with tattered yellowing Dilberts as offices anywhere. Viz, whose “Not For Sale To Children” warning appears at the top of this post, may not clear a million copies an issue anymore, but the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures, posted by Steve Holland on his Bear Alley blog, give it sales of over 94,000 a time, the third highest for any comic. Even so, it may be significant that Viz, like the comic strip features in Private Eye, gets a lot of humorous mileage from the dissonance between its adult content and its self-consciously childish and traditional comics form, which closely apes the style and grammar of the Beano.

It may seem odd to focus on the periodical market when the Herald Tribune article was about graphic novels, but the two are linked.

“With publishers in Britain still mainly taking on works from the Canadian graphic novel publishers Drawn & Quarterly, as well as the American Pantheon and Fantagraphics, the incentive to find homegrown talent is high,” says the Herald Tribune.

That’s to slight a little bit the publisher Carroll & Graf, whose Robinson imprint will be bringing out a second Mammoth Book of Best New Manga later this year. The previous volume was mostly British in origin.

And, of course, there are lots of British creators on the shelves. It’s just that they are mostly working for US publishers, telling tales of men in tights, or for 2000AD, regaling us with stories of hard men with guns. Jonathan Cape and Faber & Faber, on the other hand, are looking for the sort of respectable art comics that will get reviewed on the book pages of the broadsheets (perhaps “literary comics” might be a better term for this market, as reviewers tend to treat them as if they were a novelty form of prose).

It is noticeable that even Jonathan Cape, which has the biggest graphic novel list of any of the mainstream publishers at the moment, only has three British creators in print – Raymond Briggs, Posy Simmonds and Bryan Talbot. And with Talbot, I’m not sure how far Cape established a relationship themselves, rather than re-importing his work for Dark Horse.

It’s not hard to see why this shortage exists. There is nowhere to nurture the creators of such work. There is no British equivalent of Kramer’s Ergot, Mome or Drawn and Quarterly, nowhere to plug the gap between the self-publishing and micro-press covered by BugPowder and the full-size books that Cape and Faber want. Not only is there no Fantagraphics or Top Shelf, there is not even an SLG or Oni.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Escape and Deadline filled this role. They didn’t last long, but they did provide significant exposure for the likes of Philip Bond, Eddie Campbell, Glenn Dakin, Jamie Hewlett and Rian Hughes (as well as Best New Manga editor Ilya). It’s not clear to me where their present-day counterparts could go. The short story contest that Cape is organising with the Observer newspaper and the ICA is welcome, but unless it becomes a regular thing, it is unlikely to have much long-term impact. Perhaps a shortage of publishing entrepreneurs is more a problem than a shortage of creative talent.

Maybe the new British talent is all on the web. If so, I’ve missed it so far. Anyone have any suggestions about what I should look for?

Review: Crikey!

Crikey! The Great British Comics Magazine! issue 1, edited by Brian M Clarke, cover by Mike Kazybrid, Sequential Media, 2007, 48 pages, £3.99
Features: “Nutty Notions” by Brian M Clarke, “Fiendishly Interesting: A Terrifying Tale of the British Horror Comic” by Bob Norton, “My Comicy Saturday” by Brian M Clarke, “Ken Reid” interviewed by David Britton, “The Terrible Toys of Dr Droll” by Tom Sweetman, “My Comic Hero: Frank Bellamy” by Glenn B Fleming, “Play Misty For Me” by Tom Sweetman, “Wham!: The Funniest Comic in the World” by Brian M Clarke, “The Devil in the Shop” by Tom Sweetman, “Um letters”, “Jackie Who?” by Helen D Bennett

After reading about this on the web, I was pleasantly surprised to find it in a bricks-and-mortar shop, Travelling Man in Newcastle. Crikey! is a new fan magazine about British comics from the 1950s to the 1970s. I’d guess that those dates (“from TV Comic and Eagle through to the end of Smash and Valiant” as it says at the Crikey! website) were picked not so much because of any trends in comics or society – say, from the end of paper rationing to the arrival of the first home computers and mass-market video recorders – but because that was when the authors were children. The tone of the magazine is mostly and unashamedly one of nostalgia rather than comics scholarship.

So there are a couple of articles on Brian M Clarke’s comics shopping habits in the 1960s and Tom Sweetman’s pleasure at spending a night at the local newsagents. The article about Frank Bellamy is about how inspirational Glenn B Fleming found his work, rather than about Bellamy’s career as such (newcomers would be better off with the essay about Bellamy in the TwoMorrows volume True Brit). And while it’s nice to see that girls’ comics are not neglected, Helen D Bennett’s essay about Jackie is rather odd, as it’s a comic she claims not to have read.

This nostalgic approach is fine as far as it goes. There is always some pleasure to be derived from reading about what makes writers happy (though the website sometimes crosses into rather dubious “my childhood was better than yours” territory). But rather more to my taste are the more historically minded account of how Leo Baxendale founded the new humour comic Wham! in 1964, the overview of girls’ horror comic Misty and the 1979 interview with the late Ken Reid, one of the great humour cartoonists of his day. The article on the horror comics scare of the 1950s which led to the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act of 1955 – still on the statute books, I believe – would have been of more interest to me if I hadn’t already read Martin Barker’s book on the subject, A Haunt of Fears, but the bibliography here makes me realise that that book came out 23 years ago, so there’s plenty of justification for going over the ground again.


Like Lew Stringer, I would have liked more facts and figures, although, unlike Lew, I am not knowledgeable enough to supply corrections. Since British comics so rarely ran credits in those days, I appreciate that the names of writers and artists may not be available, but it would be helpful if the issue numbers and dates of the comics scanned for illustrations were given. And while it is a great pleasure to see so much vintage comic art, I am not wild about the approach of printing thin slivers of pages, with only fractions of some panels showing.

Still, this was an entertaining and, in places, informative read, and I’ll certainly be getting the next issue.

British Comics: A Quick Guide for Visitors, Part Two

See also Part One: Background and Periodicals

The simplest way to run through the various reprints, trade paperbacks, manga, annuals and other books of comics available in the UK is to take you through an imaginary bookshop. So, imagine that you have just entered a large branch of a major chain like Waterstone’s.

As before, I’d welcome corrections, expansions, and different opinions.

Manga
A big comics section may be given over to manga. Almost without exception, these will simply be the US editions from Viz Media, Tokyopop and Dark Horse, whether the originators are from Japan, the US or Germany (though a few US translations are licensed to British publishers like Gollancz and Harper-Collins).

The “almost” allows room for The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga, a 540 page anthology of mostly new (or previously only web-published) material from a large number of creators, mostly, but not exclusively, based in the UK. A volume came out in 2006, edited by Ilya, who I remember as a small-press cartoonist back in the 1980s, and was published by Robinson, who are responsible for a stable of Mammoth Books of Best New prose stories (eg one for SF, one for horror) which are published annually. The hope seems to be that the manga volume will be too.

Incidentally, the term “manga” is being used here very loosely: some of these cartoonists have only microscopic traces of Japanese influence in their bloodstreams.



Graphic Novels
This will probably have a section of a similar size to that for manga, and will contain a mixed bag of material.

There will be a range of US titles from DC, Vertigo, Image and Marvel. But in addition to the US Marvel trade paperbacks, there will also be titles by Panini, who handle Marvel’s European business. These include some unique editions of US material (paperback editions of the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man run in colour, Runaways in full-sized paperbacks), as well as reprints of material originated by Panini and its predecessor Marvel UK.

The latter include Death’s Head, the original Chris Claremont/Herb Trimpe version of Captain Britain from the 1970s, and lots of Doctor Who. My pick of the Doctor Who series would be Dragon’s Claw, featuring Tom Baker’s Doctor. This not only contains page after page of prime Dave Gibbons artwork, but also Mick McMahon’s splendidly quirky “Junkyard Demon”.


US art comics will often be well-represented in this section, sometimes in UK editions by respected mainstream book publisher Jonathan Cape. For example, we got a paperback edition of Alison Bechdel’s Fun House last year (but never did get a hardback edition, that I saw). Cape also publishes work by UK literary comics authors like Bryan Talbot (such as Alice in Sunderland) and Posy Simmonds, as well as Ethel & Ernest, a moving memoir of his parents by Raymond Briggs, best known for his nuclear tragedy When the Wind Blows and his albums for children, such as Fungus the Bogeyman.


But on the whole, the literary or consciously artistic approach is a field in which British comics are lacking, possibly because of the absence of any UK equivalent of Fantagraphics, Top Shelf or Drawn and Quarterly.

If you are lucky, you might also find some of the humorous literary adaptations and collected comics of Hunt Emerson, published by Knockabout Books, on these shelves too. See here for my views on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.


There is also likely to be a fair selection of Rebellion’s 2000AD books. These are either slim albums of recent material, such as Ian Edginton and D’Israeli’s seaborne horror strip Leviathan, or big fat volumes of classic series from the 1970s and 1980s, including Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog and the peerless satire on religious and racial bigotry, Nemesis the Warlock.


Possibly even fatter are the volumes from Carlton Books reprinting war stories from Commando Picture Library.


Titan Books’ various reprint series are available wherever Diamond distributors spreads its tentacles, but are also to be found in bookshops. A highlight is Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun’s heavily researched and moving series about the Great War, Charley’s War. The best-looking are the reprints of the 1950s SF series Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. Other reprints from boys’ comics have stalled after one volume each of The Spider (retitled King of Crooks to avoid infringing the copyright of the US pulp character) and The Steel Claw. But an anthology volume called Albion Origins is apparently in the works.


Titan is also compiling two classic newspaper strip adventure series, the adaptations of the James Bond novels, and Peter O’Donnell’s great female adventurer, Modesty Blaise. The latter is now well into Enric Badia Romero’s run as artist, but see if you can track down some of the earlier volumes featuring the strikingly stylish artwork of Jim Holdaway.



Humour
The humour section of the bookshop will be where you can find reprints of British newspaper strips as, apart from one or two series based around football (soccer, if you must), they now all embody both meanings of the word “comic”. Humour is too individual for me to lay down the law, so you are best off browsing, but two I’d recommend you take a look at are Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor’s Alex about an amoral, selfish merchant banker, and, above all, Steve Bell’s biting political strip If…,with its brutal, powerful artwork.


The humour section seems also to be where bookshop staff shelve things they don’t know where else to place. Over the last year, I have noticed here a big reprint volume selected from the 1950s girls’ comic Girl (imaginative title, eh?) and a set of imaginary biographies of characters from boys’ sports comic strips.



Children’s books
This is where you will probably find the English language editions of the great Franco-Belgian comics series Asterix and Tintin. These are the only European comics you are likely to find in a British bookshop, unless the graphic novels section has some NBM or First Second translations for the American market. Cinebook has been translating some other classic European comic albums, including the Lucky Luke and Blake and Mortimer series, but I have yet to see these in an ordinary bookshop.

In the autumn, the annuals will start to appear. Most of these are hard-back, extra-long editions of the regular comic periodicals, though there will also be editions devoted solely to popular characters (such as The Bash Street Kids from The Beano), and annuals devoted to currently popular films and TV series that do not necessarily have their own regular comics. Some comics – including 2000AD - do not have associated annuals any more. Look before you buy: not all of these have much, if anything, by way of comic strip content these days. Annuals are aimed at the Christmas market; after Christmas, they can generally be found for a couple of months at greatly reduced prices, and are then taken off sale.


This year, I have noticed for the first time some large format paperbacks labelled as “summer annuals”, but these all seem to be activity books with no comics content.

I’m guessing, but the children’s section may be where the Bumper Book of Look and Learn will turn up. See Steve Holland’s post about it. Look and Learn was a children’s educational magazine, but for our purposes it was also the home of The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire, a magnificent planetary romance painted by Don Lawrence. The one or two collections published years ago now go for a bomb on eBay, and the only current editions are lavish Dutch ones that require a second mortgage to buy. Apparently, the Bumper Book will include a complete Trigan Empire story.


There will also be a wide range of illustrated children’s books, some with comic strip content. Take a look at Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories series, discussed here. Beyond that, I’m not well informed about children’s books. It might be worth having a browse through the “picture books” section, if your preferred definition of “comics” is broad enough.


Art
Finally, don’t leave the bookshop before looking in the art section. You never know what will be shelved there. I’ve seen Robert Crumb and Little Nemo in Slumberland here recently. And you can always buy a book about Hogarth and wallow in his sequential print series.



Comics shops
Comics shop may have some or all of the above, though they tend to be light on children’s books and rarely stock annuals.


Update, 8 June: added a mention of Raymond Briggs and Ethel & Ernest.

Pictures and panels
The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga, edited by Ilya, cover by Neill Cameron, published by Robinson Books, 2006; interior panels from Bulldog: Empire by Jason Cobley and Neill Cameron, and Princess at Midnight by Andi Watson

Doctor Who: Dragon’s Claw, cover by Dave Gibbons, published by Panini Books, 2004; interior panels from Doctor Who “Junkyard Demon” by Steve Parkhouse (writer and letterer), Mike McMahon (pencils), Adolfo Buylla (inks) and Alan McKenzie (editor)

Ethel & Ernest: A True Story by Raymond Briggs, published by Jonathan Cape, 1998 (paperback 2002)

Aliens Ate My Trousers! by Hunt Emerson, published by Knockabout Books, 1998

Leviathan by Ian Edginton (script), D'Israeli (art) and Tom Frame (letters), published by Rebellion, 2006

The Complete Nemesis the Warlock volume 1, cover by Kevin O’Neill, published by Rebellion; interior panels from Nemesis the Warlock Book Three by Pat Mills (writer), Kevin O’Neill (artist) and Steve Potter (letters)

Commando: True Brit, published by Carlton Books, 2006. Cover image downloaded from Carlton Books

Charley's War by Pat Mills (writer) and Joe Colquhoun (artist), published by Titan Books. Cover image downloaded from Titan Books

Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future: The Man from Nowhere, cover and interior panels by Frank Hampson, published by Titan Books, 2007. Cover image downloaded from Titan Books

The Steel Claw: The Vanishing Man, cover by Brian Bolland, published by Titan Books, 2005; interior panels by Ken Bulmer (writer) and Jesús Blasco (artist). Cover image downloaded from Titan Books

Modesty Blaise: The Black Pearl, cover by Jim Holdaway, published by Titan Books, 2004; interior panels from Modesty Blaise “The Killing Ground” by Peter O’Donnell (writer) and Jim Holdaway (artist)Cover image downloaded from Titan Books

If … Marches On by Steve Bell published by Methuen, 2006

The Best of Girl, published by Prion Books, 2006; interior panels from Wendy and Jinx “The New Headmistress”, written by Stephen James, drawn by Peter Kay, and Vicky and the Vengeance of the Incas, written by Betty Roland and drawn by Dudley Pout. Cover image downloaded from Carlton Books

Doctor Who: The Official Annual 2007, published by BBC Books, 2006

The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire, art by Don Lawrence, scanned from The Trigan Empire, published by Hamlyn Books, 1978. This panel is probably not from the story to be featured in the Bumper Book of Look and Learn

A Harlot’s Progress plate 2, by William Hogarth, 1732, scanned from Mark Hallett Hogarth, published by Phaidon Books, 2000

British Comics: A Quick Guide for Visitors, Part One

Sean Kleefeld recently asked what comics he should look out for when visiting Britain this August. I started jotting down some thoughts, but it quickly became clear that there was too much for a simple comment, so here it all is as a blog entry, you lucky people.

A quick disclaimer: I make no claims to expertise, nor to be a definitive arbiter of taste. I would welcome additions and alternative viewpoints. But I hope this post will be of use to anyone taking a holiday here.

Background
If you want to swot up before arrival, there is nothing better than Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury’s book Great British Comics: Celebrating a Century of Ripping Yarns and Wizard Wheezes. As the title suggests, this is a big, lavishly illustrated history of British comics , actually stretching as far back as the creation of the first continuing comic strip character, Ally Sloper, in 1867, and beyond.


If you are globe-trotting this summer, you might prefer The Essential Guide to World Comics by Tim Pilcher and Brad Brooks, which has a good chapter on British comics, and other chapters on US, Japanese, South East Asian, Franco-Belgian, European, South and Central American, Scandinavian, and Australasian comics, plus one on a miscellany of other countries (it’s quite an eye opener, particularly revealing how comics sales are falling everywhere, even in Japan and Mexico).


For history on the web, start with Comics UK.

For the current British Comics scene, John Freeman’s Down the Tubes is indispensable. Among other things, it features a news section and listings of all current professional comics periodicals and books. The Forbidden Planet International Blog is also well worth checking. For British small press comics, try Bugpowder.

The magazine Comics International used to be highly valuable, not least for the directory of comics shops in Britain in the back. Unfortunately, since changing publisher a year ago, only one issue has appeared. Perhaps it should change its title to All-Star Comics International?

Periodicals
If you read all that history, you’ll get the impression that the dominant form of comic in Britain is the weekly anthology. Once, this was true, but no longer.

The twin giants of the children’s humour weekly comics still stand: The Beano and The Dandy, published by D C Thompson. Each contains a mix of 1 to 3 page-long stand-alone strips featuring continuing characters. The target audience is under-10s. The Beano has recently spawned a spin-off monthly, BeanoMax, aimed at 8-12 year olds, and containing a mix of strips and magazine features.


D C Thompson also publishes small-format digests featuring Beano and Dandy characters, and Classics from the Comics, a monthly reprint magazine mostly containing material from the 1950s through to the 1970s: I reviewed an edition here.

Of the boys’ weekly adventure anthologies, only 2000AD remains, though it might now more accurately be described as a nostalgic men’s weekly adventure anthology. I reviewed some recent editions here and here.


2000AD also has a monthly counterpart, the Judge Dredd Megazine, which mixes strips with articles (though in this case the articles are all about comics, and not just those from the 2000AD stable), and a reprint magazine, 2000AD Extreme Editions, which generally gathers together serialised weekly strips into a single lump.

The other great remaining anthology is the monthly Viz comic, the Geordie masterpiece of scabrous humour and topical satire, which mixes the classic children’s comic style of humour strip with outright filth and mock-articles in the style of the British tabloid newspapers. I reviewed an issue here, but be careful – it is marked “not for sale to children” for good reason.


The other long-standing comics format, the boys’ adventure comics digest, containing a complete self-contained story told in one or two panels per page, is now represented only by Commando (sometimes referred to as Commando Picture Library), which specialises in war stories – mostly, but not exclusively – about the Second World War.


Specialised girls’ comics have vanished, so far as I know, replaced by magazines.

So are British comics dying out? Not at all, but they have mutated. What you will find by the dozen in the Down the Tubes listings are children’s magazines based on a single franchise – anything from Tellytubbies to Thunderbirds, from Lazy Town to Shaun the Sheep - which mix a minority of comic-strip pages with puzzles, articles, posters and readers’ drawings. I have reviewed a couple that I rather like - Wallace and Gromit and Doctor Who Adventures – and one that I don’t - Action Man ATOM.

There is also the occasional children's magazine featuring a minority of comics pages but which is not tied to a particular franchise, such as Toxic.


Those seeking variant additions of US comic-books will also find a number of super-hero comics on the shelves, generally reprinting the contents of two US comics in each.

A couple of other periodicals are worth mentioning.

Private Eye is a magazine that mixes investigative journalism, political muckracking, and topical humour. It contains a lot of cartoons, including some in strip form. Two of its current political strips draw their inspiration from old British comics, satirising the Conservative Party in the style of Lord Snooty and His Pals, a long-running Beano series, and Prime-Minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown and his faction within the Labour Party in the style of Scottish classic comic-strip The Broons.


Spaceship Away is a semi-professional publication that started as a Dan Dare fanzine. It is notable for containing a brand new Dan Dare comic strip drawn by Don Harley, the long-term assistant to original series artist and creator Frank Hampson. It is also reprinting other 1950s SF strips, such as the adaptation of the radio series Journey into Space shown here.



You will also find comic strips elsewhere - for example, Fortean Times, a magazine about unexplained phenomena, ghosts, UFOs and all that jazz, features a one-page strip every month by the magnificent cartoonist Hunt Emerson. He might also still be drawing Firkin the Cat for the soft porno magazine Penthouse, but I wouldn't know about that ...


Buying periodicals
You won’t find many of these titles in comics shops in Britain – for the most part, those concentrate on American comics, graphic novels, and translations of manga. You might find 2000AD, the various Doctor Who titles and, if you are lucky, Spaceship Away and possibly some locally produced small-press titles.

For the rest, your best bet is the newsagents, particularly the big branches of W H Smith on the high streets of town and city centres. I recently counted about 90 comics titles on the shelves of the central Newcastle branch.

Most will be grouped in a section of children’s comics, which will be immediately recognisable because it is so untidy. Most British comics these days come with some cheap toy or novelty sellotaped, gummed or polybagged to the front, which makes shelving them difficult (and restricts browsing).

But look around the shop too. The three different Doctor Who titles might be in different places - Doctor Who Adventures with the children’s comics, Doctor Who Magazine with film and TV magazines (where you will sometimes find 2000AD and its spin-offs too), Doctor Who Battles in Time with partworks.

Private Eye will normally be shelved with current affairs magazines, and Viz either there or with men’s magazines like Maxim or Loaded.

Update, 6 June: added request for other views, expanded material on Private Eye, added mentions of US comic book reprints and Hunt Emerson.
Update, 7 June: added reference to Toxic.

Next – Part Two: Books (graphic novels, reprint collections, annuals and children’s albums)

Pictures and panels
Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury Great British Comics: Celebrating a Century of Ripping Yarns and Wizard Wheezes, Aurum Press, 2006; cover shows Korky the Cat by Charles Grigg

Tim Pilcher and Brad Brooks The Essential Guide to World Comics, Collins & Brown/Chrysalis Books, cover by Roger Langridge, 2005

The Beano issue 3383, 2 June 2007, published by D C Thompson. Cover shows Dennis the Menace and Gnasher; interior panel from Minnie the Minx, both drawn by Tom Paterson

The Dandy issue 3417, 2 June 2007, published by D C Thompson, interior panels from Ollie Fliptrick, art by Dixon

2000AD prog 1539, 30 May 2007, published by Rebellion, interior panels from Nikolai Dante “Thieves’ World” part 2 by Robbie Morrison (script), Simon Fraser (art), Gary Caldwell (colours) and Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Viz issue 165, May 2007, published by Dennis Publishing, interior panels from Sting and the Riddle of the Horse’s Arse (uncredited)

Commando issue 4007, May 2007, published by D C Thompson, “Wolf Patrol” (uncredited, reprinted from 1993)

Toxic issue 94, 6 June-19 June 2007, published by Egmont Magazines, interior panels from Team Toxic "Getting to the Bottom of It", art by Lew Stringer

Private Eye issue 1186, 8 June-21 June 2007, Pressdram Limited; strip The Broon-ites drawn by Henry Davies

Spaceship Away issue 7, Autumn 2005, published by Rod Barzilay; interior panels from Journey Into Space episode 1 “Planet of Fear”, written by Charles Chilton, art by Ferdinando Tacconi, reprinted from Express Weekly, 1956