Take the Hyacinth Challenge

Dick Hyacinth is paying for the five-minute argument, and who am I to quibble? (Yeah, I know he says it’s a fake, but let’s try it and see.)

Says Dick, “Newspaper strips set back the comics industry/medium 50 years: Because they were so much more prestigious and lucrative than comic books, the most talented cartoonists gravitated towards newspapers rather than comic books. Newspaper strips are an excellent format with many advantages, but there are limits to what one can achieve in three or four panels. Furthermore, newspapers made comics a wildly popular form of art in the United States, but also conditioned the public to think of comics as disposable. Comics as a medium and an industry would have been better off if left to struggle in the comic book format. Such a Darwinian landscape would have forced cartoonists to produce more ambitious material sooner.”

Now it is rare that history provides perfect counter-examples, but in the case of anglophone comics, the British and American experiences are pretty much mirror images.


In the USA, comic strips first proliferated in the newspapers in the 1890s. It wasn’t until the 1930s that separately published and sold comic books became commonplace. In the UK, comics as separate publications took off in the 1880s, but it wasn’t until the 1920s that comic strips started appearing in newspapers. In Britain, comic strips appear in a handful of national newspapers, there are no syndicates to allow anyone to make a living by selling strips to local papers, and the newspaper comic strip is just too small to syphon off talent on a large scale.

So, if the Hyacinth hypothesis holds, Britain should have been the home to more ambitious comics material earlier than the US. Not so. Apart from a few imitators of the US undergrounds, it wasn’t until the 2000AD generation grew up in the 1980s that Britain started producing artistically ambitious comics, with the possible exceptions of the works of Raymond Briggs, who never worked in either periodical comics or newspapers, and Posy Simmonds, who has since been able to use newspaper serialisation as the basis for ambitious and complex works such as Tamara Drewe.

So Dick needs to look elsewhere for reasons why American comics were held back relative to bandes dessinées and manga. My own preferred culprit is the Comics Code Authority. In the 1950s, EC and some others were providing a generation which had spent World War Two reading The Boy Commandos and learning from Will Eisner how to repair Jeeps with comics which could have broken through into more adult and ambitious forms. But America took a collective political decision not to go down that route.

Of course, you could argue with that.


Panel
The Adventures of Mr Stanley Deadstone and Company art by Tom Browne, from The Halfpenny Comic, issue 1, 22 January 1898, reprinted in Denis Gifford Victorian Comics, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1976

Racing Back to the Starting Line

Just over a month ago, I posted a picture Jack Kirby had drawn of Ally Sloper, whom I described as “probably the first recurring comics character”.

Wrong.


Sloper first appeared in Judy in 1867. Poking around the Early Comics Archive maintained by Andy Konky Kru at BugPowder, it is possible to identify several earlier candidates. I was aware of Richard Doyle’s Brown, Jones and Robinson, but had somehow got it into my head that it was only published as a book (like Töpffer’s M Vieuxbois). But no, it was a series published in Punch in 1850 and then collected in 1854.

The Early Comics Archive also has several adventures of one Mr Briggs, by John Leech, dating from 1850 and 1851, more of Leech’s Tom Noddy from 1855, and four stories of Mr Peter Piper by John Tenniel from 1853.

Was any of these the first recurring comics character? I’m not confident enough to say. Anyway, this is reducing art history to the level of the Guiness Book of Records. Appreciate them for what they are. Tenniel’s art on Peter Piper is particularly enjoyable, mixing looser, more cartoony shapes than his Alice illustrations or caricatures with the same meticulous rendering.


But staying at that low level for a moment, John Leech was, of course, responsible for one unchallengeable first: the first time the word “cartoon” was used to denote a humorous picture, rather than a preparatory drawing for a painting, fresco or tapestry. He even labelled it “Cartoon No 1”.

There’s a bit of a shaggy dog story here. It starts when Parliament burnt down in 1834. There was no Guy Fawkes to blame this time. A dry summer had turned the tally sticks – medieval wooden tax returns – stored in the basement into perfect kindling. A stray spark set it all burning.

As the new Palace of Westminster was being built (the one still used by Parliament today), paintings and frescos were commissioned to decorate it. The cartoons – in the old sense of preparatory drawings – were put on display. The magazine Punch thought that there were better uses for the government’s money than spending it on art for the rulers. At the time, the humorous drawings that appeared in Punch were called “cuts”, short for “woodcuts”, from the printing technique. A full page was given over to “the Big Cut”, the principal satirical picture of the issue, and John Leech was the artist designated to draw it. This is what he came up with for the issue dated 15 July 1843.


There were five more numbered “cartoons” in this sequence, and by the end of it, Punch’s staff had renamed “the Big Cut” as “the Cartoon”. The name soon spread to the other humorous cuts, though the earlier term was still common enough in 1890 for Alfred Harmsworth to name one of his new ha’penny picture-story papers Comic Cuts.

The Cartoon – with the definite article and a capital “C” – was a fixture of Punch for the next 150 years. Among Leech’s successors on the Cartoon was that same John Tenniel who drew Mr Peter Piper. When I first read Punch in the 1970s, the Cartoon was the responsibility of Trog, who also drew the comic strip Flook in the Daily Mail and a weekly political cartoon in The Observer. Trog was the pen name of jazz musician Wally Fawkes.

So at least one Fawkes prospered from the destruction of Parliament.


You may now groan.


Panels
Ally Sloper “Some of the Mysteries of Loan and Discount” by Charles Ross and Marie Duval, Judy, 1867, reprinted in Ally Sloper: A Moral Lesson, 1873, and taken here from the Early Comics Archive, which reproduces the full strip and many more.

“How Mr Peter Piper Was Induced to Join in a Bear-hunt” by John Tenniel, 1853, taken from the Early Comics Archive, which reproduces the full strip.

John Leech “Cartoon No 1”, Punch, 15 July 1843, reprinted in William Hewison The Cartoon Connection: The Art of Pictorial Humour, Elm Tree Books, 1977

Self-portrait with Flook by Wally “Trog” Fawkes, from the Camden New Journal report of his retirement

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.

Review: Father of the Comic Strip – Rodolphe Töpffer

Father of the Comic Strip – Rodolphe Töpffer by David Kunzle, 207 pages, University Press of Mississippi, 2007, US$25 (paperback edition)

First things first. The Swiss schoolmaster, writer and artist Rodolphe Töpffer (1799-1846) was not “the father of the comic strip”. You don’t have to think that comic strips began on the cave walls at Lascaux to realise that. They were already common in the early nineteenth century, as single-sheet prints. You can see an example by Thomas Rowlandson in an earlier post. The author of this volume, David Kunzle, professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, even reproduces a French broadsheet comic strip version of Robinson Crusoe himself.

Töpffer’s innovation was to spread his stories out over multiple pages, with multiple panels to a page, and have them printed and bound in albums. Inside the book, Kunzle qualifies his title by referring to Töpffer as “the father of the modern comic strip”. He might more accurately be called “father of the comic book”.

He was not only an innovator, he inspired others. The first publishing imprint devoted to comic books, Albums Jabot, was set up in France to publish pirated editions of Töpffer’s works, going on to commission new comics from Cham (Amédée de Noé) and Gustave Doré. He inspired comic strips by such luminaries as Edward Lear, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and William Makepeace Thackeray – examples of which are reproduced by Kunzle.

Töpffer’s comic albums, which he began to publish in 1833, were picaresque slapstick farces with light satirical elements. The one thing that anyone who has heard of Töpffer knows is that Goethe was a fan. Kunzle explains that this was because Goethe greatly preferred Töpffer’s mild, humorous approach to the scabrous bile of the English school of caricaturists. Töpffer’s artwork was based on simple outline drawings, which were designed to allow the reader to grasp the salient points quickly and to move swiftly on to the next panel. This was a contrast to Töpffer’s own hero, William Hogarth: every engraving in one of Hogarth’s sequences demands slow painstaking attention to its detail.



Töpffer sometimes attributed his style to a carefully considered theory of aesthetics, and sometimes to his poor eyesight. To my own poor eyes, he looks like someone making the very best of limited talent and technical skill in drawing, much as Jules Feiffer would do in the 20th century. Kunzle, however, sees a good deal of sophistication in Töpffer’s draughtsmanship and he has John Ruskin on his side (“he can do more with fewer lines than any draughtsman known to me”), so who am I to argue?

Certainly, Töpffer sometimes pulls off some starting effects with the grammar of comics. In the sequence below, he cuts rapidly between Mr Jolibois, caged in the belief that he is a wild beast, and the Professor who is studying him. Remember, Töpffer produced this strip eight decades before Eisenstein revolutionised film editing.



The publishers describe David Kunzle’s book as the first full-length study of Töpffer in English. It is a companion volume to a complete edition of Töpffer’s comic strips in translation, edited by Kunzle.

The study opens in a rather daunting manner, when, after the briefest of introductions, it plunges into an analysis of contemporary political themes in Töpffer’s comics, which assumes a degree of familiarity with the strips which I did not have. As the next chapter is also thematic – a discussion of Goethe’s opinions of Töpffer – I began to wonder if this had been planned as a bumper edition of some new Journal of Töpffer Studies. Fortunately the next few chapters discuss the comics themselves in a straightforward chronological way, before backtracking to consider Töpffer’s prose works, and then looking at his legacy.

Kunzle is particularly good on the publication and reception of Töpffer’s work. Already, there were French critics who would praise his prose works and draw a veil over his comics. Kunzle also brings out the extent to which Töpffer’s innovations were dependent on advances in print technology: new developments in lithography made it a lot easier to reproduce art the same way round as the artist drew it (woodcuts and etchings generally reversed the original drawing). Without this, it would have been much harder to integrate handwriting and drawing in the way that he did. You could almost infer that comic books were just waiting to be allowed loose in the world when the printing presses allowed.

I found the chapter about Töpffer’s influence on comics in France, Britain, America and Germany particularly interesting. I suspect that this may have reworked material from Kunzle’s earlier, two-volume History of the Comic Strip, but since I have never seen that long out-of-print work on sale for less than £300 a volume, I am not complaining.

The book is heavily illustrated throughout, with extracts from Töpffer’s own works as well as artists who influenced him (including Daumier and Cruikshank) and artists whom he influenced.

Well worth reading, if you are interested in comics history. If nothing else, it will equip you for lots of pretentious name-dropping.

Sequential George

Before it became economical to distribute printed comic strips in the eighteenth, and more especially nineteenth, centuries, the best way to get a lot of people to read stories told in sequences of pictures was to put them on display in a public place.

Many of those public places were owned by the Church, and in Western Europe the Catholic Church had a rich tradition of using, to borrow Will Eisner’s preferred expression, “sequential art” to tell stories from the Bible and the lives of the Saints.

Today is the Saint’s day of England’s favourite Anatolian (or Libyan, or whatever), St George. There are lots of tellings of St George’s story in pictures, and some of them are collected in Samantha Riches’s book St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth.

Over the centuries, the St George legend accumulated a number of apparently incompatible elements, requiring him, in some versions, to be killed twice. In these first three panels (of six) from the La Selle Retable, an English alabaster altarpiece now to be found in Normandy, St George is brought back to life by the Virgin Mary after his first death, armed and sent off to fight the dragon.




In the subsequent three panels, George is put on trial by the Emperor Dacian for refusing to worship the old Roman gods, tortured, and executed. It was this martyrdom, rather than his wyrm-slaying heroism, that earned George his sainthood. Many sequential artists seem to have dwelled lovingly on the torture scenes, as in the fifteenth-century stained glass windows of St George’s Church, Stamford, Lincolnshire, recorded here in the sketches made by William Sedgwick around 1641.








The windows themselves no longer exist, for if the artists worked with the glee of an Al Feldstein or Graham Ingels, then the seventeenth century equivalents of Dr Wertham were a lot more thorough and successful than he ever was.


Pictures
from Samantha Riches St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth, Sutton Publishing, 2000

Take a Tour with Dr Syntax

Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) was one of the pioneers of comics, though he wouldn’t have recognised the term. This engraving of 1784, which satirises the coalition government of Charles James Fox (the Fox) and Lord North (the Badger), is a fully formed comic strip, with sequential images divided into panels, and using even word balloons.


(Scanned from George Perry and Alan Aldridge The Penguin Book of Comics: A Slight History, Penguin Books, 1967, revised 1971, reprinted with new introduction 1989)

Among Rowlandson’s most popular works were his picture stories about his recurring character Dr Syntax, Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1812), The Second Tour of Dr Syntax, in Search of Consolation (1820) and The Third Tour of Dr Syntax, in Search of a Wife (1821). These were bound sequences of full-page engravings, 31 of them in the first book, 24 in each of the others, with accompanying verses by Dr William Combe.

I had seen the occasional Dr Syntax plate, but recently came across a site that has the whole lot of them in small scans. Bill Bennett used to trade in antique prints under the name Postaprint, but has now retired. However, he has left his reference pages on-line, including the plates from those three books, plus Rowlandson’s The History of Johnny Quae Genus. The verses aren't included.

Typically, one plate matches one incident in the tour, so the effect is of an illustrated book. Occasionally, however, there are elements of sequential art, as in these two successive plates showing Syntax ambushed and tied up by highwaymen.


These two scans come from the Postaprint site, which is well worth a look.

Old Flanagan's Blog of Impractical Cats

The next episode of Doctor Who on BBC1 (which should be broadcast on Saturday unless the FA Cup semi-final overruns) is set in New New York in the year 5 billion plus, and brings back the race of the cat-nuns from last year’s “New Earth”. Then, on Monday, 2Entertain will release the region 2 DVD of “Survival”, the last story of the 1963-1989 run, which is full of cheetah-people.

Cat people have had a long history in folklore and fiction. Gustave Doré produced this picture of one of the best-known, Puss-in-Boots, from the 17th century tale by Charles Perrault, in 1863.



Sadly, by this time Doré had given up creating comic books. (See the bottom half of this article by Patricia Mainardi on the 19th Century Art Worldwide site for more about his comics career.)

I was going to suggest that anthropomorphic cats made their way into comics with Tiger Tim, created by Julius Stafford Baker for The Rainbow in 1903. But Paul Gravett’s book, Great British Comics, says that Baker was inspired by a series begun by James Swinnerton in 1897. Here’s an example from Coconino Classics, signed 1918 and published in 1919. You may want to spend a while poking around that treasure trove of a site, but be sure to come back here, won’t you?



Swinnerton and Mr Jack were American, but Tiger Tim wasn’t even the first recurring cat character in British comics. That seems to have been Stripes, from the Chowgli and Stripes series in Illustrated Chips, which began in 1899. (Chowgli, an African boy, was presented with the appearance and speech patterns that late Victorian prejudices required, but he was still the hero of his own strip.)



The style of the cartooning is such that I’m not sure if Stripes was anthropomorphic or not. Probably not. But he did speak, which counts for something.

Cat people turned up early in science fiction comic strips, with Buck Rogers (and, in the panels below, Wilma Deering) meeting the Tiger Men from Mars in 1930.



Flash Gordon proceeded to meet the Lion Men of Mongo in 1934.



The Doctor has met a few cat people in comic strips. Here he encounters Big Cat of the Freefall Warriors, a team of stunt pilots.



The strangest story to feature the Doctor and cat people was probably “Menace on Metalupiter”. It appeared in the Doctor Who Annual 1977 (published in 1976), when the publishers, World Distributors, were attempting to minimise costs by hiring artists who had not only never seen Doctor Who, but appeared to be unfamiliar with the concept of comics too. At least they had a few publicity stills of Tom Baker to work from.

The Doctor has decided to visit his friends on the planet Metalupiter. He thoughtfully shows Sarah and Harry a photograph.



Can’t work out what that picture is supposed to show, even if you have clicked to enlarge it? Me neither, and I’ve been puzzling over it for 30 years. Off and on, that is. I don’t want you to get the impression I’m obsessive, or anything.

The TARDIS arrives, and the crew go off to look for the locals.



No, I can’t work out what happened in that panel either. The Doctor then captures one of the local Metalupitrons, described as “cat-faced robots” and soon finds the trouble.



The cat-faced robot, called Puskeet, is soon able to explain what is going on. The planet has been invaded by aliens, who want to turn the whole world into fuel crystals.



I think we all know how it feels to have our memories replaced with rubber, don’t we?

The Doctor tries to stop the aliens, but is held back by their brain-scrambling ray (which the writer and artist may have tried on themselves first). But don’t worry, Puskeet turns up to save the day. Note that although the captions describe Puskeet, the pictures are of the alien invader. Or, at least, so I assume. A caption describes the alien as “four-armed”, but this chap seems only to have two.



No, I’ve no idea what happened in that last panel. The tale concludes with a masterpiece of bad storytelling.



Why the sudden close-up of the Doctor’s eyes? Why does Sarah conclude that the Metalupitrons are charming? Why is every single figure facing the wrong way to lead you through the panels? Who knows?

The good thing about this story is that it provides such an absolute low of incoherent storytelling that everything else pales by comparison. Whenever I find myself annoyed by bad panel progression and narrative non-sequiturs, I ask myself, “But is it as bad as ‘Menace on Metalupiter’?” and I feel much more at ease.


Panels and pictures from:
Perrault’s Fairy Tales, illustrated by Gustave Doré, 1863, reprinted in The Doré Gallery: His 120 Greatest Illustrations, Dover Publications, 1998

Escapades of Mr Jack by James Swinnerton, 1919, from Coconino Classics

Chowgli and Stripes “Chowgli and Stripes Take a Dangerous Ride”, from Illustrated Chips issue 467, 12 August 1899, reprinted in Denis Gifford Victorian Comics, George Allen & Unwin, 1976

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century “Tiger Men of Mars” by Phil Nowlan (writer) and Dick Calkins (artist), 1930, reprinted in Robert C Dille (editor) The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, A&W Visual Library, 1969

Flash Gordon “On the Planet Mongo” by Alex Raymond, 1934, reprinted in Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon volume 1, Checker Book Publishing, 2003

Doctor Who “Doctor Who and the Freefall Warriors” by Steve Parkhouse (writer) and Dave Gibbons (artist and letterer), Doctor Who Magazine issue 56, September 1981, reprinted in Doctor Who: Dragon’s Claw, Panini Books, 2004

Doctor Who “Menace on Metalupiter”, uncredited, in The Doctor Who Annual 1977, World Distributors, 1976