What comics would you get in the year of your birth?

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SID
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Re: What comics would you get in the year of your birth?

Post by SID »

Digifiend wrote:Well, since the scenario is the Doctor dropping you off in the wrong era, Doctor Who as a TV show doesn't exist!
LOL. True! Very true!
Reading comics since 1970. My Current Regulars are: 2000 AD (1977-), Judge Dredd Megazine (1990-), Spaceship Away (2003-), Commando (2013-), Monster Fun (2022-), Deadpool and Wolverine (2023-), Quantum (2023-).

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Re: What comics would you get in the year of your birth?

Post by Phoenix »

I don't need to get any. I've got them all already.

geoff42
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Re: What comics would you get in the year of your birth?

Post by geoff42 »

Now, Phoenix, do you really have every comic/storey paper at the time of your birth - I actually don't doubt it. I trust your statement. But are we including girl's comics, other obscurities, and certain publications you wouldn't find on ebay? By the way, congratulations on your new book.

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abacus
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Re: What comics would you get in the year of your birth?

Post by abacus »

Since I was born the last week in 1940 my childhood comics began with Rainbow, Tiny Tots, Beano snd so on.I would like to find comics of my birthdate but unlike some of you it could turn out to be quite expensive. :)

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Re: What comics would you get in the year of your birth?

Post by SID »

abacus wrote:Since I was born the last week in 1940 my childhood comics began with Rainbow, Tiny Tots, Beano snd so on.I would like to find comics of my birthdate but unlike some of you it could turn out to be quite expensive. :)
But they wouldn't have been expensive at the time, abacus (unless you bought every comic in the land).

Anyway, the original premise of this thread was what comics would you read regularly if you found yourself trapped in the year of your birth but at the age you are now. I am not talking about buying comics for just collecting purposes and let's pretend that you never bought these comics before either. :)

Talking of collecting though, I'm lucky enough that my birthdate falls on a published date so I have recently started collecting comics with that issue date.
Reading comics since 1970. My Current Regulars are: 2000 AD (1977-), Judge Dredd Megazine (1990-), Spaceship Away (2003-), Commando (2013-), Monster Fun (2022-), Deadpool and Wolverine (2023-), Quantum (2023-).

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Re: What comics would you get in the year of your birth?

Post by Phoenix »

geoff42 wrote:Now, Phoenix, do you really have every comic/storey paper at the time of your birth - I actually don't doubt it. I trust your statement. But are we including girl's comics, other obscurities, and certain publications you wouldn't find on ebay?
My comments may seem misleading, Geoff, for which I apologise. I should perhaps have said I've already got all the ones I would want, which is perfectly true, as I do have every week's issue of all D. C. Thomsons' text story papers which were published the year I was born. I've got most other weeks' issues as well, including those that appeared before I was born, but then I have been putting the collection together seriously since 1985.
geoff42 wrote:By the way, congratulations on your new book.
Thank you. Have you bought one yet? I only ask because we could do with getting lots of money back in the kitty as Ray and I currently have two more projects on the go, This Was The Victor, in a similar format to This Was The Wizard, and a history of Thomsons' story papers for girls, which is looking at the general content of the ten titles that they produced for girls of about nine to thirteen, a similar demographic for which they produced The Wizard and its companion papers, but the fiction will be presented by theme across the papers, school, ballet, sport, sci-fi, fantasy, historical, animals, hobbies, mystery etc. I'm trying to recover from the stress of the last few months of trying to convert This Was The Wizard to the pdf files that the printers required by getting to know a different desk top publishing program, which will allow itself to convert to pdf files, and as the best way to learn it is to try to do something with it, I'm scribbling a history of The Hotspur's popular footballer Cannonball Kidd in A5 format. It will probably run to about 100 pages, and take about a month to write. If it then looks worth publishing I'll get the printers to run off about a hundred. My current thinking is that it could lead to an occasional series as in my estimation there are about fifteen extremely memorable characters from The Hotspur, The Rover, Adventure, and The Wizard who deserve their stories to be revisited, such as Strang The Terrible, Baldy Hogan, Morgyn The Mighty, Alf Tupper, Dixon Hawke, Bernard Briggs, William Wilson, Solo Solomon etc. I would actually appreciate some feedback on ths idea if members have time.

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Re: What comics would you get in the year of your birth?

Post by NP »

We got American comics from a little newsstand right next to Seaforth docks which had comics with last month's date on. Very new for those days. They were the ballast ones that teenagers like the DJ Billy Butler used to hang around and pounce on!
A neighbour had a cousin in America who sent over a big parcel of comics in 1965 and we opened it to find Amazing Fantasy 15, Incredible Hulk 1 and Tales of Suspense 'The Man in the Ant Hill' staring up at us. All about 3 years old at that point, and so given away. They were in colour, but not the colour of WHAM! and TV21. Maybe that was the difference between 'colour' and 'color'! A few months later, SMASH! ran some Hulk stories and Marvel was here officially. Sometime in 1966 American comics turned up in our local newsagents on the spinner racks and there was no going back.
The top comics in the year of my birth would have been Beezer, TV Express, maybe Eagle, and of course The Beano. Those four were pretty good in those days.

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Re: What comics would you get in the year of your birth?

Post by geoff42 »

Book ordered, Phoenix. I look forward to the Victor one as well.

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Re: What comics would you get in the year of your birth?

Post by geoff42 »

A historical reference for the likes of Morgyn the Mighty, Alf Tupper, and Bernard Briggs would definitely receive a thumbs up from me.

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Re: What comics would you get in the year of your birth?

Post by Phoenix »

geoff42 wrote:Book ordered, Phoenix. I look forward to the Victor one as well.
That's great news, Geoff. I'm sure you won't be disappointed with it. When you have had time to read and digest it perhaps you could let us all know what you think of it. Our book on The Victor is still in its initial stages so patience will be required, but at least we have the format in place, a clear division of labour, and there is no problem over reference material as we both have all the issues.
geoff42 wrote:A historical reference for the likes of Morgyn the Mighty, Alf Tupper, and Bernard Briggs would definitely receive a thumbs up from me.
Again great news. In fact I'm sure that there must be thousands of people out there who would love to revisit the serial stories about such iconic figures but would never be looking to buy in the original story papers, partly because they would be expensive, partly because they would not necessarily know where to find them, and partly because they would be unlikely to remember which issues their favourite stories appeared in, and possibly even which papers, so they would almost certainly dismiss the idea straightaway.

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Re: What comics would you get in the year of your birth?

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geoff42 wrote:Book ordered, Phoenix. I look forward to the Victor one as well.
Geoff, you will not be disappointed.

For all that we may rail at Phoenix's pedantic approach at times, it has paid off in spectacular fashion in this book. I am putting my review together for Down The Tubes and I will post a link to it when it is published.

I'll give you an example of why I think it is worth every penny. I enjoyed Red Dagger and I knew that each story was a reprint from one of the D C Thomson's back catalogue. No 9 was Terror In The Tall Tower and was a reprint from Wizard with the story art by Denis McLoughlin. His dark brooding style suiting the story perfectly. I wondered if it had been rescripted from the story papers but never realised that it was pulled from the 1930's Wizard!

Now, this reference tome allows me to help find out some of the relationships that I had wondered about regarding some of the stories. And that, for me, is invaluable.

Long may Moore and Marsden continue to produce work of this quality. And yes, I'll be using some of this for my review! :lol:
I started to say something sensible but my parents took over my brain!

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Re: What comics would you get in the year of your birth?

Post by Phoenix »

colcool007 wrote:No 9 was Terror In The Tall Tower and was a reprint from Wizard with the story art by Denis McLoughlin. His dark brooding style suiting the story perfectly. I wondered if it had been rescripted from the story papers but never realised that it was pulled from the 1930's Wizard!
August 1935, to be precise, and with a different title too, as it was then called The Terror In The Skyscraper. Just to clarify, Red Dagger 9 Terror In The Tall Tower in 1980 was a reprint of the September 1974 picture strip version from the second coming of The Wizard, which was relaunched as a picture story paper in 1970, some six years after the text story paper breathed its last. Although there were some picture strip stories in the text paper from time to time, Terror In The Tall Tower wasn't one of them.

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Re: What comics would you get in the year of your birth?

Post by colcool007 »

Phoenix wrote:
colcool007 wrote:No 9 was Terror In The Tall Tower and was a reprint from Wizard with the story art by Denis McLoughlin. His dark brooding style suiting the story perfectly. I wondered if it had been rescripted from the story papers but never realised that it was pulled from the 1930's Wizard!
August 1935, to be precise, and with a different title too, as it was then called The Terror In The Skyscraper. Just to clarify, Red Dagger 9 Terror In The Tall Tower in 1980 was a reprint of the September 1974 picture strip version from the second coming of The Wizard, which was relaunched as a picture story paper in 1970, some six years after the text story paper breathed its last. Although there were some picture strip stories in the text paper from time to time, Terror In The Tall Tower wasn't one of them.
And the one-legged ex-marine becomes an Indian Vietnam veteran (Was he still a marine?). What I find amazing is that the featured Jack Glass' vignette (entry 260 on page 33) could have been used as the template for one of the frames in the version that was printed in 1974. I must dig around to find my copy of Red Dagger 9 to show you exactly what I mean.

Do we know if the artists who redrew the stories were ever given copies of the original publishing run as part of their reference material?
I started to say something sensible but my parents took over my brain!

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Re: What comics would you get in the year of your birth?

Post by Phoenix »

colcool007 wrote:What I find amazing is that the featured Jack Glass' vignette (entry 260 on page 33) could have been used as the template for one of the frames in the version that was printed in 1974. I must dig around to find my copy of Red Dagger 9 to show you exactly what I mean.
I think this may be the frame you are referring to, Col. It's from page 15. To save you rooting round for your copy of Red Dagger I'm posting both for comparison purposes.
Attachments
TerrorSkyscraper.jpg
Terroroctopus.jpg

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Re: What comics would you get in the year of your birth?

Post by geoff42 »

From the latter posts between Col and Phoenix, this is the reason why we need solid, reference books on past publications. Wikipedia is all right up to a point, but it can never deliver "what we really want". Well, not what I want.

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