Indeed, George Rosie wrote: "In both Cracker and Sparky the artwork and quality of the stories may be regarded as undistinguished and indistinguishable. Sparky features a process of unmemorable comic characters called such things as Superwitch, Peter Piper, Hungry Horace, Dreamy Daniel, etc."

Note that he conveniently ignores the much cleverer standout strips like Puss an' Boots and Spoofer McGraw.

He added that Sparky is "saved from total insignificance" by The ("often extremely funny") Circus of P.T. Bimbo, the comic's American strip.

Thanks for your thoughts on this book, Raven: oddly enough, when I finally got to visit the actual D C T comic offices around two years after reading this book, it never especially clouded my judgement on the way the institution was run, other than I expected them to pay pretty modest rates for artwork [this itself turned out better than I expected].

The negative tone of the writing never really seemed to dent, let alone impact, upon the ongoing practises within the offices as far as I could see.

DCT seemed to exist within their own isolated time-warp, completely unaffected by outside forces: which is both a curse and a bonus, depending on how you look at it.



Regarding SPARKY, the PT Bimbo strip was a nice change but it hardly represented what was unique about the comic I thought.

I should have said a bit more about this, having read it, Phoenix - sorry not to get back to this. I was interested to read the article and it does refer to a lot of stories, but of course (as ever for the times) without mentioning the stuff I really want to know more about: artists and writers, or even the other elements of the creative process such as how the editors interacted with the creators. Cadogan skims over the stories quite lightly, expecting the reader to be amused by the silliness or absurdity of them: very much like I did when first writing about Jinty stories when I came back to them as an adult. I guess you need to live with them and be absorbed in them for longer before you start taking them seriously

I didn't have any introductory period. I took them seriously from the moment I opened the very first story paper I ever saw, which was one of several issues of The Wizard given to me by a Lancaster Royal Infirmary nurse when I was recovering from having my appendix out at the age of nine. I was the only child in a men's ward, and I had already read all the books the nurses had been able to find for me, all having been novels for adults, when one day, after having persistently urged the nurses to find more for me, one came in with a pile of issues of The Wizard, apologetic because they were the only other reading matter that she could find. I remember commenting somewhere that starting to read the first one was like opening a window on joy. I have no idea what happened to them. There was certainly a period when I didn't read any story papers, which started when I went to university and ended when I bought a copy of The Rover in a Bolton newsagents fourteen years later. By that time I was married, and our first son, Andrew, was just over one year old. My current collection started to take shape, albeit extremely slowly, from that point.

Raven, that is pennies as the only copies now available are now listed at £230.00!

There's one up at £15.00 + £2.85 p&p on eBay.

Wow! I've got a spare copy, and I would certainly sell it for £230.

As I stated earlier, I discovered a job lot of these [as brand new copies]in a discount store in Princes Street, Edinburgh, around 1982: there were stacks of them on sale for one pound , and obviously if I had a crystal ball I would have known to buy up a whole stack of them.


If anyone comes up with a workable design for a time-machine, but is destitute, funding their idea should not be a problem......

The £233.76 may be an accidental mispricing.

some of the pricing on Amazon [to name one outlet option] is so random as to appear insane, with brand-new copies of some items being much cheaper than brand-new ones, you see this sort of thing all the time; I have certainly seen relatively rare books on sale for hundreds of pounds...dunno if that is the case here, though.

Unfortunately, it is not as both Amazon and Ebay have the book listed around the £230 mark.

If anyone wants a copy, Edinburgh books have one for sale for £15 + P&P