Comics UK

No, it's inhaling all that old comic newsprint!

You may have forgotten, but we pondered this last year, and generally seemed to think it would be Battle:

http://comicsuk.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.p ... 59&p=86470

The last two enemies being twins may have come from a need to wrap the serial up quickly before the merger with Knockout at the end of June 1973.

That's Revenge of the Puzzler from Whizzer and Chips, 1972-73. The bearded one was the Model-Man. The smiling one was Mr. Freeze.

There's a thread on the Puzzler serials here:

http://www.comicsuk.co.uk/forum/viewtop ... 148&t=5578&

The £233.76 may be an accidental mispricing.

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

Ah, so it's literally quite similar to Lord of the Flies!

Thanks for those, ISpy. School For Survivors doesn't look that much different from the pre-ban fare, really. Is this a post-apocalyptic tale or an abandoned in the wilderness tale, or something similar?

Thanks for all those, ISpy, very good of you.

The artwork samples in your first selection look much more like they're from a D. C. Thomson comic of the time; they don't seem to reflect IPC's usual contemporary standards or styles for adventure. Curious.

Do you recall if School for Survivors had an ...

Thanks, ISpy. I'd be interested to hear about any interesting looking strips exclusive to the post-ban era.

Yes, I'm very familiar with the pre-ban material, ISPY. It's just the post-ban strips I hardly know anything about. I remember the bottle throwing being especially singled out.

Do you - or anybody else - know what happened to Blackjack at the end of his serial? Was his sight problem cured?

It hardly set the world alight, yet it featured regular work by loads of Fleetway stalwarts like Ortiz, Cruz, Kennedy, Burns, Bradbury, Western, etc. at a time when the traditional boys' adventure comic was becoming an endangered species.

That's what I suspected, and everyone still seemed to be ...

Thanks for the reply, although this:

The rest of the comic was above the D C Thomson output of the time, but it was also above the Fleetway output.

... makes it sound like it was quite good, if it was better than both?

I was thinking about how a comic like, say, Speed tends to get dismissed ...

The standard line, of course, is that the comic returned on December 4th 1976 bowlderised, too tame to be interesting to the punk kids any more, just a traditional adventure title, a sell-out, etc.

I was just wondering if anyone has actually read the post-ban issues, and if it's any good as a ...

The comic is Pippin, which featured both Joe and Sooty and Sweep - on pages next to each other - in 1967.