Comics UK

Digifiend wrote:Yet the cover star wasn't an animal, unlike Dandy's Korky the Cat, Beano's Biffo the Bear, and Topper's Mickey the Monkey. Quite the anomaly...

Only if you count The Beezer's Ginger as an animal. Although for a time Pop, Dick and Harry were the Beezer cover stars and the latter two were quite wild.

Lew

I know what you mean about Dick and Harry. But when I mentioned an anomaly, I meant in that Sparky's cover star was human when so much of it's other content was animal based. Beezer's cast was mostly human, so that matches the cover star.

Sparky did join the trend though by promoting `John Bull dog` to Barney Bulldog` (They closed the Bull to the Dog). Young Ben joined him a few weeks later!

Ironically though, that's about the time a lot of the animal characters were ditched, especially the adventure story ones. Although Puss n Boots was also added not long after.

all today's examples are from issue 105, [21 JAN, 1967]:

Little Davey Spacer appears in a rather bizarre tale here:





---and more 'traditional' adventure fare from the period, with the ISLAND from the PAST:

An outer space adventure story in a Thomson comic? Very rare, that's more the sort of thing you'd associate with Eagle or 2000AD. Nice surprise there. The only other ones I can think of are The Topper's Willie Walker and the Wonderful Whizzers from Planet Ozz, and The Beano's last 50s text story Ace From Space.

Digifiend-there were two `Alien Invasion` stories in 1965 Sparky! The better one was "Year of The Vanaks" which may have been a 1950s re-print!

I loved the Davey Spacer stories. The first two were loosely based on Swifts "Gullivers Travels". That first adventure of his was weird-Chicken people with Ray guns. What was Minnie the tea lady adding to the brew those days?

Digifiend wrote:An outer space adventure story in a Thomson comic? Very rare

I'm assuming, Digifiend, that when you say 'a Thomson comic' you are not including their story papers, which are unfortunately often referred to as 'comics', because there are countless space adventure stories there. Also I wonder whether they are quite as rare as you suggest anyway. Already on this thread alone we have been introduced to Raiders From The Red Planet and Davey Spacer In Giantland. Curiously, the title for this adventure, Little Davey Spacer, seems less appropriate for a story seemingly based on Gulliver's A Voyage To Lilliput, given that he is much bigger than the tiny people living on the asteroid, and much more so for his adventure in the land of giants, which, as has already been pointed out, can very much be linked with Gulliver's second adventure recounted in A Voyage To Brobdingnag. The fact that these Davey Spacer and Gulliver stories are in the same order would seem to confirm this link.

Yep, I meant Beano, Dandy, Beezer, Topper, etc, not Wizard, Adventure, Hotspur et al. As you say, they're not comics. I'm actually not that familiar with the various stories from the text papers - just the well known ones such as Morgyn the Mighty, Bouncing Briggs, Alf Tupper, and Strang the Terrible (and none of those are space stories). Of those four, Morgyn and Strang are also ex-Beano stars, and the other two (in their later picture story form) have been in Classics recently.

Digifiend wrote:Morgyn and Strang are also ex-Beano stars

Yes they were indeed, but well before they ever appeared in The Beano they were popular and recurring characters in the text story papers. Strang The Terrible debuted in Adventure in 1936, and Morgyn The Mighty first appeared in The Rover in 1928.

Interestingly, a Jimmy's Magic Patch story published a few months before Strang's Beano debut, showed Jimmy reading about Strang in Adventure, then being sent into his world by the patch. I saw this episode in one of the 60 Years books, and at the time, didn't realise the significance of the word "Adventure" on Jimmy's paper - I thought it just meant it was an adventure story. Seems the Beano editor was testing Strang on the readers, because he ended up taking Jimmy's slot not long after, although Jimmy of course would later return. Both Jimmy and Strang were drawn by Dudley Watkins.

Come to think of it, Strang lived in a world where the dinosaurs weren't extinct, so I suppose the modern equivalent would be the just-axed TV show Primeval, which also shows humans fighting dinos.

According to The History of The Beano: The Story So Far, Morgyn's Beano series would later be used in Rover as well, one of Rover's first picture stories.

The fact that Strang turned up in that Jimmy and his Magic Patch episode and in a subsequent Beano series of his own may have had more than a little to do with the fact that a certain Stuart Gilchrist was editor of both titles at the time.

Digifiend wrote: According to The History of The Beano: The Story So Far, Morgyn's Beano series would later be used in Rover as well, one of Rover's first picture stories.

Yes, it appeared in 1954. Another fact that may be of some interest, in view of the link we have established between Strang and Morgyn, is that the strip Strang The Terrible in The Beano in 1944 reappeared in The Rover in 1957 retitled Morgyn The Mighty, so plunging Morgyn into a world of sabre-toothed tigers and other such prehistoric predators.

Sparky seemed to be a kind of `Sargasso` sea for old stories & characters! `Strang the Terrible` sounds like one of those Wrestlers that ITVs `World of Sport` would have on show 4pm on Saturday afternoons!

alanultron5 wrote:Sparky seemed to be a kind of `Sargasso` sea for old stories & characters!

I have looked at this issue before, but a reminder and an extension might be timely. Bearing in mind that all I know about this comic is what I've picked up on this thread, principally from Alan and ISPY, I have noticed the following adapted borrowings. Where the character or story originated I have placed in brackets. Lonely Wood (The Wizard), My Grockle And Me (The Rover), Minnie Ha Ha (The Wizard), The Year Of The Vanaks (The Wizard), Invisible Dick (The Rover), Kipper Feet (The Wizard), The Lonely Lad Of Blue Lagoon (The New Hotspur), Little Davey Spacer (Gulliver's Travels), Keyhole Kate (The Dandy), Nosey Parker (The Rover), Hungry Horace (The Dandy), Pansy Potter (The Beano), Freddy The Fearless Fly (The Dandy) and The Shipwrecked Kidds (Judy). We can also include concepts like the flying horse and the city under the sea, both of which were used in Thomsons' text tales in the Thirties. I wonder what revelations future contributions hold.