Comics UK

Although DC Thomson's annual Topical Times Football Books are very well known I was surprised to pick up some examples of Topical Times weekly from the late 1930s yesterday. While this publication was largely concerned with sports, and football in particular, it's interesting to see that it also featured some cartoon and fictional content, making it an intriguing addition to Thomson's famous story papers of the period. Given the later success of magazines like Scoop and Striker one can't help wondering whether it'd still be around today if wartime paper shortages hadn't forced its cancellation in 1940.

Topical Times is an interesting title. Published in the same format as the Thomson boys' story papers it actually predated all of them, first seeing the light of day in 1919.
It was one of the first papers to focus predominantly on sport and during its twenty-one year and 1070 issue run it was renowned for the number of free gifts it gave away, particularly its 'panel portraits', series upon series of photographs of sporting stars. most often of footballers with the Scottish and English editions each offering different sets to their readers.
As well as all the sporting content the Topical Times also contained cartoon pages and at least one adventure yarn each week.
Issues are worth picking up from the late 1920's and early 1930's as they quite often contain spot art by the great Dudley Watkins.

I pick up the Topical Times whenever I come across them but they rarely turn up. There is an ephemera fair on Sunday at the Royal National where one or two might show up. I have some Whams promised to me by one dealer.

Unfortunately I don't have any copies earlier than 1938 so no Watkins; even so they are quite fascinating. Many of the cartoons are signed but apart from a young Robert Coram ('Maroc') I don't recognize any of the artists, which just shows how large the talent pool was. Given the number of story papers aimed at women it's quite surprising that this seems to have been the only one produced specifically for grown men (though I've no doubt it would have been popular with boys as well).