Comics UK

Comic book postal auctions have a set of DC Thomson first issues for sale including The Mascot which I had never heard of. Also listed is a four page Wizard preview although it looks more like a woman's paper.

http://www.compalcomics.com/catalogue/lot7.htm

Just thinking about what I wrote above, I have Derek's Wizard book but not sure where it is so unable to confirm if he alluded to it. To be honest it doesn't look like it had anything to do with the boys paper and was maybe an aborted try out for a women's paper but is dated one month before Wizard 1. Perhaps it became Blue Bird which appeared two months later.

But then again the Wizard cannot have been conceived, written and printed in less than a month so must have been in the pipeline when that women's version appeared.

Hi Steve,
This 4 page Wizard preview was created by Thomson's as a way of attempting to legally 'trademark' the Wizard as a title. The contents, which were borrowed from their women's titles, were used to hide the true nature of what the finished product intended to be to competitors and the date on the cover was a merely speculative projection.

Fascinating! That sounds rather like the way in which DC comics produced a handful of so-called 'Ashcan' editions of forthcoming titles like Action Comics in order to register the trademark and logo during the 1930s. In the event, of course, the 'real' first issue of Action Comics made history by featuring Superman on the cover!

Kashgar wrote:This 4 page Wizard preview was created by Thomson's as a way of attempting to legally 'trademark' the Wizard as a title.

As I stated in the Introduction to my THIS WAS THE WIZARD (Darsym Press 2014), there were six of these preview issues, which I photocopied in the British Library and of course paid for. At the time it seemed appropriate just to use the first one. In the book I acknowledged the source, and speculated that the reason for their existence was to establish DCT's right to use the title for their new story paper, so Kashgar's comment above is obviously correct. I suspect that the six-week period was to give any other company that had already used it or was planning to do so, the opportunity to contact Thomsons in order to discuss the matter.

Then compal are amiss in saying it is undocumented. They are unaware of Derek's intricate research.

I used the front cover of issue 1 of THE WIZARD as the front cover of my book THIS WAS THE WIZARD, and for its rear cover I used the back page of the very last issue. I remember being in an eBay tussle to buy that first issue, and if memory serves, it eventually cost me about £170. I had to have it though, so I was always going to be the last man standing, regardless of how high it might have gone.

The whole problem of copyright or 'trademarking' had started for Thomsons with 'Adventure' a single, common word title which was impossible to effectively make exclusively their own and which in turn led to problems when it came to publishing an annual connected to the title in the autumn of 1923. Any publisher could have legitimately published an Adventure annual if they had so wished and hoped that sales might have been boosted by buyers thinking it had some connection with the Thomson boys' paper so Thomsons' solution to this was to give their own official Adventure annual the rather obtuse title of 'Adventure Land', which they could legitimately trademark and a title which the annual retained until its final issue in 1940.
In a similar way when Thomsons ceased to publish the Magic comic in 1941 they attempted to retain the 'copyright of continual usage' by having the title added to that of the Beano Book to create The Magic - Beano Book' which ran for the rest of the 1940's and thus retained their rights to the title should they ever have wished to revive it again.

I wonder if that's why Martin & Reid only published one issue of their own Magic Comic in 1948?