Buster adventure stories

[Peter Gray]

I have 4 Busters with him in..
http://www.bustercomic.co.uk/crabbes.html

[Raven]

I have 4 Busters with him in..

You published a couple of lovely instalments, with the metal octopus and talisman-stealing sky raiders on your blog a while back.

Here, in case anybody missed them:

http://petergraycartoonsandcomics.blogs ... aders.html

[Peter Gray]

another Carlos fun adventure...read it properly here..
http://petergraycartoonsandcomics.blogs ... pilot.html

a kid playing with a special gun...which can also be a real gun...its the 60's folks...where kids playing cowboys and indians was the best game ever....1968 29th June.







http://www.bustercomic.co.uk/george.html
http://www.bustercomic.co.uk/shrinker.html
I don't have these comics to show these Carlos drawings..

[Lew Stringer]

...its the 60's folks...where kids playing cowboys and indians was the best game ever....1968 29th June.

Cowboys and indians was more of a 1950s game. In the Sixties we played at being Batman or Daleks.

Lew

[Peter Gray]

heres another cowboy 60's classic with Batman and Daleks in a future Wonder horse story..read at the blog..comicsuk won't let me have the memory I need to show this here...I do make them too big..
http://petergraycartoonsandcomics.blogs ... onder.html







artist is unknown...from 1966 9th July...just remembered I had two 1966 Busters in my collection so should have know they were not the large size...DOH! refering to the what did you buy post in discussions..

[Raven]

Cowboys and indians was more of a 1950s game. In the Sixties we played at being Batman or Daleks.

Lew

And Jonny Quest ... ?

[Raven]

heres another cowboy 60's classic with Batman and Daleks in a future Wonder horse story..

Thanks for posting that, Peter. I've long wanted to see what the Valiant Champion strip looked like and it's really nice.

[Lew Stringer]

Cowboys and indians was more of a 1950s game. In the Sixties we played at being Batman or Daleks.

Lew

And Jonny Quest ... ?

Nah. JQ was never as popular as Doctor Who or Batman. (I didn't even see it, so it must have clashed with something else.) Besides, we didn't relate to kid characters. We ASPIRED to be the adult heroes. Why play at being Robin when you can be Batman?

Lew

[philcom55]

I think I'm a couple of years older than you Lew and I can certainly remember a tremendous buzz going around the playground when the first episode of JQ aired. The opening titles in particular, with their dinosaurs and giant robot spiders, inspired all sorts of imaginary adventures for a while. We still played cowboys too in the early 1960s (though few kids ever wanted to be an indian in my recollection) but by far the most popular games amongst boys of my age were re-enactments of World War 2. Nowadays one tends to forget that in 1960 'The War' had only ended 15 years previously and virtually every garden shed held gas masks and tin hats, while the countryside was still littered with overgrown pillboxes and air-raid shelters!

- Phil Rushton

[Raven]

Nah. JQ was never as popular as Doctor Who or Batman. (I didn't even see it, so it must have clashed with something else.) Besides, we didn't relate to kid characters. We ASPIRED to be the adult heroes. Why play at being Robin when you can be Batman?

Lew

Surely young fans of the TV show at least would have preferred to be Burt Ward's Robin rather than Adam West's rather less dynamic Batman?! I tended to find the teen-type heroes most appealing, myself, as a boy - reading the Fantastic Four (my favourites) in The Mighty World of Marvel, Johnny Storm certainly seemed like a more appealing and exciting character to be than Reed Richards.

Johnny Quest came to mind after all this talk of Huckleberry Hound Weekly lately, as I know he had a double page strip in it. Did you not buy this, Phil, to get an extra weekly Quest fix?

[Kashgar]

In the rural idyll where I grew up (OK it was a mining village but it was also surround by extensive areas of woodland) our 'war game' of choice was 'Japs and English', a nod to the jungle-like nature of our preferred playground. Somehow Nazis and dense undergrowth didn't go together.

[Lew Stringer]

Nah. JQ was never as popular as Doctor Who or Batman. (I didn't even see it, so it must have clashed with something else.) Besides, we didn't relate to kid characters. We ASPIRED to be the adult heroes. Why play at being Robin when you can be Batman?

Lew

Surely young fans of the TV show at least would have preferred to be Burt Ward's Robin rather than Adam West's rather less dynamic Batman?!

Adam West less dynamic? Good grief no. Robin may have been brave and heroic but he was always portrayed as second fiddle to Batman. Who would want to play at being second best? We didn't aspire to be teenagers, we aspired to be adults. (Besides, Robin was a BOY wonder played by a grown man, - it wasn't a good look.) In fact if the part of "Batman" was already taken by one of our mates we'd make up our OWN superhero rather than be Robin!

Lew

[tony ingram]

Nah. JQ was never as popular as Doctor Who or Batman. (I didn't even see it, so it must have clashed with something else.) Besides, we didn't relate to kid characters. We ASPIRED to be the adult heroes. Why play at being Robin when you can be Batman?

Lew

Surely young fans of the TV show at least would have preferred to be Burt Ward's Robin rather than Adam West's rather less dynamic Batman?!

Adam West less dynamic? Good grief no. Robin may have been brave and heroic but he was always portrayed as second fiddle to Batman. Who would want to play at being second best? We didn't aspire to be teenagers, we aspired to be adults. (Besides, Robin was a BOY wonder played by a grown man, - it wasn't a good look.) In fact if the part of "Batman" was already taken by one of our mates we'd make up our OWN superhero rather than be Robin!

Lew

I never understood the whole kid-sidekick-the-kids-can-identify-with thing. Nobody in their right mind would want to be Robin or Speedy or whoever, permanently in the shadow of their mentor and permanently stuck being regarded as a child despite routinely risking their necks for Gotham or Star City! For God's sake, poor old Dick Grayson didn't even get out of short trousers and pixie boots until he was about nineteen and finally told Batman where to shove 'em!

[Raven]

I never understood the whole kid-sidekick-the-kids-can-identify-with thing. Nobody in their right mind would want to be Robin or Speedy or whoever, permanently in the shadow of their mentor and permanently stuck being regarded as a child despite routinely risking their necks for Gotham or Star City! For God's sake, poor old Dick Grayson didn't even get out of short trousers and pixie boots until he was about nineteen and finally told Batman where to shove 'em!

Robin's been portrayed as quite cool for some years, though - especially the Tim Drake version. And at the end of the Sixties, Dick was off at college mingling with all the hippies and youth culture, maaaaan. I suppose the appeal is that they have these powers but they're young and have no adult responsibilities, so they're a bit more carefree.

The much younger sidekicks in days of yore (presumably most readers were probably around ten or under?) were presumably to appeal to the very young readers, though, to whom the likes of Bats would seem like a father figure.

[Lew Stringer]

I never understood the whole kid-sidekick-the-kids-can-identify-with thing. Nobody in their right mind would want to be Robin or Speedy or whoever, permanently in the shadow of their mentor and permanently stuck being regarded as a child despite routinely risking their necks for Gotham or Star City! For God's sake, poor old Dick Grayson didn't even get out of short trousers and pixie boots until he was about nineteen and finally told Batman where to shove 'em!

Which actually brings us back on topic. Most of the Buster adventure strips featured adult characters, as had most British comics prior to Buster. That's what readers aspired to at the time, - to be heroic and grown up. Somewhere along the way readers' tastes changed, and kid characters began to dominate the comic. In fact they began to dominate ALL children's comics.

I've always found this a curious thing, but I guess comics went along with the majority who began to prefer to "relate" to characters rather than look up to them. Perhaps comics hadn't changed quickly enough, and the adult heroes suddenly seemed stuffy and boring to more modern kids? Or more likely it reflects a shift in society itself, where children have more power than in previous generations (family friendly pubs, more activities for kids for example) so they don't WANT to be grown up?

Lew