Comics UK

No, it's Baxendale, a detail of "Doomsday School" from "Wham!"; Deidre The Weirdie at centre, Fred Feendish below, Young Nick's ear left, and an unnamed squelchy thing right.

Perhaps! But I'm sure I read a strip from America about the germ scare, something about Boy Scouts going door-to-door collecting old comics to be burned because they were a health risk. If it's true, it might have started as a convenient excuse to destroy copies of the crime and horror comics still ...

I haven't got many issues of "Princess Tina" - girls' annuals are easier to find and have self-contained stories - but here's my favourite cover. Nicely harmonious colours, and the girl looks like a preteen Valerie Singleton.

The Trolls aren't revolting, they're cute because they're beautifully ugly! You boys just don't understand.

In the mid-Sixties my grandfather worked as a hospital orderly. Whenever we visited he would have have a pile of comics for us to read, always recent issues of a random selection of titles. When I asked him about this years later, he said comics were banned in the Childrens' Ward. Any brought in wer...

"Not mere 'thrillers' as we used to know them, nor the once-familiar 'school stories'. These are evil and dangerous – graphic, coloured illustrations of modern city vice and crime." That's a common theme with decency campaigners. "The old stories we loved and our parents hated were great, but this m...

Thanks, Phil, those pages made my day! The "Little Orphan Annie" influence sticks out like a sore thumb.

That last one's a jaw-dropper, Mike. Two pages a week seems amazingly fast to me. I've never managed a page in less than a week.

Mine is from Frank Wells, who describes comics thus: "A strange literary form... where phrases, sentences, lines and paragraphs have given way to indiscriminate balloons, containing spattered globs of language that can, if it is worth doing at all, be read in any order." Obviously Wells was one of t...

I thought Lion was just a boring "boys-own" until "Turville's Touchstone" (AKA "Spellbinder")started in 1969. Valiant in the mid-60s had beautifully dark art, I liked looking at it, but "Kelly's Eye" was the only strip I'd always read. "Wham!" was best around the time of "Doomsday School". Sadly, I ...