Richard S. wrote:The Comic Journal issue 1-16 - very happy with that
There were just 39 issues of
The Comic Journal, Richard. The original compiler was Manchester-based Alan Cadwallender, who produced the first 18 issues, originally on stapled A4 sheets but he changed the presentation to A5 with issue 13. I think it was illness that persuaded him to sell to Bryon Whitworth in 1990, a further 5 issues later. I well remember Bryon approaching me that year at a book fair in Leeds, where I had a stand selling books and comics/story papers, to ask me if I would write an article for issue 19, his first obviously. I agreed, and wrote an eight-page piece that I called
The D. C. Thomson Big Four (1946-1955) - A Preamble. Alan Coates did an article on
Happy Days, which had been launched in 1938, and Colin Morgan wrote an article he called
''Q'' Squadron Goes To War For The Hotspur. There were four other articles in that issue.
Bryon eventually persuaded several more people to contribute articles, including such luminaries as Bill Lofts, Derek Adley, Ray Moore, Denis Gifford and Steve Holland, the A5 booklets getting thicker and thicker up to issue 28 in Autumn 1984. For issue 29 in Spring 1995 Bryon opted for an A4 format, with coloured covers and some internal pages in colour too, a format that he retained until issue 38, the Spring/Summer 2001 number, at which point he sold more or less his entire business to David Mirfin of Rotherham. Bryon did go on to produce issue 39, the Spring/Summer 2002 number, which turned out to be the final issue, despite David's stated intention to maintain production.
It is probably worth mentioning that early in Bryon's A5 phase he produced two Omnibus Editions covering issues 1 to 10 and 11 to 15 respectively. Presumably he still had reasonable stocks of issues 16, 17 and 18 that he had acquired from Alan.
