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Great episode nice to see more IPC comics featured.
Though Tammy never made me cry, even with the handicapped and orphaned children and evil step-parents, school bullies, nasty neighbours - though I was reading in the early 1980s - maybe things were toned down by then.
Interesting that Charlies War was treated like a girls comic story though. Pat Mills made interesting interviewing.
1/4 million is staggering, don't think it had those figures by 1980 though
Don't forget that next week's edition starts a lot later, at 10:30. If you set your recorder for 9:00, you'll get a documentary about Factory records and the Hacienda club.
Note that Sunday has "Happy Birthday Wullie" at 7:00 (presumably a companion piece to the Broons programme) and "In Search of Moebius" at 10:00.
Steve Flanagan wrote:Don't forget that next week's edition starts a lot later, at 10:30.
No doubt because of the full penetration images from the Lost Girls artwork. At least that's what's on the review disc. I'm skeptical it'll make it to transmission without censorship but we'll see.
Haven't had the time up 'til now but just thought I'd add my two penn'orth to the 'Comics Brittania' debate.
Given the limited amount of time available and the general audience it was appealing too it was only natural that this history was going to be painted with very broad strokes and therefore miss out a lot of what we dyed in the wool comic fans may consider significant.
As has already been mentioned, for me, the main fault that the two programmes screened so far have had was their desire to tell the story in a strict linear fashion, with a beginning, a middle and an end and make the facts fit that template.
Although you can see why they started with them, the Dandy and the Beano didn't revolutionise the world of comics with the speech bubble. Speech bubbles had been around for decades in comics before D&B came along. What they did do which was striking though, was to publish so many of their comic strips without textual librettos, a common sight in the titles of Thomsons main rivals the Amalgamated Press at the time.
Mind you this applied in reverse to the D&B's adventure strip output which steadfastly stuck to using the libretto sans speech bubbles method of storytelling for decades to come. So in that respect they could hardly be called trailblazers.
I also think, though I love and admire their work dearly, that too much credit is sometimes given to giants like Dudley Watkins, Leo Baxendale, Davey Law and Ken Reid, certainly when it crowds out the work of others. For instance when Leo left the Beano and Jim Petrie, Ron Spencer, Dave Sutherland and Bob Mc Grath took over the strips he left behind they all took those strips and added many touches of their own in the decades to come and so none of them should be dismissed as being the inferior anonymous 'ghosts' hanging onto the great man's coat-tails.
Dudley, Leo, Davey and Ken are the greats but they aren't the whole story and I think a couple of minutes devoted to a roll-call of others would have been nice.
(BTW although Dudley did draw a couple of Big Eggo's during the war it was Reg Carter who drew the strip week to week and was responsible for it's origin which wasn't what it implied in 'The Fun Factory').
In the second programme it was almost mandatory that we began with Dan Dare and the Eagle but again the desire to fit the story into a neat box meant that they had Marcus Morris creating the paper to counteract the effect on British youth of horror comics from the US but then the US comics they chose to highlight were those from EC Comics which didn't themselves appear until Eagle was already on the newsstands.
As to the ground-breaking IPC girl's title Tammy, while admittedly it did contain some interesting stuff, girls had been encouraged to cry over their papers for years so this was hardly anything new and the notion that it replaced or overtook the likes of DC Thomsons Bunty is patently not true. Bunty was still being published sventeen years after the demise of Tammy.
Kashgar wrote:In the second programme it was almost mandatory that we began with Dan Dare and the Eagle
Yes - and they went on to give the impression that Girl was the first girls' comic, whereas the ground-breaking School Friend was described as just one of its "competitors". (I was also a bit dubious about the sweeping claim that 'Kitty Hawke' failed because girls only wanted to read about ballet and ponies. In fact I've heard several women say that they simply disliked it because it was such a pale shadow of Dan Dare - which they avidly followed in their brothers' copies of Eagle!)
Those girls comics were hilarious they were so brutal. They were slaves. Orphans. In a war!
I'm really enjoying this series. Ok, there are inconsistencies but I've never been one to dwell to deeply on historical accuracy (I know that's not always a popular point of view here) and am quite satisfied with just watching a rollocking good piece of entertainment, putting faces to names.
Channel 4 should make Charley's War into a film or series. As realistic as possible. The Monocled Mutineer would pale in comparison.
The problem with crying onto your Tammy's (and sob, sob Charley's War) was that the already poor paper quality would get more damaged than you would want
chrissmillie wrote:Ok, there are inconsistencies but I've never been one to dwell to deeply on historical accuracy (I know that's not always a popular point of view here) and am quite satisfied with just watching a rollocking good piece of entertainment, putting faces to names.
Yes but when those errors are deliberate it's all a bit silly really.
As for the omissions of most IPC comics, I'm wondering if it's down to behind the scenes friction in some way. (2000AD and Roy of the Rovers are definitely no longer IPC, and am I right in thinking that Battle, Action and Tammy are now all Egmont properties?)
Good point. The IPC/Fleetway line was undoubtedly the most innovative of the 70s-80s. And, although they may not want to mention it in the series, IPC/Odhams did print the first Marvel heroes (apart from Alan Class of course). Marvel UK was hugely influential but I bet there's no mention (I'm trying not to read your blog Lew until I see the series first).
i can't help but think that it's because DCT are still there publishing comics and therefore would appreciate any form of advertising to promote the medium, hence a lot of co-operation, whereas IPC are long since divested of any comics output, having sold off stuff to pay the bills or because they can no longer be bothered to run it. that part of the comics division that went to maxwell/fleetway was split once again as egmont bought out fleetway, allowing rebellion to get into that convoluted "what is or isn't part of 200AD" set up, and that the old IPC stuff is now Viacom/AOL Time Warner...which has a strange 'therefore' of being the possible property of DC Comics, in the long run.
thompsons could stick bums on seats to talk, including current editors and the like, but who could IPC offer? nice to see the reclusive john sanders on air, now in his seventies and living in france, writing the odd non-fiction book and enjoying retirement, but he's IPC/Fleetway old guard, and even he was made redundant in the IPC sell-off, going to fleetway as a freelance consultant before finally jacking it all in.
i too, am not really looking forward to the final episode, except for action, which i think shoud really have gone in the last show. i can live without Viz etc. and the laddish market described in the blurb. i wasn't ever a big fan of the humour comics, but it was still an enjoyable first show, but unless they find time for warrior, marvelman and similar, i think the deadline/viz aspect may be a bit dull...crisis perhaps? i dunno, you've seen it. alan moore is bound to feature, so i guess V gets a mention, but i'm not holding my breath for another "comics grow up" show.
I suppose as a sort of intro to the comics scene it is not all bad.Of course the ghosts of Fleetway live on only through us,but at least we still have D.C. Thomson veterans around who can enrich our knowledge of the scene.The American market of comics differs so widely from our weekly anthologies that it is perhaps a different genre and outside the remit of ComicsUK and I suspect most fans interests here.The likes of Steve Holland should be celebrated for being the stalwart for the British comics genre and exhaustingly researching every nook and cranny of this much loved market.What a great shame he wasn't included in the program.Now that I would pay to see,along with the likes of Shaqui,Lew and Kashgar,not forgetting Peter Gray of course.Real fans!Get these four together and we would have a program that would leave us all breathless.
chrissmillie wrote:And, although they may not want to mention it in the series, IPC/Odhams did print the first Marvel heroes (apart from Alan Class of course).
They go back a bit further than that too. L.Miller published reprints of Human Torch and Captain America in the 1950s.
- though I was reading in the early 1980s - maybe things were toned down by then.
Pat Mills made interesting interviewing.
...I'll give it a go..
