morgan the mighty - ahem, MORGYN the Mighty

[Rob J]

Did you know - there's only one mention of ol' Morgan the Mighty in the whole of the Comics UK forums. Fora. Forii. Foras. ONE! I'm a little aghast. With the recent talk of Summer Specials (in the comic year thread), I somehow managed to remember this character. I recall him from the summer specials only (I only used to get one weekly in the early-mid '70s, Whoopee) - but pretty fondly, if I'm honest. Thing is, I can't think which comic he was in. Warlord? Nah - can't be. Not Victor either. Or at least, he's not in the '74 annual. So yeah - I'm blanking on this one. Can someone tell me please. Thanks all.

[steelclaw]

Morgan the Mighty Was in Rover,then when Wizard and Rover merged in 1973 it was in Wizard as a Text story, when The Victor merged with Wizard in 1978 it began in Victor.

I'm sure someone else will give you a very detailed account of Morgan the Mighty soon.

http://wizardcomics1970-1974.blogspot.com/

[Rob J]

Thankee, thankee. In the meantime I'll try to edit my post to reflect what appears to be the correct spelling of the strip in question. I.e. MORGYN the Mighty.



Maybe that's why the search function wasn't turning much up.

[steelclaw]

Thankee, thankee. In the meantime I'll try to edit my post to reflect what appears to be the correct spelling of the strip in question. I.e. MORGYN the Mighty.



Maybe that's why the search function wasn't turning much up.

Same here

[colcool007]

Morgyn The Mighty is one of my favourite Victor characters. Despite starting off in the Beano from issue 1 (Yes, he is that old) and a mild flirtation with The Rover in the 50's, he ended up in the roomy arena that was the Victor battling to halt Mongol hordes from repeating Genghis Khan's European tour to dealing with zombies in Haiti when he wasn't pulled into the future to help deal with an alien horde invading Earth to get more slaves.

A swift look at Red Dagger gives you 4 of the best Morgyn stories as each Morgyn series seemed to only last for 10 comic issues (3 pages to a weekly gives you approximately 30 pages and not enough to fill a Red Dagger digest of 64 pages). The Red Dagger stories were illustrated by Ted Kearon with the later stories (mid 70's to early 80's) illustrated by Garcia. And when Victor went into decline, British veteran John Cooper was commissioned to take over the reins and he produced a very superior style.

While mentions of Morgyn might be thin on the ground, we have such a wide remit in comicsuk, it would not surprise me to have a low discussion value on a character such as Morgyn until others have exhausted their discussion on characters that were of a higher value to them. E.G. I have discussed the True Stories on many an occasion, but that does not mean that they are my favourite part of the Victor, just that it is the most easily identified.

[Kashgar]

I'm doing this from memory so please forgive any errors which, if they occur, I'll amend later. Morgyn the Mighty began life as a text story in the pages of Rover in 1928. His first appearance as a picture strip character was, as Col recalls, in Beano No1 in 1938 drawn by George 'Dod' Anderson but his arrival as a major strip character had to wait until 1963 when his first Victor series began drawn by Ted Kearon. Kearon continued to draw Morgyn in the Victor until the early 1970's when Antonio Garcia took over. Later artists employed on the character included Ted Rawlings (ills for text stories in Rover and then Wizard), John Cooper and towards the end of Victor's life in the early 1990's, including the paper's final issues, Mike Dorey.
Dudley Watkins drew the illustrations to accompany the text in the 'Morgyn the Mighty' book published in the early 1950's but his only Morgyn picture strip, published in Rover in 1957, doesn't really count as it was a retitled reprint of a 'Strang the Terrible' strip he'd drawn in the Beano during the war.
I have a feeling that the final few Rover books published in the late 1950's may have contained the odd Morgyn strip drawn by James 'Peem' Walker but I admit I could be misremembering this.
One final point re the reprints in Red Dagger issue No 3. These have the first printing dates for the strips they contain as being from 1971. Now, while the strips did indeed appear in Victor in 1971, they were already reprints by then. Both having originally appeared in the paper in the mid 1960's.

[colcool007]

Thanks for that addition. I had not realised that some Morgyn stories were even older than 1938.

Onto the rebrand of Strang The Terrible, it was fairly obvious that Morgyn and Strang became one character as most of the later stories (where Morgyn is rescuing people, fighting to save lost causes) read more like Strang stories instead of Morgyn stories, but they do not suffer in the re-telling of each tale.

As to the print dates on Red Dagger, it always annoyed me that DCT used the last printed date for each story, instead of saying that the story was originally published in nineteen oatcake. But that's a personal gripe.

[Kashgar]

On checking Morgyn did first appear in Rover in 1928, in No 304 (11/2/28) to be precise. I was slightly awry with my memories of the later Rover Books though as he only appeared in picture strip form in one of them, the 1956 edition, but the artist was Peem Walker though.
Morgyn appeared in picture strip form in 25 of the 31 Victor Books published with artists as follows -
Ted Kearon 1964-1970, 1975.
Antonio Garcia 1978-1982
Felix Carrion 1983-1990
John Cooper 1991-1993
Mike Dorey 1994.
He also appeared in 19 of the 26 Victor Summer Specials
Ted Kearon 1967, 1968, 1972-1974
Antonio Garcia 1976-1983, 1985, 1986, 1988
John Cooper 1989, 1990
Mike Dorey 1992.
Happy belated eightieth Morgyn, perhaps the oldest of Thomson's truly famous characters created solely for the juvenile market.

[Rob J]

Fantastic info - thanks!