What an amazing comic everybody should own a set.


Sometime in the early Eighties I bought a couple of volumes of The Captain at a comic fair in Manchester. I was reading a lot of school stories at the time and those volumes seemed promising. However, I really couldn't get on with them at all so I was really delighted when a couple of years later the late Norman Shaw, comic dealer par excellence from Upper Norwood, took them off me and gave me a really good discount off a quite significant purchase of issues of Adventure and The Hotspur between 1946 and 1950, which I still have. I can still remember the feelings of pleasure and anticipation as I left his house with two fat parcels en route for Crystal Palace railway station, Euston and home. I returned many times over the years to Norman's emporium but I have never since bought another issue of The Captain or any similar publication, unless it had direct relevance to some research I was involved in. You, on the other hand, FM, if we are to judge by the papers you've been telling us you have acquired recently, would seem to be quite obsessed by papers and comics from between the turn of the century to roughly the First World War. There's obviously no reason why you shouldn't be, but as you may well be the only forum member on this particular paper trail, I'm curious to know if there is any specific reason why you have this focus. Feel free to ignore this post if you think I'm being rude which, admittedly, I sometimes am.felneymike wrote:Volume 2 of The Captain, 1899-1900. The style of the title blocks and artwork reminds me of another paper i have - Boys of Our Empire.

I know just how you must have felt, Phil. I had some sadistic teachers as well.philcom55 wrote:back in the day I'd have probably favoured a three-quarter scale nuclear submarine with working missiles!
I got interested in them after discovering Sexton Blake, but then branched out into pretty much any Boys' Own type stuff from the era you mentioned (though i do extend up to 1940, when "graveyard week" killed off a lot of papers). As for why i like it... i don't really know. Maybe it's the escapism (people of the time certianly needed a bit of that!), maybe it's the old fashioned "right is right and wrong is wrong" attitudes which make for villains you can be pleased get defeated, or maybe it's just the fact that so distant an era seems completley alien to somebody who can't even remember the 1980's all that well that the stories seem a lot more "fantastic" than they did when they first came out.Phoenix wrote:Sometime in the early Eighties I bought a couple of volumes of The Captain at a comic fair in Manchester. I was reading a lot of school stories at the time and those volumes seemed promising. However, I really couldn't get on with them at all so I was really delighted when a couple of years later the late Norman Shaw, comic dealer par excellence from Upper Norwood, took them off me and gave me a really good discount off a quite significant purchase of issues of Adventure and The Hotspur between 1946 and 1950, which I still have. I can still remember the feelings of pleasure and anticipation as I left his house with two fat parcels en route for Crystal Palace railway station, Euston and home. I returned many times over the years to Norman's emporium but I have never since bought another issue of The Captain or any similar publication, unless it had direct relevance to some research I was involved in. You, on the other hand, FM, if we are to judge by the papers you've been telling us you have acquired recently, would seem to be quite obsessed by papers and comics from between the turn of the century to roughly the First World War. There's obviously no reason why you shouldn't be, but as you may well be the only forum member on this particular paper trail, I'm curious to know if there is any specific reason why you have this focus. Feel free to ignore this post if you think I'm being rude which, admittedly, I sometimes am.felneymike wrote:Volume 2 of The Captain, 1899-1900. The style of the title blocks and artwork reminds me of another paper i have - Boys of Our Empire.
Thanks for your reply, FM, and your explanation. As for the in-story recaps in the DCT papers, I agree they were irritating and could very easily have been replaced by a For New Readers panel, which they actually were on a regular basis, but only in selected serials.felneymike wrote: As for DCT story papers, i have a few volumes of those but the in-story recaps annoy me a lot.
If memory serves me correctly the centrespread was a poster of Cheeky on a skateboard, but the reverse may have had story pages.Peter Gray wrote:Got the Cheeky number 1 today....great to have.But there are four centre pages missing...![]()
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oh well it did come with three other Cheekys I didn't have and was cheap.still annoying..