Please allow me to introduce myself...

[ramonschenk]

Hello all!

My name is Ramon Schenk and I am a Dutch comics reader/collector/researcher. I first became aware of the enormous quantities of British comics in existence when I studied in Bath for a few years in the mid-1990s. I even found out that some of my old favourites were not Dutch but translations!

Picked up an extensive collection of Miller and Alan Class books, simply because they reprinted material that at the time seemed unobtainable in the American originals. I then branched out into original UK material, basically everything but humour (yeah, that takes out quite a chunk!).

I normally specialize in US comics, Charlton and pre-1980s in particular, but also keep up with many current titles.

For the Grand Comics Database, I am trying to get more information on British books and more books catalogued. Amazing to realize we have more Norwegian comics indexed than British!

Anyway, hope to pick the collective brains here once in a while, maybe even be of help to someone as well.

Regards,
Ramon

PS If anyone is also on the Crikey! forum, you may feel this introduction is a bit familiar. I couldn't be bothered to write another intro!

[Niblet]

Welcome to the forum, Ramon.

Comics UK members have a wealth of knowledge about British (and other) comics, so I'm sure you'll get answers to any questions you have. We would also be interested in anything you can tell us about Dutch reprints of British material.

[stevezodiac]

I am a big fan of Charlton comics as well - particularly the westerns. Peter Morisi is one of my favourite artists. I have most of their mystery titles from the late 60s onward. Welcome to the forum.

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

Welome, Ramon---the more comics diversity on here the better [the fact that UK comics characters have been transferred into Dutch is certainly of interest to us-----can you remember which characters were 'Hollandized']?

Maybe the original names were altered for the benefit of Dutch readers, so maybe you could describe the characters and situations....

[philcom55]

Hi Ramon,

I'm a big fan of the GCD and would also like to see British comics featured there far more prominently. The trouble is that while the current format is ideally designed for those 'American-style' comics that were published over here by the likes of L. Miller, Thorpe & Porter, Atlas and Alan Class (eg Marvelman, Creepy Worlds, Space Ace, etc.) I feel that the majority of British titles are far less suitable.

The long-running British comic Valiant, for example, featured some of the most colourful adventure strips of the 1960s such as the Steel Claw, Mytek the Mighty and Kelly's Eye - yet these hardly ever appeared on the covers which tended to be factually-based and almost interchangeable from a distance. Added to the fact that weekly publication resulted in four times as many issues being published as any American equivalent, the creation of a GCD-style cover gallery would be something of a waste of time and effort. It seems to me that it'd be far better to find some way of showcasing significant splash panels and events.

Similarly, the American model doesn't really allow for the crucial importance of hardbacked 'annuals' in the history of British comics. Often these wouldn't really qualify as 'comics' at all according to the GCD's criteria, with far more pages devoted to text features than strip content. Nevertheless a typical annual can contain the equivalent of an average comicbook: for example the three, eight-page strips by 'Dan Dare' artist Desmond Walduck that I discovered yesterday in an obscure 1962 annual based on the old 'R.C.M.P.'
television series - as seen below.



- Phil Rushton

(By the way Ramon - as a matter of interest, where is your avatar taken from?)