Victor Strip in Classics --- finally!

[Kashgar]

Goggo - the Wizard in the Goldfish Bowl was a text series illustrated by Davy Law in Beano Nos 486-501 (1951/1952). He then also drew the illustration for the Goggo text story that then appeared in the 1960 Beano Book. In between times, in the Beano Books for 1954 and 1955, Goggo had appeared in a picture strip but in both cases these were drawn by Ron Smith not Davy Law.

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

the clanger on page 44 is an illustration of CLOTT described as being by DAVEY LAW; it is in fact a later JIMMY HUGHES frame.

ALSO.....the 'TOUGH of the TRACK' tale has been requested by 3 readers, including one named PETER; could this be the legendary PETER GRAY himself?

[Peter Gray]

No...
Peter 'Jellymen from Beezer please put in Classics' Gray
or simply Peter Jellymen Gray..


Though I did get the Great flood of London from The Beano into Classics...

[Kashgar]

As they've chosen to highlight Davy Law in this issue ( despite the Jimmy Hughes goof) I thought some of you ( well Peter at any rate) might like to know the numbers and dates of Davy's last contributions to his three most famous strips. In fact all of them, Dennis, Beryl and Corporal Clott each appeared in their respective titles Beano, Topper and Dandy on the same date 25th July 1970 in numbers 1462, 912 and 1496.
Dennis was then taken over by some guy called Sutherland who seemed to then fade from the scene rather quickly ( I wonder whatever happened to him) while Beryl was taken over for a few weeks by Bob McGrath before John Dallas took over the reins and Corporal Clott was taken over by Jimmy Hughes.

[Lew Stringer]

Great to see Tough of the Track in Classics. Not being a collector of Thomson adventure weeklies it's been a long time since I read that type of strip. I'd forgotten how well structured their scripts were, and how appropriate the art was for that grimy but charismatic backstreet world of Alf Tupper's.

It's unlikely they'll reprint the whole run but I'm looking forward to seeing what they dig out next!

I'm also pleased to see Classics now retaining the "toplines" over the strips, - all part of the charm of those old comics.

Lew

[AndyB]

I think they're handwriting in dates where necessary as well. Too consistent across too many years not to be.

All things considered, though, production changes like keeping toplines probably makes production cheaper - more simple reproduction straight from the original page.

[steelclaw]

classics seems to be stocked at random whsmith in SE London....
Lewisham but not Catford or Bromley...
you could always subscribe....

At last I've subscribed, I'm glad I have as well,with the start of Adventure stories from
The Wizard,Hotspur,Hornet and Victor coming up in the next months.

[AndyB]

Who drew Puss and Boots in this month's classics? I should know, but it's not John K Geering.

[felneymike]

I too got this issue today, and the promise of further adventure comics certianly sounds interesting!

...Though i wonder if they'll be annoyingly incomplete reprints like the Great Flood of London apparently was?

[nottinghamian]

I'll buy this regularly if they keep printing the adventure stories.

[felneymike]

I only noticed today that British Comics has been updated, with the final episode (he's also publishd the first, but none in between) of "There Was Once A Game Called Football", which was apparently presented in picture-story form in (the new) Hotspur, might be an interesting one to request! The text story seems to have implied football would die out and vanish sometime around the late 1940's only to be revived by schoolboy in the 2140's after he was searching for something to write a history essay on. In the final story an obscure Mongolian tribe challenges the school team to a match after having carried on playing the game for 200 years, after a Scotsman introduced it to them.

[Kashgar]

If I remember rightly Bert Vandeput drew the picture strip version. I'll check out when it actually appeared in the Hotspur.

[Kashgar]

Just checked and 'There was once a game called Football' was adapted into a picture strip in Hotspur Nos 209-216 in 1963 and Bert Vandeput was the artist.

[Lew Stringer]

Just checked and 'There was once a game called Football' was adapted into a picture strip in Hotspur Nos 209-216 in 1963 and Bert Vandeput was the artist.

The title sounds distinctly familiar, but I wasn't reading Hotspur in the early sixties. Was it reprinted (or redrawn) in the late sixties/ early seventies by any chance?

Lew

[felneymike]

According to the British Comics site, the text version (6 parts, the picture strip was 7) was reprinted in The Rover in 1969