Welcome to Comics UK. If you like your comic literature British, then this site is just for you. It will attempt to detail as many British comics, story-papers, writers, artists and everything else that is connected with this subject since Funny Folks (the first British comic) hit the shops, back in 1874.

There have been close on 2000 separate publications since Funny Folks. Many of them were just ‘one-hit wonders’, but a lot produced household titles like The Beano, Dandy and 2000AD. Their characters also became well known. Most people have heard of Dan Dare, Judge Dredd, Roy Of The Rovers, Billy Bunter and Dennis the Menace. This site will aim to list as many of them as possible via a member contribution process called Comicpedia (no prizes for guessing where the idea for that name came from )

The intention of the Website is to build up as large a reference database on British comics as possible and will display the facts with accompanying illustrations.

1887 Christmas Number

Sections of the Site

Within the site, there will be a section count of somewhere in the region of 30+. These will include the Comic Gallery, Annuals and Specials sections which will display the front covers of said items. So if you are unsure of the year of that undated Beano, Dandy or Rupert annual, you will find the answer here. Also, if you are perusing those sections and notice that you have a copy of a missing cover or a better copy of an existing cover, then, in the words of the great Denis Gifford, "let me have it!" You can upload it via the Loading Bay section and get credited accordingly. There are currently 3965 Annual covers, 1167 Specials covers and 1811 Gallery covers.
   

Other sections which you may like to visit from time to time are the Forum and the Links page. The Forum has been running since 2001 and has some extremely knowledgeable members. You will be able to pose and answer questions, discuss comics, artists, writers, reminisce, in fact, anything British comic or story paper related is discussed here. The Links page has some great links to other British comic or story paper related sites that are out there on the Interweb.

If you've ever wondered just what happened to a certain publication, the Family Tree section will reveal all. Just select the publication title and press OK to see which titles it incorporated and which title subsequently incorporated it. There will be a Characters Section, that will attempt to give an overview of as comic characters as there has been throughout history. One more very important section is the Checkpoint Area, which will allow you to catch up on anything within the site which has been updated or added to since your last visit. It will appear of the front page by default and it will save a lot of trawling through the site.

There will be sections on Publishers, Newspaper Strips and History of Comics  as well as a Quiz, Adverts, Jokes and Memory Lane section. My immediate memory is returning home from my paper round with a handful of comics, walking into the kitchen, putting the comics on the table and going to the hallway to take off my coat, only to return to find my Mum fully engrossed with Battle Picture Weekly. To cap it all, she wouldn't let me read any of the other comics until she had read them first. She said that I might tell her the outcome of a story. She'd let me read Krazy though. It was a bit too modern for her.

Loss of Website

At the end of April 2011 the Comics UK Website got moved to a new hosting company whose servers did not support the old classic ASP coding language that every section of the Website was written in (except the Forum section.) All the data and code was retrieved but there was no way to display any of it without incurring additional costs. So a rewriting of the whole Website started in earnest and has become a three phase affair. Phase #1 will be completely redesigning the look and functionality of the whole Website and getting the basic sections up and running again, like Galleries, Annuals and Specials; Phase #2 will concentrate on the more difficult to code sections like Family Tree and Timeline; Phase #3 will be the building of the Comicpedia section.

Comicpedia

This major new section will allow select-members to add details to the Website. They will be able to write overviews on topics like the Comics and Story Papers, Artists, Writers, Publishers, History etc. And just like other Wiki's, fellow members can add their own details to whatever has already been written. The obvious aim here is to have a very large factual database of those wonderful pieces of literature.

So peruse and enjoy the pages from the options in the menu header above and take a trip down memory lane........

Al.