Pocket-Money Comics: The Complete Judge Dredd

As mentioned in this month's Hatch, Match & Dispatch feature, The Complete Judge Dredd title came to an end twenty-five years ago. Launched in February 1992, it boasted the clever tagline of "The Law in Order" and ran for forty-two monthly black-and-white issues, which isn't a bad old run for a comic that -- aside …

Oddities: Beneath a Steel Sky

Beneath a Steel Sky is a highly regarded 1994 computer game developed by Revolution Software and released on the MS-DOS, Amiga and iOS platforms. I bought it a couple of years after it was published but I never managed to get it to install properly, even though my PC at the time was a top-of-the-range …

Hatch, Match & Dispatch – July 2020

It's that time again, "Rusty Staples" readers! It's the last Monday of the month, and that means we get to look ahead to see which British comics are celebrating (or commiserating) a major anniversary in the coming month. This time around the list includes a couple of Judge Dredd titles, a couple of Conans, some …

Altered Images: Albert Fitzwilliam Digby

Pocket-Money Comics: Batman Monthly

You'd think that for a relatively recent comic (say, from the late 1980s) it would be easy enough to track down all the info. But not so! The publication life of London Editions' Batman Monthly is annoyingly vague. The majority of the evidence suggests that it ran for fifty-six monthly issues, then it was relaunched …

“Remind me again… What’s the publisher’s daughter’s name?”

It's long been a tradition for British comics aimed at girls to be given a girls' name (that is, a name we tend to commonly associate with female people), but -- not counting those whose title is the name of a character like Batman or Popeye -- how many comics can you list that have …

Pocket Money Comics: Mandy Picture Story Library for Girls

You remember the Picture Story Library for Girls comics, don't you? If you were a girl growing up in the UK or Ireland in the 60s, 70s, 80s or early 90s, you almost certainly read at least one of them. And if you were a boy growing up in that time and you had sisters …

Pocket-Money Comics: Boy’s Cinema

OK, so Boy's Cinema wasn't actually a comic. It was a weekly story-paper that specialised in prose adaptations of then-current movies. It was very popular in its heyday, many decades before Netflix and Blockbuster and the movie novelisations from the 1970s and 80s, all of which were written by Alan Dean Foster. Boy's Cinema From: …

Sparkyology 101

I don't think there's an official name for the process of studying old British comics and story-papers, so I have decided that it shall henceforth be named in honour of one of my childhood favourites. (If you don't believe that Sparky was worthy of having an entire field of study named after it, then there …

Hatch, Match & Dispatch – June 2020

We're plunging headlong and blindfolded into the land of uncertainty this time around, folks, with rather too many publications that have as-yet-unverified details. (On that note, a few people have asked how one researches these old comics: where do the details come from, and what constitutes verification? Well, there's no one specific way: every collector …