Enfari’s Syndrome: Thunder

IPC's Thunder started strong and finished strong, albeit rather abruptly and far too quickly. A couple of minor exceptions aside, its initial line-up of strips remained constant throughout its twenty-two-issue run. Thunder was launched in Autumn 1970 (the cover-date of issue #1 is 17 October), and it maintained the same price right through to the …

In-Shallow Profile: Foom #8

My first proper taste of comic-book fandom -- other than the atrocious comics I drew for myself -- came from Marvel with the December 1974 issue of their in-house fanzine Foom. Foom is an acronym for "Friends of Ol' Marvel" because, well, of course it is. Stan Lee, right? It was a quarterly publication that …

In-Shallow Profile: Look Alive magazine

In the early 1980s the Powers That Be in IPC decided to test the water with a "lifestyle" magazine aimed at boys in their early-to-mid teens. There was already one-and-a-half plethoras of mags for girls in that age-range, and some of them were selling very well indeed, but there was nothing comparable for boys. So …

Oddities: Superman’s Boots

When I was younger (which doesn't narrow things down much: until now I've always been younger) I used to draw -- or rather colour -- Superman's boots with a yellow stripe around the top, the same yellow as his belt and the blobs on his chest's S-symbol. The angle of the top of the boots …

On this Day… March 4th

From "The Curious Case of the Crime-Less Clues", Detective Comics #364, June 1967 Script: Gardner Fox Pencils: Sheldon Moldoff (signed as Bob Kane) Inks: Joe Giella Colours: uncredited Letters: Gaspar Saladino Batman and Robin investigate a series of riddle-based clues... but the Riddler has already been apprehended. It's not a great story, let's be honest, …

Introducing… MADCAP!

If you're a collector of comics -- especially British comics of the sort that feature rather frequently on this blog -- then I'm hoping that you'll like MADCAP! MADCAP is brand-new, exciting, zany, avant-gardey and zeitgeisty, technologically advanced, quirky, gluten-free, anti-bacterial and -- best of all -- it's available right now, and all for the …

Hatch, Match & Dispatch – March 2020

There are lots of British Marvel comics in the list this month, folks! Can you name them all? Hmm... I bet there's at least one you've forgotten about (or maybe not even heard of)! We've also got a lot of titles that became part of the My Guy family tree, including My Guy itself and …