Lately I’ve been scanning some of my collection of very old or rare comic-books, because reasons. It’s a relatively simple and quick process as long as the comics are smaller than the scanner… American comics, for example, fit very nicely. Unfortunately, a lot of my oldest comics are British Fleetway titles, which tend to be … Continue reading Scanning Large Images
Month: October 2014
Little Comics
As we all know, there’s a standard size for comics, which is approximately 15.5cm x 24cm (6” x 9.5” for those poor souls who don’t understand the metric system). But that’s only American comics, of course. And only current American comics, at that. When I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, the most … Continue reading Little Comics
The Parent of Modern Comics?
Some will disagree (and they have every right to do so, even if they’re wrong) but it seems to me that the first mass-market comic that really understood its readers without patronising them was Eagle. First published in on April 14, 1950, at a price of three pence (equivalent to about US$192.72 in modern money, … Continue reading The Parent of Modern Comics?
Fantastic Annual 1970
Before Marvel UK came into existence, a lot of Marvel comics were reprinted in UK titles published by Power Comics, an imprint of Odham’s Press. The weekly titles were Pow!, Wham!, Terrific, Smash! and Fantastic. Just those five titles, as far as I know, but that was probably because this was back in the days … Continue reading Fantastic Annual 1970
The Titans
As is well known and extensively documented elsewhere on the web, Marvel Comics International Ltd (later known to the fans as Marvel UK) was the British wing of Marvel Comics, established in the early 1970s to repackage US Marvel titles in a more regular and consistent manner than had been done previously (more on that … Continue reading The Titans
UK Girls’ Comics and Annuals
Girls’ comics are often sorely neglected on the web… It seems to me that this is most likely not because girls didn’t buy comics - they very much did - but because the issues didn’t survive. They weren’t collected as obsessively as boys’ comics, which is a real shame because some of the British comic … Continue reading UK Girls’ Comics and Annuals
Pilot #22, vol. 1
One of the oldest “comics” in my collection… The Pilot was a British adventure paper for boys that ran from 1935 to 1938, 131 issues in total. Published by The Amalgamated Press, this is issue 22, volume 1, dated February 29th 1936 - so it was probably on sale sometime during the preceding week. The … Continue reading Pilot #22, vol. 1