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 …

Mistaken Identity: Doctor Doom

Sometimes comic-book characters end up having the same name, and that can happen for a number of reasons: 1. It’s a coincidence and couldn’t have been avoided. 2. The creators didn’t check. 3. The creators didn’t care. The first one definitely happened with Dennis the Menace, with both versions of the character launched in the …

Enfari’s Syndrome: Captain Britain

In 1976 an Irish kid living in the suburbs of Dublin was taking a bit of risk buying a comic called Captain Britain. Especially a kid like me: I was very small for my age, couldn't fight, and lacked the physical prowess to out-run a tree... and I possessed a self-defeating tendency to smart-mouth the …

Enfari’s Syndrome: Ranger

It's been quite a while since I began procrastinating about reviewing Ranger but I've finally decided to come clean and admit that the reason I was putting it off was ridiculously petty: its pages are 255mm by 330mm. Thus -- or even hence -- they're too large for my scanner... ... which means that each …

Star Wars Day!

For the past few years the fourth day of May has been pushed as "Star Wars Day" because "May the 4th" sounds like "May the Force" (this is something that young Rusty spotted back in 1978, but tragically failed to trademark), even though it means everyone is quietly ignoring the fact that none of the …

Clogging the Newsagent’s Shelves Since 1867!

(Updated! See the notes below!) All right, chums, brace yourselves and each other because we're about to sail into waters that have been very sketchily charted... There could well be dragons. There will almost certainly be errors. For the past several years I've been attempting to compile a database of every British comic and story-paper …