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: …