Pocket-Money Comics: Sun

Sun was one of those comics that never managed to settle down for very long. It was launched by J.B. Allen in the latter days of 1947 as Fitness and Sun, but with “Fitness and” in much, much, much (etc.) smaller letters than “Sun” — so small that most readers probably never noticed it was there to begin with.

Sun (J.B. Allen / Amalgamated Press)
First issue: 11 Nov 1947
Last issue: 17 October 1959
Duration: 11 years, 11 months
Issues: 558
Absorbed into: Lion

Some on-line sources insist that there had been a magazine called Fitness and Sun that was relaunched as this comic. While I’ve yet to find any solid evidence of that (the aforementioned on-line sources all seem to be referring to each other), I’m inclined to believe it: for the first two years of the comic’s life it bears the words “New Series” after the issue number and I can think of no other reason for that. Although “Fitness and” was dropped from the actual logo after issue #4, it did stick around for a while longer, with “Fitness and Sun” tucked away in the corner, as though it were a shameful secret like that time my cousin Sean accidentally called a waiter “Daddy” and we had to cut off all ties with that branch of the family.

Aside from the word “Sun” in the title almost nothing about the comic remained consistent throughout its life… Initially a fortnightly publication, it switched to a weekly schedule from #66 (13 May 1950). It also changed its size, targeted market, page-count, content, genre, print quality… just about everything switched and shifted around a lot. Even the publisher changed, with Amalgamated Press taking over from issue #42.

And on the subject of the title, for a comic that never absorbed another, it was definitely one of the least self-assured with regard to its own identity, with twelve title-changes. That’s more than one per year! Near as I can tell, here’s a complete list of all its personalities:

Fitness and Sun — #1 (11 Nov 1947)
Sun — #5 (06 Jan 1948)
Sun Comic — #47 (20 Aug 1949)
Sun a Happy Family Comic — #62 (18 March 1950)
Sun Comic — #92 (11 Nov 1950)
The Sun Comic — #155 (26 Jan 1952)
Sun — #164 (29 Mar 1952)
The Sun Adventure Weekly — #395 (01 Sep 1956)
The Cowboy Sun Weekly — #427 (13 Apr 1957)
The Cowboy Sun — #439 (06 Jul 1957)
The Sun — #441 (20 Jul 1957)
Sun Weekly — #446 (24 Aug 1957)
Sun — #531 (18 Apr 1959)
(Dates and issue numbers are correct to the best of my knowledge, but please do let me know if you can correct any mistakes!)

In the middle of 1957, in a span of five months, it changed its title four times. I mean, that’s so far off the charts it’s been eaten by a dragon, so for the sake of clarity, I’m going to refer to it as Sun from now on.

Sure, the comic reinvented itself a lot, but then back in those days the attitude to comics was very different to today. Even a devoted reader might stick with one comic for a couple of years at most before moving on to another, or being taken out of school and forced to work down the chimney mines to support the family. Long-term loyalty probably wasn’t a high consideration for the publishers: it made more sense to follow the trends.

Plus comics were generally considered to be disposable rather than collectable. When you were done with your issue you swapped it with a friend for something else. Or your granny used it to light the fire. Or the pages were torn into convenient squares and hung on a nail ready to be used for a different purpose entirely (and that’s where we get the popular phrase, “That fella is so conceited! He thinks The Sun shines…” etc.).

Probably the single most drastic demographic shift for Sun happened around issue #190 (27 Sep 1952) when it started running the “Billy the Kid” strip on the cover. Cowboy strips had already featured heavily in the comic, but by now dedicated cowboy comics (that is, comics about cowboys, not necessarily comics for cowboys, which I imagine would be quite different but no less fascinating) were flooding the market so Sun pulled its cutesy cartoony “Moko and Boko” strip from the cover and replaced it with the highly romanticised version of the adventures of Henry McCarthy, AKA William H. Bonney.

Barring one or two exceptions, Mister the Kid remained the cover star for the next three hundred issues, of which the Red Era (from #233 to #368 — 25 Jul 1953 to 25 Feb 1956) is possibly the most recognisable: just about all of the covers featured a single image of Billy against a red background. You can find him riding a horse, firing his guns at an unseen enemy or punching someone, usually a Native American. (And on exactly all of those covers he’s depicted as a roguishly handsome man in his thirties, when the real Billy the Kid was neither roguishly handsome nor handsomely roguish and died at the age of twenty-one.)

Issue #490 (28 Jun 1958) saw another large shift in focus. The full-colour covers were dropped, the page size changed, and the cowboy content was finally side-lined. The prairies were replaced by minefields… the new cover star was WWII hero Battler Britton.

In what was presumably an attempt to boost sales, for Sun‘s final six months it was very clearly subtitled “Battler Britton’s Own Weekly” / “Battler Britton’s Own Paper.”

The Sun finally set with issue #558 in October 1959, when it was absorbed by Lion, and if you’re wondering (as I was) why you’ve just realised that you can’t recall ever seeing a copy of Lion and Sun, this is the cover of the first combined issue:

Yes, Lion tucked away the “And Sun” part of the title out of shame or embarrassment. Rather like the way another comic, over a decade earlier, had tried to hide that its title really began with “Fitness and.”

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But that’s just the history of the comic. To get some idea of what it was actually like, we need to look at an issue, right? Although, with so many different incarnations, which era should we pick that would be a fair representative of the comic overall?

Well, no sense getting all worked up about that because I only own one issue so that narrows the field a lot. This is Sun issue #21 (New Series), dated 17 Aug 1948.

Now, I’m not the sort to be easily spooked by a simple drawing, but I’m pretty sure that the cheerful, grinning sun on the logo is planning to murder me in my sleep and make an apron out of my skin. I mean, just look at it!

Similarly anthropomorphised suns have been around for a long time, of course. Michelangelo (the artist, not the turtle) created several, such as this one specially commissioned for the cover Alphaville’s 1989 album The Breathtaking Blue:

2000AD fans might well remember the amazing Mr Sun and Mr Moon from “Strontium Dog” as marvellously depicted by the legendary Carlos Ezquerra:

And more recently the sun from Teletubbies creeped out a whole new generation…

But getting back to our issue of Sun… Here we have the entire issue laid out in Rusty’s patentless At-A-Glance format. All eight pages of it.

People don’t say “Holy Mackerel” any more. Back in the good old days before political correctness we weren’t so worried about offending religious fish.

1. Voyage to Venus
Like most of the strips in this comic, this is presented in Rupert Bear style, with captions beneath each panel explaining what’s happening. According to the catch-up box: “The Randalls, Joan, John and Dad, with their dog, Rover, have landed on the planet Venus from their space-ship. Their adventures are unexpected and exciting.” Well, I don’t know about that, but their adventures are imaginative and quite nicely drawn, if a little tame.

2. The Mystery of Westford Manor by Trevor Holloway
Episode five of a serial that I solemnly vow I will almost certainly never be bothered to read. Sorry, Mister Holloway. Well, maybe I’ll read it if I ever manage to find all the other episodes. This one is continued on page 6, and in total comes to about 2850 words.

3. Susan Starr – The Girl Reporter by Peter Hallard
The title alone is enough to firmly nail this story in the era known as “the past.” But… if one is going to go to the trouble of calling Ms Starr a “girl reporter” to make sure that no one accidentally mistakes her for a proper reporter (that is, a male one), why not go all-out and use an equally archaic term like “reporteress”?
This story, which I studiously didn’t read, is continued on page 6 and clocks in at about 1950 words, and at the end we’re very matter-of-factly told, “In next issue Susan is in another thrilling adventure.”
This page also features Editor’s Post-bag, which list excerpts from readers’ letters (“Mary Allen, 212 Saxton Road, Abingdon, says she can supply the addresses of a number of film stars to anyone sending in a stamped, addressed envelope” — this does not sound at all hugely suspect) and Fun Fair, which contains two puzzles, a trick, and a joke about a lazy building worker.

4-5. Comics
A two-page spread of comic strips, featuring The Petrified Valley (four panels), Formula ‘X’ (14 panels), Addy (four panels) and Kindheart (six panels, and the only one that’s a “proper” comic with speech bubbles and no captions). There’s also the first part of a cut-out-and-ruin-your-comic series called Transport Through the Ages. This is just the front cover, though: the caption beneath asks us to “Cut the above picture out and paste on cardboard to form the front cover of a book.” And now we know why it can be hard to find intact copies of Sun from this era.

That is one freaky-looking dog up in the corner there.

6. If the readers haven’t hacked up their copy in order to create their Transport Through the Ages book they can read the rest of the Susan Starr – The Girl Reporter and The Mystery of Westford Manor episodes, plus there’s Film Corner, which this week features profiles on actors Kathleen Ryan and Basil Radford.

7. Home in Happy Valley: “The Man Who Lost his Memory”
A 1700-word story, part of a series about life in the old west. In this one, the impoverished but kindly Morton family meet an old man who’s lost his memory. They kindly treat him with kindness and he later kindly repays their kindness when it turns out he’s actually rich as well as kind.
Tucked away in the corner of this page is Cadbury’s Quiz, a shockingly thinly-disguised ad.

8. Sherwood Outlaw — The Adventures of Robin Hood
The back page features colour again, albeit that same unsettling orange and green colouring that makes it look like someone skipped a stage at the printers (probably the same miser who figured that they could shave a few bob off the budget by not hiring a letterer). In this rather bloodthirsty-yet-bloodless episode, the verdant vigilante Robin Hood and his Merry Men have recently ambushed a wealthy merchant but it turns out to be a trap set up by one of Robin’s own men. Lots of people and horses get killed, and it ends with Robin captured and about to be cast into the deepest dungeon in Nottingham.

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Eight pages isn’t a lot for two pence back in 1948. I realise that times were tough in the post-war era, but only a couple of years later Eagle #1 gave us twenty pages for only a penny more (Sun‘s final resting place Lion also absorbed Eagle, so they’re both part of the same family tree).

I suspect that even readers with a moderate interest in old British comics won’t know much — if anything — about Sun. Its only real legacy is Battler Britton, who carried on in Lion and later showed up in Knockout and digest titles such as Air Ace Picture Library and Battle Picture Library. In 2006 the character was revived by Garth Ennis and Colin Wilson for a highly-regarded five-issue run.

But though it has mostly now faded into obscurity, and despite (or maybe because of) its chameleonic nature, Sun lasted for almost twelve years. That’s not tremendously long-lived compared to many of its contemporaries, of course, but it was the first comic launched after WWII to be successful enough to break a hundred issues, and it shone bright enough to light the way for those that were to follow.

Plus I’m sure that Sun was fiercely loved by its fans, and in the end that is what’s important: if we want to judge whether or not a comic was any good we should ask the readers at whom it was aimed, not snarky middle-aged bloggers reviewing it seven decades later.