Rusty Staples: Year Three

April 15th is the Feast of St. Aples, the patron saint of writing about comics, which is why I chose this date -- exactly three years ago -- to launch my comics blog, which was of course named after St. Aples himself. Happy Birthday to us! Hooray!

Rusty’s Reviews Round-Up

To save you literally whiles of searching through this blog, here are all of Rusty's reviews in one place! Updated: 3 July 2021 Comics: The Bank Street Book of Science Fiction -- 7 Feb 2020 Batman Monthly -- 26 Jun 2020 Battle Picture Weekly -- 2 Jun 2019 Bea -- 15 Aug 2017 Boy's Cinema …

Support the Cartoon Museum, London

The excellent Cartoon Museum in London has a huge collection of rare and vintage comics and cartoons, and regularly features exhibitions on specific themes, artists or publications. Not counting visits to family members, for me it's the #1 reason I'm itching to go back to London. The museum moved to a new, larger premises last …

Journey Planet: Battle Picture Weekly

Forty-five years ago the war comic Battle Picture Weekly crashed down into the British comics scene with such an impact that the aftershocks are still being felt today. Now, in a special double-sized issue, the award-winning fanzine Journey Planet takes a look back at this fan-favourite -- and sometimes controversial -- comic, and presents all-new …

Rusty Staples: Year Two

Blimey, it hardly seems like a year since we last looked back at the first year of Rusty Staples, and yet it is. Year Two of Rusty's life started slowly, with only one post per month in April, May and June of 2019, and then nothing at all until October. This was thanks to work …

The Eagle Timeline

The Eagle Family Tree was one of the first major posts on this blog, back in May 2018, but it's always bothered me a little that I did it the lazy way, showing only the hierarchical relationships between the comics and not a proper time-line. Plus, unlike some of the later timelines on this blog …

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 …

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 …

Most Popular Posts of 2019!

I'm happy to announce that Rusty Staples' sophomore year ("sophomore" is American high-school slang for "second") was even more successful than its first, even despite the four-month drought in the summer when I was too busy to post anything (due to a heavy workload, a week's holiday in London, the World Science Fiction Convention in …

Comics That Never Were #2

Launched in 1975, the hard-hitting all-war comic Battle Picture Weekly was a major hit for IPC/Fleetway. It was created in response to rival publisher DC Thomson's successful Warlord, and when word came that DC Thomson was preparing a semi-spin-off all-action comic with focus on more than just war stories, IPC figured they should do the …