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 …

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 …

Pocket-Money Comics: Look-In

Look-In Publisher: ITP / IPC First issue: 9 Jan 1971 Last issue: 12 March 1994 Issues: 1210 In print for EXACTLY two decades, two years, two months and two days -- and another day, and another year -- Look-In was a hybrid of magazine and comic, quite unusual for its time, though not entirely unique. …

British Comics Top-10 Issue-Count Chart – 2020 edition!

2000AD -- the legendary British Science Fiction anthology comic -- has now reached issue 2176, which means that it's time for me to fulfil the Ancient Prophecy I made in the last version of the issue-count chart and provide an updated edition. (You'll possibly have spotted that I've stopped describing these things as Longevity Charts …

Introducing… MADCAP!

If you're a collector of comics -- especially British comics of the sort that feature rather frequently on this blog -- then I'm hoping that you'll like MADCAP! MADCAP is brand-new, exciting, zany, avant-gardey and zeitgeisty, technologically advanced, quirky, gluten-free, anti-bacterial and -- best of all -- it's available right now, and all for the …

The Buster Timeline

IPC's Buster comic waved good-bye on 4 January 2000, exactly twenty years ago. To commemorate the demise of that great comic, here's a revised edition of the Buster family tree that debuted in June 2018 on this very blog. Back then, I was more interested in the family tree aspect -- showing how the comics …

The Mysteries of Wonder!

If you've spent any time peeking at or poking into the history of British comics there's a very good chance you'll have come across mentions of The Wonder, or The Funny Wonder, or The Jolly Jester, or The Halfpenny Wonder, or Jester & Wonder, or some variation on those titles. You might even have thought …