Most Popular Posts of 2020!

Looking back on Rusty Staples' most popular posts of 2020!

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 …

Pocket-Money Comics: Marilyn

Marilyn was a comic aimed at young women that ran for over ten years and presented its readers with comic-strips, prose fiction and articles all based around love and romance. The title, presumably, was chosen to imply an association with Marilyn Monroe: the comic was launched in 1955 shortly after Ms Monroe became massively famous. …

Pocket-Money Comics: The Complete Judge Dredd

As mentioned in this month's Hatch, Match & Dispatch feature, The Complete Judge Dredd title came to an end twenty-five years ago. Launched in February 1992, it boasted the clever tagline of "The Law in Order" and ran for forty-two monthly black-and-white issues, which isn't a bad old run for a comic that -- aside …

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 …

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: …

Pocket-Money Comics: Star Wars Weekly

More Star Wars = Better. That was the simple formula by which we Star Wars fans lived back in the 1970s, hence our excitement when we learned that Marvel UK would be releasing a weekly Star Wars comic. But as it turned out, we didn't even have to wait until Star Wars Weekly had finished …

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. …

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 …