Hatch, Match & Dispatch – March 2023

"Ne'er Cast A Clout 'til March is Out" as the old saying doesn't go. I don't know what it means, but it's probably something to do with comics, I expect. (That's my default position when I'm unsure about something: one day, I'll be right.)

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 …

Hatch, Match & Dispatch – June 2020

We're plunging headlong and blindfolded into the land of uncertainty this time around, folks, with rather too many publications that have as-yet-unverified details. (On that note, a few people have asked how one researches these old comics: where do the details come from, and what constitutes verification? Well, there's no one specific way: every collector …

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. …

Oddities: Superman’s Boots

When I was younger (which doesn't narrow things down much: until now I've always been younger) I used to draw -- or rather colour -- Superman's boots with a yellow stripe around the top, the same yellow as his belt and the blobs on his chest's S-symbol. The angle of the top of the boots …

On this Day… March 4th

From "The Curious Case of the Crime-Less Clues", Detective Comics #364, June 1967 Script: Gardner Fox Pencils: Sheldon Moldoff (signed as Bob Kane) Inks: Joe Giella Colours: uncredited Letters: Gaspar Saladino Batman and Robin investigate a series of riddle-based clues... but the Riddler has already been apprehended. It's not a great story, let's be honest, …

Hatch, Match & Dispatch – January 2020

We're into 2020 now, which means that 1940 was a round number of years ago. This in turn means that this year we'll be acknowledging the anniversaries of the deaths of a lot of British comics thanks to the paper shortages of World War II. None for January, thankfully, but they're coming (spoiler: one of …

The Playhour Timeline

Update 20210824: I recently discovered that, contrary to my long-held belief that there was no merger of the Playhour and Jack and Jill comics, there was a merger of the Playhour and Jack and Jill comics when the former absorbed the latter. I fumbled across this juicy info-nugget when I was looking for confirmation about …

Super DC Bumper Book

Super DC was a forty-page monthly comic published by Top Sellers (AKA Thorpe & Porter) in the UK from June 1969 to July 1970. It reprinted American DC Comics strips alongside home-grown text features, puzzles, letters pages, etc. The strips were in black-and-white, culled from titles such as Action Comics, Detective Comics, Superboy, Superman's Pal …