Hatch, Match & Dispatch – Mar 2021

It's the last week of February, so that means it's time to look at the Important British Comics Anniversaries for March...

Retro Interview: Evan Skolnick, 1995

As long-time readers of this blog might be aware, one of my all-time favourite superhero comics is the first volume of Marvel's New Warriors (Jul 1990 to Sep 1996)... Art by Mark Bagley and Jackson Guice It's a comic that took a bunch of Marvel's discarded characters -- Nova, Firestar, Speedball, Marvel Boy and Namorita …

Hatch, Match & Dispatch – Nov 2020

Here we are again with a super-streamlined version of Hatch, Match and Dispatch, readers! Just pure data, almost no filler! (See also Oct 2019, Nov 2019, Dec 2019, Jan 2020, Feb 2020, Mar 2020, Apr 2020, May 2020, Jun 2020, Jul 2020, Aug 2020, Sep 2020 and Oct 2020.) Update 20201027: The great Rob Kirby …

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 …

Enfari’s Syndrome: Captain Britain

In 1976 an Irish kid living in the suburbs of Dublin was taking a bit of risk buying a comic called Captain Britain. Especially a kid like me: I was very small for my age, couldn't fight, and lacked the physical prowess to out-run a tree... and I possessed a self-defeating tendency to smart-mouth the …

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. …

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 …

In-Shallow Profile: Foom #8

My first proper taste of comic-book fandom -- other than the atrocious comics I drew for myself -- came from Marvel with the December 1974 issue of their in-house fanzine Foom. Foom is an acronym for "Friends of Ol' Marvel" because, well, of course it is. Stan Lee, right? It was a quarterly publication that …

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 …