One of my favorite web-sites is Bear Alley, the blog of Steve Holland, editor of some great recent books on British Comics.  Steve's site is filled with information and illustrations and news on the British Comics scene past and present.

Starting today its even better.   Steve has started to reprint, two episodes at a time, a comic strip I had been searching out for many years - Eagles Over the Western Front.  The strip ran between 1971 and 1973 and vied with The Trigan Empire as my favorite part of the educational comic/magazine Look and Learn.   Indeed when the strip ended I stopped buying Look and Learn.   Two pages of Trigan Empire not being enough to overcome the temptation of the NME and other Rock music papers at the time.

Printed in black and white, 'Eagles', told the story of the Royal Flying Corps, and in my, often quite faulty memory, was grittier and more realistic than war stories in Victor or other british comics.  Characters lived and died and because of the non-combat sequences where we got to know them, were more than simply soldier or airman number one, so their deaths meant that much more.  It had quite an impact on me at the time and I had been trying to find out more about the strip and remember exactly when it had been published.  A task made more difficult by the fact that I had forgotten the damn title. 

Art is by Bill Lacey, whose work you will have seen if you bought the recent Rick Random reprint book, which features his artwork on the first adventure of the great space detective.  This is a real treat and not one to be missed. 

Link below.

bearalley.blogspot.com/

With the bad news about DFC, nice to have something positive to report about British comics

British cartoonist Paul Grist, responsible for the excellent british superhero comic Jack Staff - imagine Albion with some affection for the source material and bit more originality,  is publishing his latest creation one page at a time on his Paul Grist's Big Cosmic Comic Blog.

http://bigcosmiccomic.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2009-02-05T15%3A04%3A00-08%3A00&max-results=7



Well worth taking time to look at.  Pages seem to go up about one per week




And while you're at it, you could do a lot worse than picking up some of his Kane collections.  An excellent crime comic.

The weekly British comic, the DFC, launched less than a year ago is facing closure by the end of the month.  In some ways it was a throwback to the british comics of old, mixing humour with adventure strips including the first comic-strip scripted by Philip Pullman.  In other ways it was something very new.  Sold by subscription-only, it managed to avoid some of the costs of usual comic launches but at the cost of depending on word of mouth to gain new readers and featured material that was reminiscent of both Manga and european style comics often mixing the art styles with more traditional British comic scripts.

If I have one monor complaint, I dod have to say that it was published in a colour register that could, at times, burn the back of your eyes out, resulting in some strips (the Etherington Brothers' "Monkey Nuts" springs to mind) being almost painful to read.  Or perhaps I'm just getting old and am more comfortable with art that is more subtle and european in style.  I've included a panel from Mezolith by Adam Brockbank in the post  as a wee example.




Mezolith Written by Ben Haggarty and illustrated by Adam Brockbank.


DFC began with much fanfare and a preview was given away with the Saturday Guardian the week before it was first published.  The owners are looking for a buyer, but with the final issue scheduled for the end of March there isn't much time for anyone to appear. 

It'll be missed in our house, as it was something that my daughter (now eleven) and I read together.   She recently told me that DFC was much better than the Beano, except when the Beano featured Derek the Sheep.  


DFC gave an outlet for for some very talened British comics writers and artists, producing material that looked different to anything else out there at the moment.  A noble experiment and one I hope can continue at some stage in the future.

It might be worth keeping an eye on the web page for back issues, I'm sure there will be some sort of sale.


http://www.thedfc.co.uk/

I'm probably too late in posting this, but I'd suggest that anyone with any interest in British humour comics should try to seek out the issue of the Beano for the week ending 12th July, issue number 3440. In addition to the usual Dennis the Menace and Bash Street Kids strips there is a three page adaptation of Edward Lear's famous nonsense poem, The Owl and the Pussycat. Art, some additional dialogue and a biographical sketch of Mr Lear supplied by the superb Hunt Emerson.

I always tended to think of Emerson as the British 'Underground' Cartoonist of my youth. His Calculus the Cat strips for Knockabout and the full page strips that appear to this day in the Fortean Times have always made me think of him as someone who worked for grown-up comic fans. But his surreal style, which must have been influenced by the masters of British humour comics Leo Baxendale and Ken Reid, suits this material down to the ground. Lew Stringer, has a scan of the first page of the adaptation on his Blog so you can see for yourself just how good it looks.

http://lewstringer.blogspot.com/2008/07/edward-lear-in-beano.html

This seems to be a bit of a departure for the Beano, but in the same post Lew reports that another Emerson poetry adaptation has been completed for inclusion in a later issue. This time "You Are Old, Father William" by Lewis Carroll. I'll be watching out for that.


In the same vein, DC Thompson's Classics From the Comics magazine (at newsagents everywhere right now), celebrates the 70th anniversary of the Beano by abandoning its usual format of reprinting a selection of strips from right across the range of humour comics published over the years by the company and concentrating this month's issue on strips from the Beano. Nice to see that they are identifying the year each strip comes from as well, which makes it easier to figure out who the artist is.

A good read as usual, but I'm particularly delighted to see the first ever Bash Street Kids strip from 1954, produced by Leo Baxendale under the title "When the Bell Rings" reprinted. 

Reading Steve Holland’s excellent, Bear Alley blog this morning I was delighted to see that Carlton books’ reprints of British Pocket Libraries edit by Steve are moving beyond war Stories.

With a number of books reprinting old issues of War and Battle Picture Library already out or planned, this autumn sees the publication of High Noon, a collection from Cowboy Picture Library and (cheers) Rick Random – Space Detective.

HIGH NOON

I’m not a huge fan of Westerns, but any book reprinting stories drawn by Jesus Belasco, best known for The Steel Claw, is all right by me. The book also has strips by Ron Embelton’s younger brother Gerry and Alberto Breccia.

I’ve seen some of Embelton’s work recently, in the 80’s version of the Eagle where he drew Dan Dare for a while, but by all accounts his B&W art is far superior and well worth a look.

But it is the work of Alberto Breccia, that is really exciting me about this book. I had never heard of him, or rather his name had not stuck with me, but a quick ‘Google’ and I can hardly wait to see these strips. He was known in Europe as ‘the Master of Black and White” and what I have seen of his work is stylish and atmospheric. I’m almost certain that some of his work was reprinted in early issues of Heavy Metal but I have not been able to confirm that just yet, but this book looks well worth looking out for.

His son, Enrique, was the artist on Vertigo’s Lovecraft Graphic Novel and the recent Swamp Thing series.

RICK RANDOM

Twelve stories (or ten – if you believe the Amazon description) by the definitive ‘Space Artist’ of British comics, Ron Turner, with four of them written by Harry Harrison.

Turner worked in British comics for almost 40 years. From the ‘Atomic Mole’ strips he produced for ‘Big’, which I have never seen, through Thunderbirds and the Daleks for TV21 and finally producing one painted Dalek strip for Dr Who Monthly in the nineties. Along the way he worked on war and humour strips and even drew a few of the early Judge Dredd stories. But his clean-style and imagination was more suited to ‘retro’ science fiction. In was the future of the fifties that he excelled at and this I will be looking forward to Oct this year to finally get to read some of these stories. 

Now if we could just have a collection of the Robot Archie stories from Lion Picture LIbrary.....