Who's Out There?

British comic weeklies are a world unto themselves, with their own styles and jargon. A few books have been written on the subject, and a handful of dedicated bloggers have endeavoured to provide interested readers with cover and story scans, as well as historical information, but overall this is largely an unmined field. I don’t know if this situation is caused by a relative lack of interest, or simply because there is just so much material to cover (the most popular of weeklies have thousands of issues). The other problem is that for reasons of mercantile interests (i.e. sales), a lot of these weeklies would be merged with other weeklies, sometimes keeping a double name and occasionally getting renamed altogether, every so often de-merging to continue under the original name to be cancelled altogether or perhaps merge again. Short of being a scholar specialising in this field, keeping track of all this is about as daunting as attempting to interpret this extremely confusing roadway sign.

I’m just a dabbler, tentatively poking a toe into these somewhat intimidating waters once in a while. So far, tentacle-wise, we’ve talked about Eagle’s Dan Dare, the forgotten British master Roy Wilson, and 2000 A.D., among other things… you can see all our British posts here.

The two most popular British comics are deemed to be The Beano and The Dandy, both weeklies for children published by D.C. Thomson (I really have to force myself to not add a p to that) starting in the 1930s. The former reached its four thousandth (!) issue in August 2019, and the latter counts as the world’s third-longest running comic (spot number on is taken by Italian Il Giornalino, and spot number two belongs to Detective Comics).

It’s pretty difficult to find high-res scans of most issues of any of the weeklies discussed in this post, so I was definitely limited by that. However, I believe I still managed to cobble together a fairly representative selection, with the help of co-admin RG who had to unwarp, re-colour and trim the heck out of some of these covers. Thanks, partner!

Lion, published by IPC, was brought to life to compete with the Eagle periodical, which was the home of ever-popular Dan Dare. For proper competition, this new weekly publication needed a science-fiction romp, too, and that’s how Captain Condor – Space Ship Pilot got started.  In 1969, the Lion gobbled up its rival Eagle (yum) and they merged into Lion & Eagle (sounds like a pub, not a publication! – RG). As for Lion and Thunder, that was the result of the periodical Thunder (also published by IPC) getting incorporated into Lion in 1972, after only 22 issues. I guess “Thunder Lion” would have put the cart before the horse, or the minor, unsuccessful periodical ahead of the major one.

The Wizard was a weekly “story paper” launched in September 1922, published by D.C. Thomson. It got as far as issue no. 1970, merging with The Rover in 1963 and continuing under Rover and Wizard for a while. The Wizard was relaunched in 1970, and endured until 1978.a while. The Wizard was relaunched in 1970, and.

Last (but not least, as they say), no post of this type would be complete without a couple of issues of the aforementioned Dandy!

Should your organism require more British weeklies, give Great News for All Readers a shot, or a-fix your peepers on Blimey! The Blog of British Comics, both excellent sources of the stuff.

∼ ds