Alias Colonel Blood part 1

I'm particularly pleased to offer Bear Alley readers a treat. I have managed to locate a cache of episodes of the newspaper strip featuring lady detective Lesley Shane, syndicated back in the early- to mid-1950s, at least 1952-56 and possibly later.

The quality of the original scans is poor and I've done my best to make them readable. The original newspaper strips have never been reprinted, although some stories were rejigged and revised to appear in Super Detective Library in 1953-57. The strips were also reprinted in an Australian comic book which ran for at lest 5 issues in around 1955.

Artist Oliver Passingham went on to draw other newspaper strips before spending thirty years working for D. C. Thomson before retiring in the early 1990s. He spent the next decade painting watercolours, dying in 2003, aged 78.

(* © Mercury Features.)