Comic Cuts - 10 May 2019

After a restful bank holiday weekend, I've spent most of the week continuing to make a bigger mess of the living room in an effort to tidy up the mess that was there previously. I have a small set of hobbies that seem to generate paperwork: research notes; interview notes; jottings made during telephone conversations; photocopies of artwork; photocopies of reference material; and letters. Hundreds of letters. That's how we used to communicate before e-mail.

If I can get all the paperwork in one place, I might eventually have a chance to sort it out. That was one task – to break the paperwork down into various piles relating to comics, to old storypapers, to old paperback, to various authors, to various projects I've been involved in over the years and to various projects I'd like to eventually get to.

Along the way I'm stumbling across a lot of miscellaneous stuff that I've not seen for years, some of which I'm going to share with you.

I've mentioned in the past a few people who were influential in getting me started in the various strands of research that I've done over the years. Bill Lofts was mentioned quite heavily in the introductions to the Forgotten Authors books as it was he who taught me where to look for official information, from birth certificates to company records. Mike Ashley and Phil Harbottle are ultimately responsible for my interest in Fifties SF magazines and paperbacks; while Denis Gifford provided a place for me to publish my earliest efforts writing about British comics.

Denis published the A.C.E. Newsletter, A.C.E. being the Association of Comics Enthusiasts, which I first stumbled across in the early 1980s. I was working at a local hospital and travelling up to London regularly, every Friday on my day off, to visit the British Library. One of the things I was tasked with was looking through loads of Gerald Swan papers in search of stories by John Russell Fearn – Phil Harbottle's favourite author and, through reading Vargo Statten novels, one of the writers who inspired an interest in SF paperbacks that led to me co-authoring two books with Phil.

The research led to my first appearance in print in the pages of Denis' A.C.E. Newsletter in 1982, an article by Phil in part based on the digging I had been doing. I followed up with a couple of articles of my own in 1983.

Denis offered to run an advert in exchange for writing and, as I had recently become interested in researching old War, Battle and Air Ace pocket libraries, I wrote a little note asking if anyone else was interested. I believe this was around February 1985 and someone phoned up while I was on holiday (I went cycling in Holland with a friend who, a few days in, went down with appendicitis...  but that's another story for another day).

I replied when we got back to England and that was how I met John Allen-Clark, who became a dear and close friend. He had grown up reading Eagle and Knockout and had a fairly comprehensive collection, far greater than mine. When I visited him in Maldon I'd spend hours jotting down notes and we'd chat about comics and his other interests, chiefly Biggles although he was also into records and had a huge collection of old singles. John worked for an insurance company, which brought him into contact with hundreds of people.

His friendly demeanour meant that he'd soon be discussing his interests with clients and occasionally that led to him stumbling upon a nice cache of old comics, books or records. He'd buy up what he could and, smartly, got rid of anything that wasn't his core interest. I say smartly because it's not getting rid of anything that has meant I have a scattered collection not much of which is complete. He used the money from auctioning off what he didn't want to get what he did want. Smart man.

The clipping to the right shows John in 1991 and comes from the local Yellow Advertiser. He did eventually own a complete run of Eagle and was responsible for me getting hold of the first seven years or so of Eagles that I still own. Sadly, John suffered from Parkinson's and died on 16 May 2015. Some of you may remember him from Westminster Comic Marts or Eagle Days, so I hope you'll raise a glass in his memory this coming Thursday.

It was John's collection that provided a lot of details for my early indexes, those published back in 1992-97, and he was also very involved in the research for The Comic Book Price Guide for Great Britain that first appeared in 1989.

How I became involved was basically down to lists. I was already becoming known for lists. I'd written a number of publisher indexes covering old 1950s paperback publishers, the first appearing in 1984, and most of my articles were often accompanied by stripographies. I knew Price Guide co-editor Lance Rickman from ACE Comics in Colchester and had written for After Image, which was a glossy fanzine produced by the staff.

But another influence on my compiling lists of comics was a guy called Gary Armitage. Again, he was a contact I made through Denis Gifford's A.C.E. Newsletter. Gary wrote to me in around 1987 and with one of his letters (perhaps the first?) he sent me a list of stories featuring Lion's memorable super-villain, The Spider. When I replied, I sent Gary a list of stories featuring my favourite character, The Steel Claw, from my boyhood favourite comic, Valiant. And that's how those sprawling indexes published in the early Nineties began. The layout that I have used in the new run of indexes published by Bear Alley Books was developed through correspondence with Gary. He compiled the first version of a Lion index that I was later able to greatly expand upon. It was for Gary that I put together the first version of a Valiant index, maybe six years before Valiant: The Complete Index appeared in 1994. (Not my title. The new version, which I hope to get back to at some point, will be far more complete!)

Today's random scans are more odds and ends from my scrapbook of newspaper clippings. This leads off with a 1997 interview with Arthur C. Clarke, a couple of articles about one-time Railway Children. I love that film! It still makes me weepy... and I'm not the only one. I managed to watch Avengers: Endgame without shedding a tear. The last film that had me tearing up was Anvil: The Story of Anvil. I kid you not. It's an emotional roller-coaster. To wrap things up, there's a 1998 article about the all-time most watched shows on TV

All the text should be readable if you click on the pick and either enlarge it or save it to your desktop and then enlarge it.