Comic Scene #7 and #8 (October and November 2019)

I've rather fallen behind with Comic Scene (blame it on desperately trying to keep up with a regular Ebay posting schedule), which is a shame because it has been a consistently entertaining read—and lord knows we need some entertainment these days.

I'm catching up with the latest two issues here, which is quite handy as there are quite a few features that continue from one issue to the next in Comic Scene and I now have the opportunity of reading the conclusion of the Milford Green comic strip, a Victorian era thriller in which an alien, pursued by enemies, crashlands on Earth and hands over a mysterious object to inventor Alfie Fairfield, who consults his neighbour, author H. G. Wells over what to do.

Also concluding is 18th century highwayman adventure Flintlock, although its writer, Steve Tanner, has promised that the story will continue in the pages of Comic Scene in the future.

Grouping these two issues together has an unexpected consequence of pitching Batman against The Joker. Issue 7 (October 2019) has articles by Richard Bruton on a lighthearted run of Detective Comics created by Mike W. Barr & Alan Davies in the 1980s and by Peter Gouldson on the malevolent Batman of Frank Miller's Dark Knight books.

British comics are covered in three features: Philip Vaughan concludes his review of the "new" Eagle, Lew Stringer looks back at Pow!, and Irmantas Povilaika celebrates Ken Reid's monstrously fun 'Martha's Monster Make-up'.

Ken Reid also features in issue 8 (November 2019) with a glance back at the football strips he did for Scorcher—the little known 'Sub', 'Football Forum' and 'Manager Matt'. The latter was still running when Scorcher absorbed Score, but Reid's work continued unabated with Matt succeeded by 'Hugh Fowler'. You'll have to wait for part two to learn what happened after that.

On the Batman/Joker front, we have Joel Meadow's preview of The Joker movie, Richard Bruton on Batman Adventures, the spin-off from the Batman Animated series, and Martin Dallard taking on Tim Burton's 1989 Batman movie.

Of this month's other features, Lew Stringer flies through 33 years of the history of TV Comic in two pages while Stephen Jewell has five pages to study Marvel #1000, admittedly a landmark 96-page issue involving 80 creative teams. It's a packed issue, but in this (suit)case it's like discovering your kid has packed five bath towels and only one pair of pants for his holiday.


The issue concludes with an extract from Steve MacManus's The SheerGlam Conspiracy (reviewed here) and both issues have the usual excellent reviews section, covering a wide range of mostly independent titles. Two pages are now dedicated to European comics.

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