Comic Cuts - 19 June 2020

Computer woes, a short history of my thirty years trying to put together a Who's Who of British Comics, and why the letter 'S' is so important to the upcoming Longbow books.

Here are the two pages from 1992 that were written for inclusion in The Comic Book Price Guide For Great Britain. Plans were afoot to greatly expand the fourth (1992/93) edition but even with 600 pages compared to the previous edition's 386, there was enough room to include artist bios.

The Blasco piece was recycled from an article written for a fanzine follow-up to to my Mike Western Story (1990) while the other entries were written especially. I think this illustrates one of the problems of doing a Who's Who—a single title like Commando has 140 artists and 180 writers, plus 100 artists who painted covers (although there will be some overlap with artists of internal pages), but that's probably 380 entries required for that title alone. There's almost no overlap with any pre-war titles and most humour titles, and little overlap with Eagle or 2000AD. You can begin to see why I believe a comprehensive record of the creators of British comics and story papers is a multi-volume project.