Comic Cuts: British Comics' Circulations Charts

Circulation figures for the first six months of 2008 have just been released by ABC, so here's our bi-annual round-up. (See here for the March 2008 round-up.)

PRE-SCHOOL MAGAZINES

The latest circulation figures show what is becoming a predictable steadily declining set of figures with only one or two launches. Why should this be?

I believe it's down to the fact that most comics/pre-school magazines are based on licensed material. The initial hype surrounding a new series will give a new title a solid launch—In the Night Garden being a prime example from 2007. Sales will, naturally, decline once the first set of free gifts has run out but remain bolstered by continual appearances on television over the next couple of years.

However, the pre-school market has a very narrow age range and young children will grow out of watching a show fairly quickly, starting a decline in sales which is never bolstered completely by the arrival of new readers. New shows take over the most popular viewing slots, relegating a show to a less popular time slot, losing viewers in the process, especially once there are no new episodes to watch.

All of this means that a popular magazine will have a high sale for a couple of years followed by a sharp fall from grace. A good example of this is Teletubbies which, in 2002, was selling over 100,000 copies per issue but has since declined to its current figure of just over 30,000. A similar pattern can be seen in the sales of Tweenies, Balamory and the now-defunct Fimbles, all CBeebies regulars. Even the CBeebies anthology magazines, Toybox and CBeebies Weekly, which feature many of the same characters, are showing signs of decline.

For the six months covered, Teletubbies was the biggest loser, down 11,300 sales per issue, followed by Toybox (down 9,300), Balamory (down 7,700), Noddy Magazine (down 7,600), In the Night Garden (down 6,700, although this is a settle down figure following its launch) and Fun to Learn—Favourites (down 5,300).

The year-on-year (y/y) figures show an even sharper decline for some magazines: y/y, Teletubbies is down 23,500 sales per issue (42.7%), Toybox is down 19, 100 sales per issue (20.7%), Charlie & Lola down 16,400 (24.2%), Balamory down 14,900 (34.1%), Bob the Builder down 13,500 (19.8%), Noddy Magazine down 9,600 (29.8%), Disney and Me down 8,400 (15.3%), Tweenies down 8,200 (21.2%) and CBeebies Weekly down 8,200 (11.8%).

The only magazine that seems to be bucking the trend is Redan's Fun to Learn—Friends, which has added 11,300 sales y/y (up 15%), perhaps at the expense of its companion Fun to Learn—Favourites which has lost 16,600 sales in the same period (down 24.6%).

Cancelled titles in the last six months include Fi-Fi Magazine, Learn with Bob the Builder, Fimbles Magazine, Me Too and Underground Ernie, all published by BBC Worldwide. In addition, BBC Worldwide folded Disney Witch Magazine (aimed at a slightly older age range) but noted only in their annual review for 2007-08 that "Six small children’s titles were closed as part of the continuous review of the overall portfolio."


EVERYTHING ELSE

The big surprise to most people will be the sharp fall in sales of Doctor Who Adventures from BBC Worldwide which had a steady sale of around 155,000 in 2007 but shed over a third of its readership in the first half of 2008—during which period the BBC were broadcasting the fourth season of the show. Sales fell by 61,000 per issue (down nearly 40%), the fall almost certainly caused by the change in schedule from fortnightly to weekly in January 2008, three months ahead of the new series launch. It would be interesting to know what was happening in the same period with Panini's Dr Who Magazine but its circulation isn't audited by ABC.

The Simpsons Comics from Titan shed 21,000 readers although this is only a 7,700 (6.4%) drop y/y. Simpsons Comics Presents also fell by 15,400, a fall of 5,400 (6.8%) y/y. Both titles showed particularly good second half sales for 2007 which is why the drop appears so dramatic. Simpson's Treasure Trove was cancelled during this period.

Beano took a substantial loss of 12,500 (16.8%) and Dandy took a similar percentage loss (16.4%) but, starting from a far lower figure this meant a circulation drop of only 4,700 copies per issue. BeanoMax held fairly steady, down only 6%. Another popular D. C. Thomson title, Bratz, shed 11,000 copies per issues, perhaps indicating that the Bratz craze is at an end.

Other falling circulations were recorded for Panini's Scooby Doo (7,600) and Spectacular Spiderman (5,600), and Titan's Spongebob Squarepants (5,000) and Transformers (6,400).

The biggest rise in sales was for BBC Worldwide's Go Girl which increased its sales by nearly 5,000 copies per issue, a 15,500 increase y/y.

Disney High School Musical debuted from Panini UK in September 2007 at the same time the second HSM movie was released. One would expect the title to continue to do well in the second half of 2008 with the release of the third movie.

The Chart

Please note that the chart only covers titles where circulation figures are available and there are probably twice as many comics and children's magazines available on the newsagents shelves.

(* High School Musical The Official Magazine © Panini UK; In the Night Garden and Doctor Who Adventures © BBC Worldwide.)

The Best of Boyfriend

Published by Prion Books on 1 September 2008. A collection along the lines of the Jackie books that Carlton have done in the past, including a mixture of strips, pop pin-ups, features, horoscopes and problems pages. I'm pleased to say that I managed to get a couple of full-length stories into this one: a 9-episode strip and the 9-part serial 'Janie and the Lovesick Ghosts' which is a lot of fun. The serial was so popular that it had two sequels ('The Ghosts and Lovesick Janie' and 'Janie and the Star-Struck Ghosts').

Order your copy via Amazon.co.uk.

Contents

Includes four complete comic strips...

The Model Bride Art: Gwen Tourret
The Truth About Lorna Baron! (9-episode serial) Art: Julio Bosch
Love! Love! Love! Art: J. Ariza
Mistaken Heart Art: J. Nabau

... one complete serial story...

Janie and the Lovesick Ghosts (9-episode serial) illustrated by Shirley Tourett

... and dozens of features, pin-ups, horoscopes, problem pages and fashion advice.

Synopsis

Boyfriend, a new kind of girls' paper, was launched in the spring of 1959. It was the first girls' magazine to truly put music first. Each week there would be a new 'Boyfriend' - Russ Conway, Johnny Mathis, Lonnie Donegan - introducing his life story and, to prove that he had a softer side, his favourite romantic story. You could also meet 'The Girl Behind the Boy'. Whether this was so you could emulate her to get your own pop-star boyfriend or a case of "know your enemy" so you could steal her boyfriend, I don't know. Away from the music, Rachel Lindsay handed out fashion tips on everything from clothing to hairstyles and twins Johnny and Jeannie Talbot offered weekly advice on the Boyfriend problems page. Boyfriend really came into its own when the sixties began to swing. The magazine gave itself over to modern pop: as early as February 1963, before their first album was out, Boyfriend was describing The Beatles as "even more modern than modern." Cliff Richard was a favourite of the magazine and was given his own column to introduce other stars of the pop scene...although it's unlikely that Cliff ever got any closer to the column than cashing the pay cheque he earned from the magazine for using his name.

Seven years after its birth, Boyfriend sank beneath a swelling tide of pop magazines and girls all over the country mourned its passing. The Best of Boyfriend celebrates the life of an iconic sixties publication with a welter of material that represent some of the best pate.

Publicity

full bleed, front & back covers

Reviews

"Another fantastic volume from Prion—this time Boyfriend, which concentrated heavily on the current pop scene but also had some fascinating articles on fashion and all the other things that concerned youngsters at the time—serialised picture stories were also a strong feature, and two of them are reprinted throughout the pages of this most wonderful book. An absolute gem!"—Paul Edmund Norman, Gateway Monthly.

Aaaagh!

This is what's happening right now.

Comic Cuts

I usually start these columns with the stuff I've been working on and then get onto something more interesting but I just can't resist this... the Commando Ammo Box! from Carlton. I've only just found out about it myself. It's a box (metal? plastic? I don't know) containing the first three Commando reprints that Carlton produced along with a special reprinting of the very first issue, 'Walk—or Die!'. According to Carlton, "The superb 'Ammo Box' presentation case is equipped with a robust carrying handle and, just like a real ammo box, is tough enough to protect its volatile contents. Each of these highly collectible, limited edition packs comes complete with a numbered certificate of authentication."

The only other thing I know is that the box is a strictly limited edition of 1,000.

OK, a quick round-up of personal news. We're expecting the builders back in tomorrow so correspondence and contact might be a bit patchy over the next few days. I've material queued up for Bear Alley so you shouldn't notice much difference... but behind the scenes there will be bits of the house being ripped apart, including the roof. Not quite over my head but certainly a bit of roof over the porch about five yards from where I usually sit. Chances are I shall be banished to somewhere else in the house with a laptop and it's possible we may lose our phone and internet access for a bit. I hope not. I hate being cut off from the world and, being one of the tiny minority who doesn't own a mobile phone, I rely on the land line and e-mail for communication.

Geoff West tells me that the bulk of the print run for Frank Bellamy's King Arthur should be arriving the first week of October. Some copies will be flown in so we will have copies for the ABC Show on September 21. Same applies to The Art of the Trigan Empire which is being printed at the same time. The latter is a 76-page catalogue of artwork from the famous strip that is being sold by Geoff from the Look and Learn archives. Up for grabs are 110 pages of art from all eras of the strip, including artwork by Don Lawrence, Ron Embleton, Oliver Frey and Gerry Wood, plus the recently discovered contributions by Manuel Quesada.

I've just finished typing up some captions that completes the text for Storm—The Collection vol. 9, to be published shortly by Don Lawrence Collection over in Holland. This is for the English language edition, I should add. The original collection came out in Dutch in 2003. The Storm books are still relatively unknown over here as until DLC began publishing Storm—The Collection series in 2004, only six albums (1, 2, 10, 11, 13 and 15) had seen English language editions: BAPC published one volume in 1982, Titan published two (1987, 1989), and Strip (in the UK) and Heavy Metal (in the USA) also published a pair each.

The series deserves to be better known, especially the sequence of stories that begins with Storm The Collection Vol. 5 and runs through the remainder of the series, which features some of the best artwork Don Lawrence ever produced.

Talking of Don, my next task is to type up the text for the stories for the very first Trigan Empire Collection volume. It's great to revisit those early stories. I read a lot of the Trigan Empire stories in Look and Learn but I think it must have been the 1978 Hamlyn book, The Trigan Empire, where I read the original story for the first time. Or maybe the earlier Look and Learn Book of the Trigan Empire. I didn't realise until much later that both those volumes were abridged from the original appearance of the strip in Ranger. As far as I'm aware, this will be the first time those early stories will be printed as they originally appeared.

The latest issue of Crikey! (#6) landed on the doormat on Friday and I've only just gotten around to looking at it. The new issue—a D. C. Thomson special—continues to see the magazine improve after a shaky start. The articles are light and frothy and I still think there is room for a second magazine dedicated to British comics where longer articles could appear but until that happens, Crikey! fills a much needed gap. This issue pays flying visits to Beano, Dandy, Sparky, Spellbound, Victor, Hotspur and Warlord and focuses briefly on a couple of long-time Thomson artists, Dudley D. Watkins and George Martin and the Dandy wonder dog, Black Bob. It's great to see these old British comics celebrated.

If any of these papers rings a bell, give Crikey! a try. You can find subscription details and more information at the Crikey! website.

Compiling the little bestsellers chart yesterday, I was intrigued to see how my own volumes are doing. Oddly, Let 'em Have It (not due out until 6 October) is outselling Against All Odds (out now). It's even outselling the High Noon and Rick Random, Space Detective volumes due out on the same day which is a definite surprise as I have high hopes for both those volumes. My last Battle Picture Library volume, Death or Glory, is currently #7 in Amazon's Second World War chart, with the War Picture Library volume Unleash Hell at #12. Let 'em Have It is at #28 and Against All Odds is nestling further down the list at #39—I can only guess that the "temporarily out of stock" notice is putting people off ordering it.

I shall be mercilessly plugging all these books over the coming weeks but I'll try not to let it take over Bear Alley completely. There is other stuff happening...

For instance, the Daily Mirror have revived Garth... which came as a surprise to everyone as there was no publicity for the relaunch at all. Seems the strip starting appearing last week on their website, written and drawn by Huw-J Davies, who, in 2001, helped design and was (is?) licensing manager for The Turds (hence the note on his MySpace page "it's not just about Turds anymore" but presumably not the "20 years hands on experience with high profile projects" mentioned at his Hayena Studio's (sic) website).

While it's not the Garth of old, I'm not a complete Luddite so I'll give it a few more pages for the story to get going. Apparently the initial storyline, 'The Gold of Ragnarock' (hopefully not a misspelling of Ragnarok), is intended to run to 64 pages.

(* Garth © MGN Ltd.; Storm © Martin Lodewijk/Lisbeth Lawrence/Don Lawrence Collection; Commando © D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd.)

Comic Cuts: Bestselling British collections

Back on July 14th I posted a Top 20 for the best-selling British graphic novels (i.e. collections of stories of UK origin rather than British editions of American GNs). So, one month later, here's the chart positions as of August 16th.

1. Charley's War: 2 June-1 August 1916. Titan (ISBN 978-1840236279), 26 Nov 2004.
2. Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot. Jonathan Cape (ISBN 978-0224080767), 5 Apr 2007.
3. Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, ed. Paul Gravett. Robinson (ISBN 978-1845297107), 26 Jun 2008.
4. Charley's War: 1 August-17 October 1916. Titan (ISBN 978-1840239294), 21 Oct 2005.
5. Commando: True Brit. The toughest 12 Commando comic books ever!. Carlton Books (ISBN 978-1844421213), 16 Oct 2006.
6. Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 03. Rebellion/2000AD (ISBN 1904265871), Apr 2006.
7. The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks. Rebellion/2000AD (ISBN 190426588X), May 2006.
8. Commando: The Dirty Dozen. The best 12 Commando comic books ever!. Carlton Books (ISBN 978-1844423071), 7 Nov 2005.
9. Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 01. Rebellion/2000AD (ISBN 1904265790), Dec 2005.
10. Rogue Trooper: The Future of War. Rebellion/2000AD (ISBN 978-1905437399), 14 Jun 2007)

Only 10 of the top 100 at Amazon relate to British comics so it's a bit of a short list this time round. However, I should add that Amazon update their charts hourly so there can be dramatic changes over the course of a day.

Love on Ward B

Published by Prion Books on 1 September 2008. Follow-up to the Valentine Picture Library volume published by Prion in February 2008. Not my usual thing, I'll admit, but a fun volume featuring the adventures of nurse Sally Brown who starred in sixty or so adventures published in the Hospital Nurse Romance Library in 1964-66.

Order your copy from Amazon.co.uk.

Contents

Naughty Nurse (HNPL 10, Jun 1964)
First Love (HNPL 14, Aug 1964)
Man Crazy (HNPL 15, Sep 1964)
Cure for Diane (HNPL 23, Jan 1965)
Live and Love (HNPL 31, May 1965)
Blues for a Beat Boy (HNPL 32, May 1965)

Here's where I show my ignorance of romance comics: I don't have a clue who wrote or drew these. They were original British strips but drawn by anonymous Spanish artists.

Synopsis

Blonde and impossibly beautiful, Sally Brown is a probationary nurse at General Hospital and the star of Hospital Nurse Picture Library. With her friend and colleague Maureen Evans she patrols the kind of wards that would have been familiar to her readers thanks to television. Emergency Ward 10 had been running since 1957 so everyone knew that hospitals were buildings full of dishy doctors and patients in need of a little tender loving care. The Hospital Nurse series was first launched in 1963 and for years thereafter, young girls, young women and not-so-young women invested a shilling each month to keep up with the romantic adventures of young Sally Brown. In the 1960s, nursing was second only to being an air hostess when it came to glamorous occupations for girls. Tales like "First Love", "Live and Love", "Kiss and Remember" and "Fooling With Love" tap into the obvious elements of love and romance - but titles like "Man Crazy" and "Naughty Nurse" hint that there is more fun to be had in these picture stories than between the prim covers of a Mills and Boon novel.If you think hospitals are just sterile wards full of sick people, think again.

Publicity

full bleed, front & back covers

Reviews

"Sally Brown is a probationary nurse who manages to fall in love with various male patients and solve everyone's problems, including those of the ward sister, who gave up the man she loved for the sake of her very best friend who subsequently died in childbirth! These are perfect romances for any generation - the fact they were written half a century ago doesn't detract from their appeal in any way whatsoever - hospitals are timeless in the setting they provide for such stories. The printing and binding is great, and as a companion volume to last year's Valentine story picture library, it's something to be treasured."—Paul Edmund Norman, Gateway Monthly.

Bertha Fry and Leonora Fry

Bertha Fry was born Bertha Howick in 1883, the daughter of John Howick and his wife Anne, her birth registered in Westhampnett, W. Sussex. She was Christened at St. John's, Bognor, on 15 November 1883. She grew up in Guildford, Surrey, where her father worked for the Post Office. She was educated at secondary school and privately.

In 1908 she was married to Leonard Fry. They had two children, Leonora (1913-1999, see below), who went on to become a writer, and Bernard J. (who died at birth).

Usually writing as Bertha Leonard, she contributed to Girl's Own Paper and a great many annuals from Blackie and Nelson as well as contributing to the Daily Mail and Sunday Dispatch. Her school novels are still collected, although, as Kate Tyler asserts in The Encyclopaedia of Girls' School Stories, she was "not a great or even a very good writer, but her strength lies in the variety and relative originality of her plots."

According to a brief entry in Author's and Writer's Who's Who, her interests were reading and collecting antiques.

I've yet to establish when Bertha Fry died; the best fit I can find is one Bertha Fry whose death was registered in Ealing in 1959 (aged 77), although there was a Bertha Fry who died in Wells in 1963 (aged 81) who may be her (the disparity of year of birth may be explained by my only having located her Christening rather than her actual date of birth, which, I should note, is sometimes erroneously given as 1884).

Novels as Bertha Leonard
Stella's Victory, illus. E. S. Farmer. London, "Girl's Own Paper", 1926.
Daphne the Day Girl, illus. J. Dewar Mills. London, Cassell & Co., 1927.
The House of Doug. London, Sampson Low & Co., 1927.
The Little Runaways. London, Epworth Press, 1927.
An Upper Fourth Feud, illus. F.C.D. London, Pilgrim Press, 1928.
The Princess of Sea-Pink Island. London, (Tales for Little People 2), 1929?
The Star of St. Anne's, illus. P. B. Hickling. London, Cassell & Co., 1930.
Nan's Highland School. London, J. F. Shaw & Co., 1931.
The Riddle of Rockview School, illus. J. C. B. Knight. London, J. F. Shaw & Co., 1931.
The Rivals of Redlands. London, J. F. Shaw & Co., 1931.
The School at Kesteven. London, J. F. Shaw & Co., 1932.
Hip! Hip! Hooray!, illus. Jacques Browne. London, John F. Shaw, 1934.
"Tish" for Short. London, J. F. Shaw & Co., 1934.
Silverways Manor School. London, J. F. Shaw & Co., 1935.
Stella the Star. London, Epworth Press, 1936.
The Rebellion of Rita. London, Juvenile Productions, 1937.
Castle School Mystery, illus. K.M.W. London, Epworth Press, 1938.
A Feud and a Find, illus. W. Lindsay Cable. Huddersfield, Schofield & Sims, 1945.
Bertram the Bear, illus. Peter Fraser. Huddersfield, Schofield & Sims, 1947.

Others (editor) as Bertha Leonard
Frolic and Fun. London, J. F. Shaw & Co., 1931.
Playhours. London, J. F. Shaw & Co., 1932.

Others (contributor) as Bertha Leonard
The Taming of Angela, and other stories of school life and adventure. London, Epworth Press, 1934.
The Joys of Travel. London, R. Tuck & Sons, 1936.



LEONORA FRY (1913-1999).

Apart from the fact that she was Bertha and Leonard Fry's daughter, and was born on 10 July 1913, I know nothing else about the career of Leonora Fry. She contributed to a number of the same papers as her mother, including The Children's Newspaper, and wrote a number of educational books about railways. She was married in Sussex in 1975 to Norman Oswin and her death was registered in Brighton in 1999.

Novels
For the School's Sake. London, J. F. Shaw & Co., 1934.
Through Peril for Prince Charlie. London, Juvenile Productions, 1937.
Cyril the Squirrel, illus. Peter Fraser. London, Partridge Publications, 1946.

Non-fiction
Get to Know: British Railways, illus. C. W. Huxtable. London, Methuen & Co., 1950.
Get to Know: Bridges, illus. R. Barnard Way. London, Methuen & Co., 1951.
Railways. London, Educational Supply Association, 1951.
Get to Know: Post and Telegraph. London, Methuen & Co., 1953.
How Things Developed: Clothes. London, The Educational Supply Company, 1953.
Castles, illus. F. W. Wentworth-Sheilds. London, The Educational Supply Association, 1956.
Looking and Finding on a Railway Journey, illus. E. W. Fenton. London, Educational Supply Association, 1959.

(* The Children's Newspaper © Look and Learn Magazine Ltd.)

Ken Petts

(Originally posted 21 December 2007; updated because I recently stumbled across quite a bit of new information.)

Whilst there are many artists who worked for Look and Learn who receive plaudits for their work and talent, there were a number of other excellent toilers on the magazine whose names seem to escaped fans. So for every Ron Embleton or Don Lawrence that we know about, there's a Neville Dear or a Reginald Davis whose work is less known.

One artist who deserves another look is Ken Petts, who provided historical illustrations to the magazine during the 1970s, working in both colour and black & white. He was was a prolific artist who worked as an illustrator for Everyman Magazine, Boy's Own Paper and John Bull. He did a great deal of advertising work for Dunlop, Lifebuoy Soap, Rowntree's and others.

Kenneth John Petts was born in Southgate, London, on 17 September 1907. He attended Hornsey Art School at the age of 15. He was married to Elsie Walker in Edmonton in March 1931.

Petts was active as an illustrator in the 1930s, chiefly in advertising, during which decade he was listed at various addresses: 107 Fleet Street, London E.C.4 (1932), 3 Clements Inn, W.C.2 (1933/35) and Lloyds Bank Chambers, Henrietta Street, W.C.2 (1937/39). During the war he served in the Royal Air Force, rising to the rank of Corporal. While there, he drew portraits of commanding officers and American colonels. Post-war, he turned to magazine illustration although continued to work in advertising, albeit to a lesser extent.

In 1952, Petts moved to Bedford where his two children attended the Bedford Modern School. It is thought that his friendship with the caricaturist Sammy Volz, a fellow student at Hornsey Art School and later art master at Bedford Modern School, may have also contributed to his decision to live in Bedford. (He would subsequently be the regular designer of the school's annual Christmas card.)

Petts became very involved in school affairs and was a member of the Martlets, a cricket club composed of Bedford Modern School masters, parents and recent former pupils, who would tour Kent during the summer. He often used local people as models for his work, including three girls used for a cover of John Bull in 1952 and a policeman who became the star of 'The Policeman's Car' on the cover of John Bull in 1956. He contributed a frontispiece to Bedford 1166-1966, showing the presentation of the earliest extant charter by Henry II at Rouen. He also painted a group portrait of 95-year-old Richard Turner (a neighbour of Petts in Beverley Crescent, Bedford) being presented to the Queen by Sir John Howard on the occasion of the Queen's visit to Bedford Modern School in 1977.

Petts was a prolific contributor to John Bull, illustrating covers and various serials (including Winston Graham's 'Night Without Stars' (1949), Hammond Innes' 'Campbell's Kingdom' (1952), David Divine's 'The Golden Eye' (1954) and 'The Golden Fool' (1956)) and The Life of Jesus, published as a supplement to the magazine in 1954. He also produced illustrations for Woman, The Tatler and, in the 1970s, was a regular contributor to Look and Learn.

He also illustrated books including Adventure in Jersey (1970), The Hamlyn Bible for Children (1974; also published as The Illustrated Children's Bible, 1976, and The All-Colour Children's Bible, 1982), The Ancient World (1978), The Roman World (1978), The Dark Ages (1978) and The Middle Ages (1978). The illustrations he produced for The Hamlyn Bible for Children were exhibited at St. Paul's Church, Bedford, in 1991.

He died in Bedford on 20 February 1992, aged 84.

(* Illustrations © Look and Learn Magazine Ltd. You can find more illustrations by Ken Petts at the Look and Learn Picture Gallery)

Stephen Foot

The author of a squib of an anti-war fairy tale in The Children's Newspaper—'The Pollogy Bird' in the 27 September 1941 issue—but, as it turns out, an interesting study. That's what I like about doing this kind of research... you never know where it might take you.

Major Stephen Henry Foot, D.S.O., was born in London in 1887, the son of William Henry Foot.

Educated at Eastbourne College and Emmanuel College, Cambridge (MA), he began the first of what he would later describe as Three Lives, the title of his 1934 autobiography, when he entered the service of the Shell Oil Company. After a novitiate in the Straits Settlements, he was promoted to a position of control in Mexico, where his pioneering work was complicated by political disturbances when Shell became embroiled in a revolution in Tampico.

Foot's second life was as a soldier. He served for three years on the Western Front in the Great War as one of the Reserve of Officers with the Royal Engineers at the Somme then transferred as a Brigade-Major to the 2nd Tank Brigade, under the command of Anthony Courage. Foot's later noted that his first sight of a tank in 1916 did not elicit the response he would later have for the war-machine: the "predominant emotion excited in anyone seeing them for the first time was a feeling of hilarity. One wanted to laugh... standing still, they were funny; moving along, they were a scream!"

After fighting at Third Ypres and Cambrai, his organizational skills were noted and, in January 1918, during a period of leave in England, he transferred to a staff post in Capper's Tank Directorate at the War Office and became Fuller's GSO2 in July 1918. He was mentioned twice in despatches and awarded the Distinguished Service Order (D.S.O.) in March 1918.

After the war, Foot sacrificed the large salary he was in a position to command from the oil company he had worked for and, instead, took up the career he had set his heart on whilst at school. In 1920 he became a house tutor at Eastbourne College; as bursar and house master, he remained at the college until 1934. He was notably the first careers master to be appointed in a public school; until then, careers advice had been regarded as mainly the province of headmasters but, following a series of articles written by Foot for the Daily Telegraph, careers advice became established in schools.

Later became a convert to the Oxford Group, explaining in Life Began Yesterday how their philosophy made him "a new man and how his new life has given him a new courage, a new hope, a new power." A reviewer complained that his "expression of gratitude to Dr. Buchman's Group Movement" was "an apologia for its methods and a reply to critics. Coherence is seldom obtained from converts, and Mr. Foot's work is, as might be expected, a series of detached reflexions without much affinity either to each other or to the Group Movement. With a convert's enthusiasm, Mr. Foot announces that the Groups have the cure for unemployment, and the international situation, but it will doubtless be as difficult to persuade the world of this as to cure the evils by direct attack. He also deals with a number of moral problems, mainly of personal honesty. In these regions Mr. Foot lacks grounding. It is a personal testimony to the influence of the Groups that his book will be valued." (The Times, 5 July 1935)

The book was his most successful and was translated into nine languages (French, German, Swedish Dutch, Danish, Japanese, Italian, Yugoslavian, Bulgarian) and issued in Braille. As an author, Foot had articles in The Times, Daily Telegraph, Nineteenth Century, Journal of Education, Journal of Careers and elsewhere.

He began travelling extensively on behalf of Moral Re-armament. His trips took him to Canada, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, France and Holland (1935-39), America (1946), Kenya, Uganda, West Africa, North Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland and South Africa (1948-58). His travels in Africa inspired the last of his books.

Foot died in London on Friday, 24 June 1966.

Non-fiction
Tank Tales, by "Tank Major" and Eric Wood. London, Cassell & Co., 1919.
A Housemaster and his Boys, by One of Them. London, E. Arnold & Co., 1929.
Three Lives. An autobiography. London, William Heinemann, 1934; revised as Three Lives—and Now. An autobiography, London, William Heinemann, 1937.
Life Began Yesterday. London, William Heinemann, 1935.
New Freedom Arithmetic, with Frederick Harold Turner. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1936.
Wisdom from the Desert. London, Epworth Press, 1943.
Wisdom from the Sea. London, Epworth Press, 1943.
Life Begins Today. Cape Town & Johannesburg, Juta & Co., 1951.
Africa: Choice for a Continent. London, Oxford Group, 1954.
African Tale. London, Blandford Press, 1955.

Note: The 1948 edition of The Writer's and Artist's Who's Who lists Wisdom of the Desert, Wisdom of the Sea, also listed in Who Was Who as appearing in 1943; the title was dropped from the 1962 edition. While Wisdom of the Desert exists, I can find no trace of Wisdom of the Sea and it may be a ghost title.

(* 'The Pollogy Bird' and The Children's Newspaper © Look and Learn Magazine Ltd.)

Frank Crisp

Frank Crisp was a popular children's author in the 1950s and 1960s who has rather fallen out of the spotlight. His most popular series was the adventure novels featuring schooner skipper Dirk Rogers, a salvage master and pearl diver who works with his cousin Jim Cartwright around the world. Beginning with The Sea Robbers in 1949, Dirk featured in 10 novels in all, the titles including The Haunted Reef (1950), The Java Wreckmen (1956), The Manila Menfish (1956), The Sea Ape (1958), The Demon Wreck (1958), The Giant of Jambu Gulf (1959), The Ice Divers (1960), The Coral Wreck (1964) and The Sanguman (1965). Many of his other books (e.g. The Devil Diver, 1954, and The Treasure of Barby Swin, 1955) featured young boys involved with deep-sea diving and treasure hunting in the Pacific.

Frank Robson Crisp was born on 30 November 1915 in Durham, the son of Frank Robson Crisp and his wife Sarah (nee Sinton). Crisp served with the British Merchant Navy, spending several years as a bosun aboard an inter-island steamer in Indonesia; he also worked as a pearl fisherman in Western Australia before settling in England after World War II to become a writer.

He made two whaling trips to the Antarctic, which he used as for his novel The Adventure of Whaling (1954). Although he could bring an authenticity to novels with a background of sailing and diving, not all his books involved the sea: The Golden Quest (1952) and The Weird Archer (1953) were historical novels and some, including The Ape of London (1959), were science fiction—in this instance an alien creature takes over the minds of human beings and gives them inhuman strength. His 1960 novel The Night Callers was filmed in 1965 by Armitage Film Productions Ltd. in association with New Art Productions Ltd. under the title The Night Caller. It was released in the USA as Blood Beast from Outer Space.

Crisp's career as a writer seems to have come to an end around the same time as the film was released and he subsequently went into business in London. Living in Wembley, he was the director of a catering service and wrote only part-time.

He died in June 1996. Crisp married Margaret Diston in 1941 and had three daughters.

Crisp contributed to Eagle Annual in the early 1950s and his novel The Coral Wreck was first serialised in The Children's Newspaper in 1962. Three of his novels were adapted into comic strip form in Super Detective Library in 1955-57 and Dirk Rogers was the inspiration for the character Pike Mason in Boy's World.

Novels (series: Dirk Rogers)
Within This House. London, Stanley Paul & Co., 1947.
The Voice from Yesterday. London, Stanley Paul & Co., Jun 1948.
The Sea Robbers (Dirk Rogers), illus. A. K. Lee. London, Bodley Head, Oct 1949; New York, Coward-McCann, 1953.
The Nail of Suspicion. London, Stanley Paul & Co., Dec 1949.
The Haunted Reef (Dirk Rogers), illus. A. K. Lee. London, Bodley Head, Oct 1950; New York, Coward-McCann, 1952.
By Whose Hand. London, Stanley Paul & Co., 1951.
The Golden Quest: A Seventeenth Century Tale of Adventure for Older Boys and Girls. London, Bodley Head, 1952; New York, Coward-McCann, 1953.
The Weird Archer. London, Bodley Head, 1953, abridged as The Rogues of Alwyn, London & Glasgow, Collins, 1964.
The Adventure of Whaling, illus. Winston Megoran. London, Macmillan, 1954; New York, St. Martin's Press, 1954.
The Devil Diver. London, John Lane, 1954; New York, Coward-McCann, 1954.
The Chandu Men. London, Stanley Paul & Co., 1955.
Fazackerley's Millions. London, Stanley Paul & Co., 1955.
The Treasure of Barby Swin, illus. Richard Powers. London, Bodley Head, 1955; New York, Coward, 1955.
The Java Wreckmen (Dirk Rogers). London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1955; New York, Coward, 1956.
Maori Jack's Monster. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1956.
The Manila Menfish (Dirk Rogers). London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1956; New York, Coward, 1957.
The Manila Stranger. London, John Long, 1957.
The Sea Ape (Dirk Rogers). London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1958; New York, Coward, 1959.
The Demon Wreck (Dirk Rogers). London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1958.
The Giant of Jembu Gulf (Dirk Rogers). London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1959.
The Ape of London. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1959.
The Night Callers. London, John Long, 1960.
The Ice Divers (Dirk Rogers). London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1960.
The Coral Wreck (Dirk Rogers). London, Jonathan Cape, 1964.
The Sanguman (Dirk Rogers), illus. Patrick Williams. London, Jonathan Cape, Sep 1965; New York, McCutcheon, 1966.

Non-fiction
Ships. London, Macmillan, 1955; New York, St. Martin's Press, 1955.

(* The Children's Newspaper © Look and Learn Magazine Ltd. With thanks to Tony, Frank's nephew (see comments) for the photo.)

Norah Burke

Norah Burke has been on my radar for many years and it was only last night that I finally managed to track down her death. I think I first noted her name as a writer for Gerald G. Swan. Some years later, Cliff Lewis mentioned her in connection with his publishing company Curzon, which published romances—some reprinted from serials in women's magazines—under rather more saucy titles for the original paperback market. Ever since her name has popped up in various contexts... as a writer for Look and Learn, for instance, and now with a story in The Children's Newspaper. Time, I thought, to gather together everything I knew.

Norah Aileen Burke was born in Bedford on August 2, 1907, her parents—who had lived in India for many years—returning especially for her birth. The family returned to India when the baby Norah was only two months old, and she spent the next twelve years travelling around the jungle at the foothills of the Himalayas where her father, Redmond St. George Burke, was a forest officer with the Imperial Forest Service. Constantly changing camps, carrying their belongings by elephant, made education difficult, but she learned to write at the age of eight, and started writing stories straight away. She also read as much as she could, including bound volumes of Chums and Boy’s Own Paper, and even wrote and edited her own little magazine entitled The Monthly Dorrit.

She returned to England in 1919 to attend a school in Devonshire, and lived her family home at The Auberies, Bulmer, near Sudbury, in Suffolk. Her first novel, Dark Road, was published in 1933, Burke drawing on her own background for the book's settings of Suffolk and India. After a second novel dealing with a European dictator (The Scarlet Vampire), she wrote Merry England, which was set in historical Suffolk.

Her next few novels, romances, appeared from Gerald Swan during the war and post-war years and, according to an article published in The Writer in January 1950, she had by then published 11 novels and her short stories and articles had appeared in more than 100 periodicals. Her work was published in France, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, Irish Free State, Australia, America and Canada. In 1954, she was the winner of the New York Herald Tribune World Short Story Contest.

As well as fiction, Norah Burke was also an enthusiastic travel writer, relating many of her early adventures in autobiographical travel books Jungle Child (1956), Tiger Country (1965) and Eleven Leopards (1965). She also wrote about wildlife in King Todd (1963) and The Midnight Forest (1966) and numerous short stories. She collaborated with her father on his book of big game hunting and camp life in the Indian jungles, Jungle Days (1935).

She married Henry Humphrey R. Methwold Walrond (1904-1987), a lawyer, and had two sons. She lived for many years at Thorne Court., in Cockfield, near Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk. She died in 1976.

PUBLICATIONS

Novels
Dark Road. London, Stanley Paul & Co., 1933.
Merry England. London, Stanley Paul & Co., 1934.
The Scarlet Vampire. London, Stanley Paul & Co., 1936.
Dreams Come True. London, Gerald Swan, Feb 1943.
The Awakened Heart. London, Gerald Swan, Mar 1944.
Gold Temple Bells. London, Gerald Swan, Nov 1949.
Hazelwood. London, Hodder & Stoughton, Jul 1953; as The Splendour Falls, New York, Morrow, 1953.
Not as Others. London, [publisher?], 1956.

Novels as Andre Lamour
Harem Captive. Stone, Staffordshire, Curzon, Dec 1946.
Desert Passion. Stone, Staffordshire, Curzon, Nov 1947.
Dusky Bridegroom. Stone, Staffordshire, Curzon, Dec 1947.
No Wedding Ring. Stone, Staffordshire, Curzon, Feb 1948.
Pin-Up for Michael. Stone, Staffordshire, Curzon, Aug 1948.
Take My Love!. Stone, Staffordshire, Curzon, Sep 1948.

Novels as Paul Lestrange
Slave to Passion. Stone, Staffordshire, Curzon, Aug 1948.
Tarnished Angel. Stone, Staffordshire, Curzon, Sep 1948.

Collections
Jungle Picture. A picture of the vast forests of India, along with the foot-hills of the Himalayas in short stories. London, Cassell, 1960.

Non-Fiction
Jungle Days, with R. St. George Burke. London, Stanley Paul & Co., 1935.
Jungle Child (autobiography). London, Cassell & Co., Feb 1956; New York, W. W. Norton, 1956; abridged, London, Cassell (Red Lion Readers 2), 1966.
King Todd. The true story of a wild badger, illus. D. J. Watkins-Pitchford. London, Putnam, 1963.
Tiger Country. London, Putnam, 1965.
Eleven Leopards. A journey through the jungles of Ceylon. London, Jarrolds, 1965.
The Midnight Forest. A true story of wild animals. London, Jarrolds, 1966.

OTHERS

Parables of the Gospel [Homiliae], by Saint Gregory, translated by Nora Burke. Dublin, Scepter, 1960.
The Faith Applied [Vivre le christianisme], by Jean Daujat, translated by Norah Burke. Dublin, Scepter, 1963.

(* The Children's Newspaper © Look and Learn Magazine Ltd.)

Classics Illustrated to be launched in UK

This is spooky... on Sunday I was bemoaning the lack of newsstand comics in the UK aimed at early school age children and on Monday the following is announced...

The classic American series Classics Illustrated is returning to the UK in September, with the first issues of Classics Illustrated and Classics Illustrated Junior available in W. H. Smiths from 25 September. The new series will also be available at selected Borders and other high street retailers and independent newsagents. The new series is also being distributed in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Eire.

The new series will launch with two titles: The War of the Worlds aimed at 8-14-year-olds and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for younger readers of 5 to 8. The publisher is Classic Comic Store Ltd., run by Jeff Brooks, who has been a collector and dealer in Classics Illustrated for some time. The books are licensed from Jack Lake Productions of Canada who hold the copyright on behalf of First Classics Inc. Although reprinting the original books, the artwork has been digitally enhanced to give a fresh feel to both colour and quality of the graphics.

The books will retail at £2.99 and (for juniors) £2.50. Future issues will include Oliver Twist, Robin Hood, The Man in the Iron Mask, Romeo and Juliet and A Journey to the Centre of the Earth; the junior line will continue with The Ugly Duckling, Cinderella, The Pied Piper, The Sleeping Beauty, The 3 Little Pigs and Jack and the Beanstalk.

Jeff Brooks has said, "These classic novels have introduced several generations of children to the greatest characters in literature—Oliver Twist, Long John Silver, d'Artagnan, Quasimodo and Hamlet, to name just a few—and have fuelled their desire to read the original works.

"At a time when we see children reading less and our literacy rates are a great worry, the graphic novel has the potential to get reluctant readers engaged in these wonderful stories. We can see these being widely supported in schools as well and we have added new material to stretch the reader with discussion topics and a timeline of what was happening in the world when the book was first published."

It will be interesting to see how well this goes down in W. H. Smiths—will they rack the new titles with the comics or somewhere else? Will people looking for something for their children actually know the comic exists. Our local Smiths is a marvellous example of bad planning, with pre-school comics displayed on a shelf that's higher than the average 7-year-old is tall, stacked, overlapping, three deep so that you can never see what's behind the first row because the comics are so stuffed with free gifts and all come in plastic bags nowadays that they slump down on the shelf and become invisible. I had to look very hard to find a copy of the anniversary issue of the Beano because it wasn't obviously there on display. Other comics, including Commando, are stocked elsewhere in the shop, yards away from the junior titles.

Will it work? The Classical Comics line seems to have done well and has some excellent titles due and I must confess I'd hoped that Look and Learn could have done something similar with the strips we owned; I floated the notion in 2005 but it only got as far as buying some artwork for one of the strips (Oliver Twist) before other work got in the way and the idea didn't progress any further. I shall be watching the progress of Classical Comics and Comics Illustrated with great interest.

(* Classics Illustrated © First Classics Inc.)

Bernagh Brims

One of the serials that ran in the Children's Newspaper in 1964 was a reprint of Runaway Riders, originally published by The World's Work, of Tadworth, Surrey, in August 1963. The author was a 15-year-old Irish girl, Bernagh Brims.

It's surprising how many popular pony writers began writing as young girls. Victor Watson, in Where Texts and Children Meet (ed. Eve Bearne & Victor Watson, London, Routledge, 2000) lists a number of young authors, amongst them Moyra Charlton, whose Tally Ho. The story of an Irish Hunter (1930) was begun when she was just 11 years old, Primrose Cumming, Garland Bullivant, Daphne Winstone, the Pullein-Thompson sisters, Kathleen Herald (K. M. Peyton), Catherine Harris and Lindsay Campbell, all of whom wrote publishable novels before the age of sixteen.

Bernagh Brims wrote a follow-up novel, which was published two years later. She later began working for the BBC Radio Ulster in Northern Ireland on children's educational programmes.

Novels
Runaway Riders, illus. Juliette Palmer. Kingswood, Surrey, World's Work, 1963.
Red Rosette, illus. Juliette Palmer. Kingswood, Surrey, World's Work, 1965.

Others (editor)
One Potato, Two Potato, illus. Duncan Smith. Belfast, Appletree Press, 1990.
Three Potato, Four, illus. Duncan Smith. Belfast, Appletree Press, 1990.
Five Potato, Six Potato, illus. Duncan Smith. Belfast, Appletree Press, 1992.
Seven Potato, More, illus. Duncan Smith. Belfast, Appletree Press, 1992.

(* The Children's Newspaper © Look and Learn Magazine Ltd.)

Comic Cuts

A relatively quiet week after all the disruption of the past couple of months. We're slowly getting our lives back in order now that we've got our gear back from storage, although it's still going to be a while before everything is out of boxes. It's one of those Catch 22 situations: throw everything up on the shelves willy-nilly you end up having to take everything down again to rearrange it, so you end up doing the job twice; the alternate is, plan ahead, do things in a logical order, spend ages living out of boxes. Neither solution is ideal but the latter seems to me the more sensible, although painfully slow, way to do it. Mind you, I seem to be spending loads: in the past few weeks I've bought a USB turntable to record old albums so they can be squirreled away into the deeper recesses of a cupboard, a load of magazine boxes (yes, more boxes... the ones used for storage are too big to stack unless they're packed absolutely solid and that makes them too heavy to move around easily) and a load of CD slipcases for all my DVDs, freeing up shelf space for up to 1,400 books (if you double stack). I suspect some hard decisions are going to have to be made soon about whether to sell off some of the books I've had buried unused in boxes for years.

So, a bit of a bitty week split between emptying boxes, scanning, cleaning up scans, researching some stuff, recording, battling a rising tide of plastic packaging, flattening boxes and making others, punching holes in paper so it can filed and typing up some pages so that paper can be chucked. I'm sitting here now thinking that nothing looks any different and wondering why I feel so knackered.

Things should get back to normal next week from a working point of view as I'm starting work on the final two Trigan Empire Collection volumes. We've still got the rest of the building work hanging over our heads like the Sword of Damocles and the Kitchen Ceiling of Damocles also needs looking at, although that won't be for a couple of weeks.

I noticed that Against All Odds: War Picture Library Vol. 2 shot up in the Amazon charts—at one point it was their #2 best-selling book on the Second World War!—but has now slumped back to #10 because they're temporarily out of stock. I'm sure that situation will be remedied promptly, so please continue ordering your copies with confidence. I'm still waiting on word about the next batch that are due out from Carlton on the 1st of September (Love on Ward B: Hospital Nurse Romance Library, The Best of Boyfriend and The Biggest Jackie Annual Ever!). No word yet on precisely when the Karl the Viking box-set and the next two Storm The Collection volumes will be released, although everything seems to be in hand with the Frank Bellamy's King Arthur. Like any author, I'm like an expectant father waiting in the wings for news. What proofs I've seen have looked fine but until I'm holding the squalling little brat... er, book in my hands I'll hold off on the cigar.

The Hugo Awards have just been announced. As expected, Stephen Moffatt's Doctor Who episode 'Blink' won the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form award. Stardust, based on the Neil Gaiman & Charles Vess graphic novel, adapted by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, won the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, beating out Heroes season one, but there wasn't much of a British showing elsewhere despite nominations for Ian McDonald, Charles Stross, Stephen Baxter, Ken McLeod and other Brits in various categories. I'm going to have to make an effort to read some of the nominees. I was quite surprised that the Hugos got a mention in the Guardian last Thursday, aptly a blog piece by Sam Jordison about how little recognition the awards get in the mainstream press.

Today's Observer (10 August) has an interview with Raymond Briggs about his career and the re-release of Gentleman Jim, originally published in 1980 and just reissued by Jonathan Cape. The interesting news from the interview is that Briggs is working... "On a book about old age and death, which is what you tend to think about when you get to 70. I've finished the writing. Now I've just got about five years of illustrating to do. The donkey work!"

Compiling the listing of authors who had contributed to The Children's Newspaper this morning I was struck by how many 'classics' I'd read in one form or another through comics. The hey-day was already past before I started reading them in the 1960s but, via Look and Learn and other papers, I read versions of books by Haggard, Dumas, Greek myths, Shakespeare, Defoe, Swift, Verne and dozens of others even when my tastes ran more to crime and science fiction.

It was interesting to read recently that Ofsted, the education regulator, has suggested that schools stock "action-packed stories about danger or sport to inspire [boys] in lessons." Precisely what we used to get in the days when you could pick up half a dozen boys' comics every week.

Of course, the old story papers—full of action-packed stories of danger and sports—were the very papers that were being condemned by educators fifty years and more ago as dumbing down children with their easily understood, direct language and turning them into juvenile delinquents with, er, action-packed stories of danger and sports. It's amazing how far the pendulum has swung in fifty years: nowadays one in five adults struggle with reading and writing (says this BBC Magazine report, 30 July) and parents would love to see their children reading anything, let alone a comic or story paper. In the UK, the comics were badly hit by the oil crisis in the early 1970s which pretty much wrecked the market. A decade later, by the mid-1980s, the comics industry was almost entirely gone. Although there is still a thriving pre-school comics market, there's nothing to progress onto that children can read other than books, although, thankfully, post-Harry Potter, the publishing industry has twigged onto the fact that there is a large market for children's books and 'young adult' novels. Maybe, eventually, the pendulum will swing far enough for publishers to risk thinking about putting out a comic aimed at children. The DFC is a tentative step in that direction and, if I can blow my own trumpet, Look and Learn was the first attempt to do this when it was relaunched in January 2007.

If only someone would take the terrible risk of putting a new comic onto the newsstands that wasn't aimed at 4-year-olds or based on a TV show... not necessarily the comic you or I would want (which, I suspect, would be the new Warrior for the noughties) but a stepping stone between the pre-school comics and 2000AD positioned where, say, the old 'New' Eagle was in the 1980s, or, going back even further, Tiger was in the 1950s-70s, allowing the Beano and Dandy to feed 7-year-olds to more adventure-based comics.

Have I a clue whether this would work? Of course not. But it's an idea that ought to be explored.