Planeta DeAgostini's classic UK comics reprints

In Spain, Planeta DeAgostini are reprinting old British classics in a series of new collections priced at  €14.95.They are also planning to reprint Janus Stark, Mytek and The Spider. I did some of the scanning for the Kelly's Eye and Janus Stark books 18 months ago, so it has probably taken two years to get these volumes off the ground.

One minor error on the first couple of volumes: Ken Bulmer didn't write Kelly's Eye, nor did Tom Tully write the early Steel Claw. I think Planeta have mixed up the credits on the promo covers, which they've attempted to correct in the release information for the books (Kelly, Claw) and the books themselves; the Kelly's Eye has been "corrected" to credit Tom Tully as writer. But it's still wrong: Tom Tully was not the original writer of Kelly's Eye; the first few years were the work of another writer (possibly David Motton, but I'm not 100% sure). I believe Tully only took over when Doc Diamond was introduced and Tim Kelly started time travelling. Poor old Tom Kerr and Mike Western, who both contributed strips that appear in this volume, don't get a mention either.

I was also intrigued to find that the history of IPC Media, which forms the two-page introduction begins with the creation of Eagle, which had bugger all to do with IPC or its predecessors, Amalgamated Press and Fleetway Publications. In fact, Amalgamated Press turned it down flat when it was offered to them by Marcus Morris and only acquired it by default when they took over Odhams in order to cement their position in the women's magazine market. An odd place to start when Amalgamated did, in fact, publish the first recognisable British comic in the shape of Comic Cuts.

El Ojo Mágico de Kelly vol. 1 (June 2010) 112pp
El Ojo Mágico de Kelly vol. 2 (August 2010) 136pp

Zarpa de Acero vol.1 (July 2010) 112pp
Zarpa de Acero vol.2 (September 2010) 112pp

El Imperio de Trigan vol.1 (July 2010) 80pp colour
El Imperio de Trigan vol.2 (September 2010) 96pp colour

(* My thanks to Skua for pointing out that these books were appearing.)

Trigan around the world

More foreign editions of Trigan books. The first two below are volumes in French and Spanish and the others are from Indonesia, where the strip appears to have had a good run. The advert above includes a number of covers I don't otherwise have from this series. The Indonesian editions are actually rather nice... very poorly printed on thin paper, but a slightly larger than European album size, which—thanks also to their having printed the titles in a smaller size—meant that more of Lawrence's original cover art could be seen.

(* Trigan Empire © IPC Media)

Trigan Empire goes Dutch

Our third cover gallery this week features the Dutch reprints of The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire. The strip was hugely popular in Holland, perhaps even more popular than it was in the UK as it appeared in the leading Dutch weekly comic, Sjors, rather than in an educational magazine as it did in the UK—although I've often heard it said that many readers of Look and Learn were only getting it for the Trigan Empire strip.

The innovation in Europe that never appeared in the UK was the comic album. Here in Britain, a comic strip appeared on the newsstands for a week and was usually never seen again unless a story was adapted for an annual or summer special. Comparatively few stories were ever reprinted. In Europe, however, many stories were gathered together in albums, usually around 48 pages, so that newcomers to a strip in the weekly could find older stories in bookshops; similarly, if you read the books, readers would often then pick up the weekly comic to read the latest episodes as they came out. It's a system that has been adopted now in the USA where 'graphic novels' now make up a substantial proportion of comics' sales, although most of these novels are, in fact, gatherings of 4-6 issues of a regular monthly comic book or a mini-series designed to be released in monthly parts and then collected.

But we never had this in the UK and it's a relatively new phenomenon in the States. Comic albums were being published regularly in Holland in the 1960s (as I mentioned in the column on Robot Archie the other day).

Below are a selection of covers from the Trigie album series—I never did have a complete set. The first album was, I believe, first published in 1973 by Amsterdam Boek, who followed up with a second volume in 1975. Oberon then took over with the third volume in 1976 and eventually published 35 volumes, the last appearing in 1985. They had, of course, kept most of the other numbers in print (the scan of the first album below, for instance, was from a 1982 edition, the second from a 1977 edition).

Many of these albums had original covers by Don Lawrence, drawn directly for the Dutch album market. He stopped doing the covers after 21 volumes and a new artist, Nic Van Dam drew covers for volumes 22-28. Van Dam—whose name was short for Nico rather than Nicholas—worked alongside Bert Bus and another famous Dutch artist, Harry Balm, at Spaarnestad Studio. Bus drew the covers to volumes 29 through 31. I'm not sure who did the next few covers but Gerry Wood did the cover for volume 35, although it reprinted strips drawn by Philip Corke. I do know that the volumes reprinting Wood's work wrongly credited Mike Butterworth as the author of the strips—Wood's regular writer was Ken Roscoe.

Some of these covers were reused on our recent 12-volume set of Trigan reprints, published by Don Lawrence Collection in 2004-09.

More Trigan reprints tomorrow...

(* Trigan Empire © IPC Media)

Olac the Gladiator Goes Dutch

Olac the Gladiator was reprinted in album form in Holland in 1980-82 with new covers by Don Lawrence. None of them ever appeared in the UK as far as I know, so this is a bit of a scoop!

(* Olac the Gladiator © IPC Media)

Robot Archie goes Dutch

Robot Archie had an interesting history in Holland. The strip began running in the Dutch weekly Sjors in 1963, reprinting tales from Archie's original appearances in Lion. However, Archie disappeared from the pages of Lion in 1971, and new stories continued to appear in Holland, now written and drawn by leading Dutch artist Bert Bus, although based on some of the later Lion yarns. Towards the end of the Bert Bus run, two all-original stories appeared ('Archie in de ijstijd', 1973-74, and 'Archie contra mister Magneto', 1974) written by Fenna Ridderbos.

When it came to reprinting the adventures of Archie de Man van Staal in album form, the Bert Bus stories were the first to appear, although not in their original published order--the strips were of varying lengths, so they were combined in more convenient ways to fit the album format. Thus the first album contained the first and third of Bus's Archie stories.

It was these stories that appeared in Vulcan, the IPC reprint title that launched in Scotland in 1975 (later published nationally in 1976). A treat for Archie fans who would otherwise never have been able to read the new strips by Bert Bus. (Our column header is an example of Bus's version of Archie.)

Once these new stories had been used up, the albums reverted to earlier stories, although these appeared in colour rather than the original black & white. Years later, Bus produced another Archie story, published in 2004, the year he was awarded the Bulletje en Boonestaakschaal for his contributions to Dutch comics.

There had been an earlier series of Archie albums published in the 1960s. I've listed the various titles and publication dates below.

De Man van Staal (Spaamestad)
De Man van Staal (1963)
De Man van Staal 2: De juwelenfeesten in India (1964)
De Man van Staal 3: Jacht op de schat (1965)
De Man van Staal 4: Avonturen in Afrika (1966)
De Man van Staal 5 (1967)
De Man van Staal 6 (1968)
De Man van Staal 7 (1969)

De Man van Staal (Amsterdam Boek)
De Man van Staal: Archie als ridder & De gepantserde struikrover (1973)

Archie de Man van Staal (Oberon)
Archie de Man van Staal 1: Archie als ridder & De gepantserde struikrover (1980)
Archie de Man van Staal 2: De strijd tegen de Kruls & Archie in het wilde westen (1981)
Archie de Man van Staal 3: De invasie van de Superons & In de macht van het monster (1981)
Archie de Man van Staal 4: De vernietiging van het monster & De terugkeer van de Kruls (1981)
Archie de Man van Staal 5: Archie contra Mister Magneto (1981)
Archie de Man van Staal 6: De terreur van de ijsgeesten (1982)
Archie de Man van Staal 7: Het magnetische gas (1982)
Archie de Man van Staal 8: Het teken van de schropioen & De goudkoorts van Abdul Krah (1982)
Archie de Man van Staal 9: Het kristallen luipaard (1982)

Archie de Man van Staal (Amor Vincit Omnia)
Archie de Man van Staal 10: Archie in de ijstijd (2004)

(* Robot Archie is © IPC Media.)

Neil Gaiman's Troll Bridge

Long, long ago, back in the early 1990s, I edited a magazine called Comic World. One of the features we ran each year was the Comic World readers' awards. In 1994, the winner for Best Writer was Neil Gaiman and Best Inker was Mark Buckingham. Death: The High Cost of Living had appeared the previous year and it swept our awards.

There was no prize as such, but we tried to interview the winners: Neil, Mark and Chris Bachalo, who pencilled the Death mini-series, were interviewed in issue 27, but in an effort to make it a little bit special I asked Neil whether it would be possible to reprint one of his stories. In issue 30, we reprinted "Troll Bridge" with two illustrations provided by Mark.

While I was packing I stumbled across the two illustrations and thought they deserved an airing. I suspect this will be the first time many of you have seen them... we moved house 15 years ago, about a month after Comic World folded, and this is the first time I've seen them in all that time! And they still look fabulous.

(* artwork © Mark Buckingham)

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere Revisited

After the recent clipping about Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, I stumbled across a copy of the book at the back of a shelf, an uncorrected proof copy no less. There has since been an "author's preferred text" edition of the novel.

Someone reminded me that Neverwhere was also turned into a comic strip, adapted by Mike Carey and Glenn Fabry and still available as a collection.

And here's the DVD cover.

I'll be posting another bit of Gaiman-iana tomorrow... something really special.