2024 Mikenote: This was originally a footnote to another post, and nearly as long as that post, so I've now made it into it's own page! It was also something of a 'call to arms', which wasn't really heeded. Still, the two books we did get are awesome!
Two new books about comics have been published: Football’s Comic Book Heroes and When the Comics Went to War. The football title recieved an enthusisatic response on the Comics UK forums, so I went searching for it, instead I found the war book, despite reading that it wasn’t supposed to be out until October! (psst – the image of the cover may give a clue about where I bought it, and maybe even a special offer!)
All I can say about the book is it’s incredible – profusely illustrated, and with lots of descriptions of the STORIES, not just statistics, dates, real-life stuff unrelated to comics and other boring guff. It even contains “the perfect war comic” at the back of the book with some reprinted stories to read.
Another thing it does – and something the “Comics Britannia” TV show shamefully didn’t – is acknowledge and celebrate the text-only story-papers alongside the later picture-strip comics. Indeed half the book is about story papers! All the names are there – Boys’ Own, Union Jack (the first one from the 1880’s), Halfpenny Marvel, Chums, Pluck and The Boys’ Friend. Later on, the DC Thomson “Big Five” also get thier dues.
It also avoids the predictable PC “what were they filling kids head’s with?” rants entirely – an admirable attitude that must be encouraged.
I urge everybody to go and buy this book and it’s football companion, we have to let the publishers know we want this stuff! One of the authors popped into Comics UK and said that in the initial stages 7 books were planned, and that discussions about number 3 are “ongoing”. What will we see? A sci-fi one is a given. Perhaps one dedicated to Cricket and “field” sports, An Athletics one, A motor-racing one, A police/detective/private eye one, A historical one… if they live up to the high standard of When the Comics Went to War they will be most welcome.
2024 Mikenote: It seems like any other books in the series never came out, or, at least, I never saw them. Which is a shame. RIP Borders, while we're at it. The Cambridge branch was incredible! Was like a death in the family when it went away... I do seem to recall another book coming out at around this time. It was a more general book about sporting stories in British comics, but took on the unfortunate conceit of tounge-in-cheekily pretending they were real. There were a couple of US books at the same time (one was called Boilerplate, the other was about Frank Reade) that did the same thing, pretending that some old pulps were real, and photoshopping the fantastical machines from them into period photographs. Yeah thanks for tantalising us with these glimpses of awesome early sci-fi, but not actually REPRINTING THE STORIES, so we can actually read them for ourselves. You fucking bunch of slug-brained, moronic cunts. Anyway, the British book about sports comics was a bit better, as it actually described the stories, it just described them as if they were sports memoirs of real events, and not as comics.