We travel out of this world with Gerald Edwards.
Remembering early British space comics, with Gerald Edwards.
Ask most collectors to name an early British comic book spaceman and the reply will definitely be Dan Dare, or possibly Captain Condor and then silence. This is a shame because there was a very vibrant British space hero industry, running in parallel with the birth of American comics which has been somewhat overlooked by the passage of time. From 1940 onwards there were home grown spacemen and spacewomen in the days when the possibility of a British space programme was not completely out of the question. After the war Britain was still at the forefront of scientific advancement and it still had a huge industry capable of building advanced rockets. Space was seen as the next frontier. All it needed was the research money, which is where it all went wrong.
The war years of 1939 to 1945, out of
necessity, had few comics as paper and ink were in short supply. Nonetheless there were some comics published with science fiction stories amongst the war, detective and Wild West themes. These comics were short-lived, just being published sporadically and when possible. The mainstream comics like the Wizard and Adventure featured the odd sci-fi text story and a picture strip did briefly see the light of day in the Triumph comic but that was about it.
After the war, a few more British space comics appeared but as rationing was still in place these were infrequent. It took until 1950 for some resemblance of a renaissance in UK comics, with the first appearance of Dan Dare in The Eagle. Competing with this were a handful of UK comics that tried to be more like the standard American comic, in size rather than the British tabloid. A slow start to the decade picked up some pace once rationing was ending, around the time of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth 11 in 1953. The Lion comic with its cover feature of Captain Condor had started in 1952 but was now joined by the growing number of UK space heroes coming from the Len Miller group in the main as well as some others. L Miller was known for reprinting US comics which could not be imported here but also branched out into home grown comics as well. Another well known name at the time was the studio of Mick Anglo who followed the same path as the Miller comics with some US as well as UK offerings. These comics mushroomed with titles issued regularly like Space Commander Kerry,Space Commando Comics, Pete Mangan of the Space Patrol, Captain Future by artist Norman Light and the longest lived, Space Comics featuring Captain Valiant, Ace of the Interplanetary Police Patrol that got as far as having its own space club with the obligatory badge and membership outfit
and his own space suit available in some shops. Another small publisher of these types of comic was TV Boardman, who had actually started in 1948 with US reprints but issued Swift Morgan and Spaceways comics with art by Denis McLoughlin in the early 1950s. Another company, Streamline Comics produced a line called Masterman from 1952 to 1953. There was even a “dispute” amongst the space heroes as Foldes Press / World Distributors had published a comic called Super Thriller in 1948 featuring a hero called Ace Hart, the Atom man. In 1952, Lone Star magazine was founded to sell its Lone Star/DCMT toys via the pages of its own in-house comic book and its Spaceman was also called Ace Hart. A quick complaint forced Lone Star to rename him Space Ace, the Space Squadron Commander. Someone in the design office obviously was not buying space comics from the newsagent! The Lone Star version of Ace Hart only lasted until issue number two of a rather long run. Legal action obviously worked very quickly in these days!
As the 1950s progressed scifi saw no signs of weakening as this was at the height of the early space race between the USA and Russia. A new comic designed to challenge the Eagle was released called Rocket Comic and its claim to fame was that it was all sci-fi or fantasy strips. It was endorsed by the former WW11 pilot, Douglas Bader, who was a huge name at the time. This was a mixture of both British and American comic strips. It was high quality but failed to “take off” lasting only for 32 issues in 1956. This was not the first British all sci-fi comic as in the 1930s there was another short lived, mainly text, comic called Scoops which lasted for 20 issues. It was tabloid sized and was just a little bit ahead of its time. This comic was styled after the US pulp magazines of that era. It must not be forgotten that a radio broadcast in America of a reading from HG Wells War of the World’s started a huge panic when some people thought the Martian invasion was for real, so this kind of future science story was in the public domain.
Comics were not all newspaper sized although in the mid 1950s both the Daily Express and the Junior Mirror had issued children’s newspapers both containing the obligatory science fiction characters. Even the main newspapers often had daily scifi strips published like Jet Ace Logan, Jeff Hawke or the Daily Mirror’s Garth. Another of the big publishers, Amalgamated Press, had introduced the digest size of comic which was much easier to hold in your hand. One of its main titles was Super Detective Library and what better idea than to combine detective stories with outer space and hence was born Rick Random, Space Detective. These stories were not the first space stories in this library but a series developed regularly in the 1950s with most of the art being by acclaimed space artist Ron Turner. Other mainstream, earlyto mid-1950s comics like the Sun and Comet featured space stories, often on the front cover such as Dick Barton, Special Agent drafted into space duties and the Sky Explorers.
All good things have to come to an end and by the late 1950s most of these smaller producers of comics had gone. Space Ace by Ron Turner made a small, short lived, comeback in his own comic in the early 1960s and Dan Dare was still going strong in the Eagle, although only for a few more years too and Captain Condor had been relegated to the inside pages of the Lion in favour of war pilot Paddy Payne. Super Detective Library had moved on too. Scifi, so dominant in the 1950s, had been relegated just at the time the real space race was hotting up which seems to have replaced fiction with fact. It was now over to Gerry Anderson and Dr Who to keep UK sci-fi going and the comic book adaptions were not long in coming.
Space Comics featuring Captain Valiant, Ace of the Interplanetary Police Patrol that got as far as having its own space club with the obligatory badge and membership outfit and his own space suit available in some shops.