Action and adventure
Action and adventure |
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Page 7 of 42  Yesterday's Heroes (Fleetway, 19S7). Art/script: Anon. Pocket size titles Mite this flourished in the 1960s, and refought the Second World War every issue, complete with luridly xenophobic language. The Amalgamated Press were first to go on the offensive with Lion (1952), which featured 'Captain Condor', an early and very entertaining Dare rip-off, and the sibling title Tiger (1954). When the Amalgamated Press became IPC (the International Publishing Corporation), these were followed by Valiant (1962), Hurricane (1964), Jag (1968) and Jet (1971), all of which featured a mix of war, sport, western, science fiction, pirate and 'jungle' stories. DC Thomson hit back in two ways: by turning their old story papers into comics (The Hotspur and The Wizard went this way in 1959 and 1970 respectively, while The Rover and Adventure were merged into one comic in 1961); and by launching new titles, the most famous of which were Victor (1961) and Hornet (1963). All these anthologies were much of a muchness, formularized adventure for a bloodthirsty pre-teen audience. War was far and away the pre-eminent subject, and the key characters were often soldiers: 'Trelawney of the Guards' in Lion, 'Union Jack Jackson' in The Hotspur, and, perhaps most famously, 'Captain Hurricane' in Valiant (a man so hard that he sorts out the enemy with his bare fists). Similarly, intricate cross sections of weaponry and other military arcana, in The Eagle mould, were always popular fillers.  Page from the more unusual adventure strips from the period both from Valiant (Fleetway): 'Janus Stark' (1973), about a nineteenth-century escape artist (art: Solano Lopez)  Roy of the Rovers, Tiger and Hurricane (Fleetway, 1969). Art/script: Joe Colquhoun. Roy was another squeaky clean British hero, in fact a throwback to the 1950s: an ambassador for the game, he was the natural choice for Rovers captain. The strip helped establish sport as a viable sub-genre. |