Action and adventure
Action and adventure |
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Page 8 of 42  Battle (Fleetway, 1991). Art/script for 'Charley's War': Joe Calquhoun and Pat Mills. This late example of a war-based title was remarkable for its downbeat tone: this strip told the grim story of a recruit in the First World War, and eschewed conventional heroics. Yet, for all their hackneyed content, the anthologies could provide a home to some surprisingly inventive -nay, surreal - material. For in publishers' eagerness to gain an advantage over each other, creators were occasionally encouraged to experiment. Fresh 'angles' on the adventure theme included: 'The Steel Claw' (Valiant), about a disembodied steel hand; 'The Ragged Racer' (Hurricane), concerning a 'wild man wonder athlete' who lives in a cave in Wales; and 'Janus Stark' (Valiant), chronicling the adventures of a 'rubber-boned escapologist'. For modern-day connoisseurs of British comics, such macabre masterpieces provide endless amusement. Whatever the appeal of the various titles, it was clear by the mid-1960s that there were too many of them. Though there was some outstanding artwork by individuals like Hampson, Frank Bellamy, Don Lawrence and Ron Embleton, most artists tended to be hacks, and it was perhaps inevitable that the overall standard should suffer. As had happened in the humour genre, the desire by publishers to dominate the market by expanding the quantity of their weekly output led to weaker storytelling and perfunctory art. Weirdness aside, most strips were so cliched, and so dependent upon 'potboiler' story lines to drag them from week to week, that even the dumbest young reader would not be satisfied for long. If there was a crisis in adventure comics by the 1970s, it was partly the publishers' own doing.  Look and Learn (IPC). 'The Life and Death of King Richard III' (1969), art/script: Anon  'The Trigan Empire', art/script: Don Lawrence. |