On this day, 14 July 1984: Eagle — GREAT NEWS FOR ALL READERS!

Jul 14

Jul 14 On this day, 14 July 1984: Eagle

On this day, 14 July 1984 … I’ve collected a lot of comics over the last few years. I love them, and I love writing the blog, but I sometimes feel the universe is telling me that this obsession is a bad idea. They’re not always my friends, these shelvesupon shelves of comics. A few months ago a couple of tall bookcases toppled over on top of me – fortunately I was fine, but my feet were literally buried beneath years’ worth of Busters and Whizzer and Chips. And then there’s the eczema. I’ve always suffered from it, mainly on my hands and fingers, and it’s triggered by stress and dust. Most of my comics are in fairly good condition but there’s a run of Eagles from 1984 that must have been stored in somebody’s filthy attic because my skin starts crawling whenever I open the binder holding them. It’s made me reluctant to feature any of these issues on the blog, but that’s a shame because I think it’s an especially strong period in the comic’s run – not long after it abandoned its photo-story phase and moved to fully-drawn artwork by some excellent creators – so I’ve selected one for today. Apologies in advance for the quality of the scans, by the way – the paper’s a bit yellowed and torn too.

Strips of note include: Doomlord, battling the invasion of the vampiric alien Geminids; Bloodfang, a tyrannasaur tale which would go on to develop a time-travel meat-farming element similar to 2000AD’s Flesh; The Fists of Danny Pyke, a superior boxing story brilliantly drawn by the masterful John Burns; Crowe Street Comp, the best attempt at a Grange Hill comic since the Grange Hill comic (actually, better than that); a nice The Amstor Computer tale of American spies with secret papers that could have prevented the outbreak of the Great War, surviving the crash of a zeppelin only to book their journey home on the Titanic; and The Brothers, following the plight of Peter and radiation-scarred Bob as they are chased across Exmoor by evil agent The Viper.