I am a collector of comics published in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s and this blog collects my memories of being a reader of these comics as a child, my observations as a collector today and an attempt to catalogue the comics from a fan’s perspective. My first post on the blog was posted on 31 August 2015 and for the first 28 months I focused solely on comics published by IPC. Since then I have occasionally looked at comics published by other houses (such as DC Thomson) but the focus remains mainly on IPC.
Over time, I will try to index as many of the issues, stories, characters and their talented creators as I am able. This is mostly a nostalgic appreciation of wonderful storytelling, art and design, but I’m also searching for something more significant. For me and for so many others of my generation, these comics were our literature, our social media and our companions when the telly was switched off – I’m sure that they must have had some sort of impact on how we understood and related to the world both then and today.
At first I was writing mainly about my own experiences and memories of reading comics. In 2016 I started to write ‘On This Day’ posts, looking in detail at particular issues that bore the cover date of the day of the blog post (the cover date was usually the day that a comic went off-sale rather than the day it was published).
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Not a scene from Gareth Southgate’s Schooldays, but the great Thunderbolt and Smokey from the early days of the new Eagle.
Doomlord and Joe Soap were good fun, but this was my favourite of all the Eagle photo-strips. Colin ‘Thunderbolt’ Dexter and Leo ‘Smokey’ Beckles were stars of a strip that crossed Roy of the Rovers’Tommy’s Troubles with Grange Hill. I wanted to be in their team.
