Earlier this week Comic Bits Online broke the news of the passing of Mick Anglo,
the British comics writer, artist, editor, and publisher, most famous
for his association with the creation of the comic character Marvelman.
Anglo died, aged 95 on 31st October 2011.
Pádraig Ó Méalóid produced this extensive obituary for the Forbidden International Blog - and has kindly given us permission to cross post it here.
Mick Anglo was born Maurice Anglowitz in the Bow area of the borough
of Tower Hamlets in London’s East End to Hyman and Rachel (
nee Pelter)
Anglowitz. He claims he was born on the 14th June, 1916, even though
his birth certificate gives the date as the 19th June, due to his
father registering the birth late – it wasn’t actually registered until
the 28th July, well over a month later.
He was the youngest of a family of five boys, the others being
Andrew, Sidney, Stanley and Richard. After school in the Central
Foundation Grammar School in Cowper Street in London’s Islington Mick
got a scholarship to the Sir John Cass Art School in Aldgate. He left
school at eighteen and eventually got some freelance work drawing
clothing designs for one of the London fashion houses.
In 1939, at the age of twenty-three, he enlisted in the British Army at
Oxford, becoming an infantryman in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and at one
point found himself working as a cartographer at Earl Mountbatten’s
headquarters in Sri Lanka. He also did some cartooning work for
SEAC,
the official army newspaper for the
South East Asia Command, and later
on for the
Singapore Free Press, which was revived at the end of the war.
On 29th December 1940 he married
Minnie Cedar in the Wembley District Synagogue in Hendon, London. On
their marriage certificate, both their fathers are said to be tailors,
and it turns out they lived on the same street. Mick’s occupation is
given as Fusilier #6468556, with his civilian occupation as commercial
artist noted in brackets, while Minnie was a tailoress.
When he got married his surname was recorded as Anglo, as was his
father’s, who was by now styling himself Harry Anglo, rather than Hyman
Anglowitz, so Mick Anglo was already halfway to the final version of his
own name.
After he returned to civilian life Anglo went looking for work in
comics, and the first company he worked for was Gerald G Swan, followed
by work for a lot of others, including Paget Publications, for whom he
drew Wonderman, and Martin & Reid, where he ended up working as an
editor, and for whom he wrote a number of books, including thirteen
American-style private eye novels for which he also drew the covers,
featuring the adventures of Johnny Dekker, and including titles like
‘Gowns and Gunsels’ and ‘Lugers and Larceny.’
It would have been around this time that Anglo had his first dealings
with L Miller and Son. In an interview with Roger Dicken in
Alter Ego
#87 (TwoMorrows, Raleigh, July 2009), Mick describes how he first
came upon them:
"As I recall, it was a still drab post-war Britain,
and I’d been doing this, that, and the other to keep body and soul
together. One day in the early 1950s, my next-door neighbour showed me a
couple of bright American-style comics bearing the distinctive
triangular logo L Miller and Son, an English company, with a 6d price on
them, and he suggested I check them out for some further artistic work.
I duly visited their warehouse headquarters in Hackney Road, London,
and was fortunate to meet the son, one Arnold Miller, who, it turned
out, had formed his own branch of the company to publish original
British space comics, as the bulk of the lines up until then were
American reprints, such as Captain Video. Anyway, he was raring to do a
series under his own banner ABC (Arnold Book Company), and I was very
interested, as you can imagine.
I showed him some of my work I’d brought along, though what it
was escapes me, and he was suitably impressed. It was then, during
discussions, to my surprise I discovered that the boss, Arnold’s father
Len, was in fact the same man who once sold me comics as a kid!
… After
some in-depth discussions re could I create such-and-such and find other
artists, etc, things started to buzz, and very soon I formed Mick Anglo
Limited, and found myself searching for suitable premises for a studio.
Eventually I located some rooms at the top of a rickety flight of
stairs in an old building at 164 Gower Street, London NW1, long since
demolished, which became the Gower Street Studios."
Mick Anglo’s first work for L Miller and Son was
Ace Malloy of the
Special Squadron #50 in August 1952, published under the Arnold Book
Company imprint, at which point Anglo was apparently already in his
studio at Gower Street. Further work for the Millers followed, both for
Arnold Book Company and for L Miller and Son Ltd itself, including
titles like
Space Comics (1953), starring
Captain Vic Valiant of the
Interplanetary Police Patrol, and, later on,
Space Commander Kerry and
Space Commando, both in 1954.
Fate was about to hand him his most significant job, however. This is what he had to say in
Alter Ego #87:
“One day in late 1953, I think, the Millers rang me
to say, ‘Come over, Mick – urgent – very urgent!’ I went to the
warehouse premises, and much consternation!
Len was in a right old mood.
It seemed that in the USA Fawcett had lost a court fight with Superman
comics, etc, and could no longer market their Captain Marvel character;
thus Miller, in turn, wouldn’t receive further supplies of the comic
plates to print Captain Marvel. They held the license to reprint the
comics in Britain, and he was one of their very lucrative lines. This
created big problems! … So boss Len needed a substitute real fast and
could I come up with something?”
Mick Anglo says that he went back to Gower Street and thought about
it, and decided that what they needed to do was create a British copy of
Captain Marvel to step into his shoes, and to carry on instead of him.
The character Anglo apparently suggested to take Captain Marvel’s place
was virtually a carbon copy of him. The name Billy Batson was turned
into Mickey Moran, with Moran being a young copy boy for the
Daily Bugle
newspaper, as opposed to Batson’s position as a reporter for Radio
Whiz; the costume was changed from red to blue, and the cloak was done
away with, for being too much trouble to have to draw all the time; the
dark hair became blonde; the magic word SHAZAM!, given to Batson by the
wizard Shazam, was replaced by the word KIMOTA! – a slightly altered
backward spelling of the word Atomic – given to Moran by Astro-physicist
Guntag Barghelt, making Marvelman’s powers science-based, like
Superman’s, rather than magic-based, like Captain Marvel’s; and the
transformation was all but complete. All that was needed was a name.
According to Derek Wilson’s article “
From SHAZAM! To KIMOTA! – The Sensational Story of England’s MARVELMAN – The Hero Who Would Become MIRACLEMAN” in Alter Ego #87:
“The first name change suggested – and most obvious
one – was finally adopted … although other names were seriously
considered, including Miracleman and Captain Miracle, which were
registered as possibilities.”
“That first name was, of course, Marvelman.”
In a short interview with George Khoury in
Kimota! The Miracleman
Companion (TwoMorrows Publishing, Raleigh, 2001), Anglo says this:
“Yes, it was my creation except everything is based
on somebody else. A bit of this and a bit of that. With Superman, he’s
always wearing this fancy cloak with a big ‘S’ on his chest … I did away
with the cloak so that I didn’t have to draw the cloak, which was
awkward to draw, and played with a gravity belt, and they could do
anything without all these little gimmicks.”
Six months after the launch of Marvelman, Mick Anglo formed Mick
Anglo Limited, UK company number 537200, which was registered on the
21st of August 1954 – with Anglo having filled out the forms in his
solicitor’s office nine days earlier, on the 12th of August – with a
nominal opening capital of one hundred pounds split into one hundred
shares of £1 each, with ten of those shares being drawn down and
allocated, nine to Mick Anglo, and the other one to his wife, Minnie.
The exact circumstances surrounding the creation of L Miller’s
Marvelman, however, are still the matter of some conjecture, as is Mick
Anglo’s part in it. He certainly did have a part in that creation, but
whether as primary and only creator or simply as work-for-hire,
following detailed instructions from above, is still not clear, nor is
it likely to be, it seems.
What is clear is that Mick Anglo, through Mick Anglo Ltd and the
writers and artists at Gower Street Studios, provided the Millers with
Marvelman material for the next six years, until the title went from
weekly to monthly, and became a reprint title.
Marvelman wasn’t the only superhero title that Anglo created,
although most of those that followed were based on his earlier work.
There was Captain Universe, AKA The Super Marvel, who was a man called
Jim Logan who said the magic word GALAP to be changed into his
alternative incarnation, published for one issue in 1954 by Arnold Book
Company; Captain Miracle, a man called Johnny Dee with the magic word El
Karim, published for nine issues by Anglo Comics starting in 1960, just
after Anglo ceased working for the Millers; and Miracle Man, a man
called Johnny Chapman with the magic word Sundisc, published for
thirteen issues by Top Sellers in 1965.
The last two are said to simply
be redrawn Marvelman stories, in much the same way that some of the
Marvelman stories are said to be redrawn Captain Marvel stories.
As the years went on, Anglo continued to work in UK comics, but more
at the production end, as an editor and packager, rather than as a
writer or artist, and his output, over all the years, is substantial,
and significant.
He also wrote several books for Jupiter Books, like
Penny Dreadfuls and other Victorian Horrors, and
Man Eats Man: The
Story of Cannibalism. It was also for Jupiter Books that he wrote a
series of books with the series title of ‘Nostalgia – Spotlight on…’,
including
Nostalgia – Spotlight on the Fifties, which contains an
article called The Age of Marvelman, which contains his version of the
story of the creation of Marvelman.
In 2007, Anglo’s Marvelman rights were sold to Emotiv and Company,
allegedly for £4000. What exactly those rights are, and
where they come from, has also been the matter of much conjecture, but
neither Emotiv, not Marvel Comics, who subsequently bought those rights,
have publically clarified any of these issues, nor do they appear to
intend to do so in the foreseeable future.
Much has been said, particularly in the past few days, of Mick
Anglo’s place in British comics’ history. For myself, I don’t think he
was the huge creative genius that people try to make out he was. He
certainly wasn’t the hugely influential, legendary comics’ creator that
the American comics media seem to want to make him out to have been.
 |
From Miracleman #1, published 1985,
by Alan Moore and Garry Leach |
What he was, rather, was a man who worked hard to make a living in
tough times, and who ended up providing employment for not only himself,
but many others as well. He was not interested in owning any of the
rights to the characters he worked on, but simply in doing the work he
was asked to do, and getting paid for it.
His set up was as a comics packager, producing a finished periodical
to specifications from a publisher, and this is what he did. In these
more enlightened times, that may not seem like much, but at the time it
was good honourable work, which he did to the best of his considerable
ability. He worked hard at what he was good at. That seems a good enough
for epitaph for any of us.
More Tributes
• Bear Alley (includes detailed credits for his books and comics work)
• The Beat
• Lew Stringer, Blimey It's Another Blog About Comics
• Comic Bits Online
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