DC Thomson bids farewell to Bill Graham

DC Thomson editor Bill Graham - whose credits include Starblazer, Warlord and Spike and had a long and varied career with the Dundee-based company - has just retired.

Previously interviewed by Jeremy Briggs for the site, what we haven't published before is a picture of him with his lesser-known brother — PC Murdoch from the Oor Wullie strips!

"The story goes that the comics/boys’ papers staff held a PC Murdoch look-a-like competition and he won," claims Commando editor Calum Laird, who kindly sent us this picture.

"He was, however, the only entrant. And he had no idea the competition was going on!"

downthetubes would like to thank Bill for all the support he's given this site over the past few years and wish him all the very best for the future.

• Read our 2008 interview by Jeremy Briggs with Bill

Comics Go to War!

Quickly following up on Tim Pilcher’s two Erotic Comics volumes and Steve Holland’s Sci-Fi Art, Ilex Press have released the fourth title in their Graphic History series. Comics International editor Mike Conroy has written War Comics: A Graphic History, which covers how comics have covered war in its many forms throughout the centuries.

The book is laid out in a chronological order, not for the comics as they were published but for the conflicts they covered, beginning, perhaps inevitably, with the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BC. While this is best known today through Frank Millar’s 300, the book also covers earlier comic versions of the same tale from from Dell Movie Classics to Blazing Combat.

Speaking to the American journal Kirkus Reviews, Mike said, “I decided that presenting the material in historical order made much more sense than working through it chronologically as it had been published, which is the standard approach with such comics histories. That method then became a way of focusing the content of each chapter.”

Those chapters continue through the battles of the French and British empires before the book moves on to the battles fought as America established itself as a country and into the Twentieth Century with the Great War.

While the book is aimed at an American audience with Americanised spelling throughout, the enormity of the Second World War is covered from the very different perspectives of both American and British comics. With contributions from Bear Alley’s Steve Holland, downthetube’s Jeremy Briggs and ex-Crikey! editor Brian M Clarke, the British comics section shows off the talent involved in such British war titles as Warlord, Battle and Commando to American readers much more familiar with titles such as Star Spangled War or Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos.

"I hope War Stories will show American readers that there’s more to comics than what’s published by DC, Marvel and other US publishers," Mike explains. "We Brits have also produced some great material as have writers and artists from around the globe.”

The chronological theme continues with Korea, Vietnam, the Falklands and the Northern Ireland Troubles before coming much more up-to-date with Yugoslavia, the 9/11 attacks, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Overall, the book touches on all the conflicts covered by English language comics. “If I have one regret,” says Mike, “it’s that I could not include more material from outside the English-speaking world. Maybe there’s Volume 2 beckoning!!

With a foreword by writer Garth Ennis, who’s war titles are covered in the book in some depth, this is a well researched and heavily illustrated book that covers an all too often ignored area of comics history.

• Buy War Comics: A Graphic History from amazon.co.uk

Merry Christmas: 2 Days To Go

Two days to go to Christmas and a slight cheat on our Christmas cover today in that it is the cover of an annual rather than a weekly title. That said Christmas covers on war comics are few and far between and it is an Ian Kennedy painting on the Warlord annual for Christmas 1984.

It is set forty years before in Christmas 1944 and Royal Marine Union Jack Jackson is fighting the Germans in post D-Day Europe. By this point in the stories he was still attached to the US Marine Corps but by his own choice rather than by circumstance.

The idea of Santa charging with a fixed bayonet is certainly one of the more unusual Christmas covers.

Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag…

For most people living in the United Kingdom in the 1970s it was something that happened somewhere else, somewhere across the water, but growing up in Belfast in those now increasingly far off days there was no getting away from the reality of The Troubles. Since Belfast is a port with hills to the north and south, the bomb explosions in the city centre would echo around the whole city. Everyone knew when something large had gone off with its associated destruction and possible deaths.

The attempts at stopping those bombs affected day to day life. The task of city centre shopping, so mundane in London, Cardiff or Edinburgh, in Belfast involved walking through permanent check points with body searchs on each street entrance to the central shopping area, coupled with additional bag searches on entering every big store. Boots, BHS, Marks and Spencer, all the familiar high street names searched each bag you carried as you entered their stores. That was normality for us. What wasn't normal was white police cars with flashing lights on the roof and policemen with tall helmets. That was the stuff of television since our police travelled around in armoured grey landrovers and had carbine rifles and flak-jackets.

Then there was the Army, on the streets, every day. They had similarly armoured landrovers, only theirs were painted dark green, and they carried SLR rifles and Sterling sub-machine guns which made the police carbines look a little pathetic in comparison. In addition to their landrovers, they also drove heavier armoured vehicles around the city streets. The six wheeled Saracen, designed to fight through the fields and rivers of West German against a Soviet onslaught, and the similar looking but four wheeled Humber 1 Ton Armoured, universally known as The Pig. In the skies, Lynx helicopters with cameras and searchlights and Beaver spotter planes were more common than airliners or private light aircraft.

With these as everyday sights, why read comics about the fantasy of Superman or Spiderman when you could read Warlord, Battle or Commando and learn from their factual features something about the equipment that you saw day in day out? Today these old features tend to get ignored but they made Battle and Warlord much more interesting to me than Valiant or Hotspur. As for the few American comics that made it the whole way over the ocean to the local news stands, well they may as well have come from Krypton with their odd dotty colours and irrelevant and incessant adverts.

I have read complaints that the British war comics never covered the modern reality of warfare or that a title like Commando still does not feature the modern Iraq or Afghanistan conflicts, complaints that forget that these are titles that were, and in Commando's case still are, produced for children. Children who may have parents or close relatives fighting in those war zones. The weekly war comics did not cover the then contemporary Troubles in Northern Ireland in the same way that Commando does not cover the current conflicts today. No editor is going to produce a war story for children that may show how members of the child's own family could die on a contemporary battlefield. Showing such things happen in the historical context of the Great War, World War 2 or Korea divorces the story from a modern reality and as the once present conflicts fade into the past they do get covered. Commando has set stories during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s as well as the Gulf War of the early 1990s. Battle told a fictional tale of the Falklands War some five years after that conflict itself had ended.

Back in Belfast in those childish days the politics and sectarianism of the adults mainly passed us by. The rumble of the Saracens passing the school playground was impressive, the speed of the Lynx helicopters flying over the back gardens was breath-taking, while the soldiers patrolling with their sub-machine guns past the local newsagents as you bought your comics were slightly scary. That said, the impression was that if they weren't there then the echoes of those explosions would have happened more often and that was something that you didn't want to happen.

763 members of the British armed services died during The Troubles in Northern Ireland - Army, Navy and Air Force. They continue to die in Iraq and Afghanistan today. The least you could do to remember their sacrifice is to buy a poppy this Remembrance Day.

Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal

Earl Haig Poppy Scotland Appeal

Battle Modern Master Plan from Battle Picture Weekly © Egmont UK Ltd
Army Today from Warlord © DC Thomson and Co Ltd

Tube Surfing: DC Thomson Style

Ian Kennedy may be the pre-eminent Commando cover artist over the course of the title's long history but it had been running for nine years by the time he did his first cover. Before that Ken Barr was the standout cover artist before he moved to America. There he continued to create comic covers including covers for the American format Dan Dare reprint comic Dare The Impossible. His last new cover for Commando was for Evil Ace issue 3047 in 1997, but he has now re-enlisted with Britain's last war comic and has produced the cover for issue 4138, Blood Red Battle, written by Alan Hebden with internal art by Olivera. More details of Ken Barr's work can be found at his website.

Sticking with Commando, editor Calum Laird and Gordon Tait from DC Thomson's syndication (i.e. merchandising) department discuss the choices they made to select the twelve illustrations for the 2009 Art Of Commando calendar at the Commando website. There is also a tease at the end of the piece suggesting that something Warlord related may be in the works from Unique Comic Collectables who published the calendar. In the run up to Christmas could it have anything to do with a certain Royal Marine in a Santa outfit?

On a much less war-like and rather more feminine note, after our mention of Beano products from Boots it looks like DCT's syndication department having been talking to Marks and Spencer as well. M&S have a 1000 piece jigsaw featuring a selection of covers of DC Thomson girls annuals such as Jackie, Bunty, Judy and Mandy available for Christmas. Anyone hoping for a similar one featuring Warlord, Hotspur and Victor will be disappointed as the closest male alternative is a jigsaw of The Dangerous Book For Boys.

Perhaps the M&S Christmas TV advert will have Twiggy, Myleene and the girls doing the jigsaw by a roaring fire...