This mag's been a long time coming!

by Brian M Clarke

Something like Crikey! doesn't happen overnight, you know.

No indeedy. The initial idea for a magazine devoted to the freakishly weird creations that inhabited British comics between the '50s and '70s goes back two and a bit years. During the course of its creation it has left behind a battlefield of corpses as it shuddered between go/no-go status over the ensuing 30 or so months.

My first notion to do a fanzine based on British comics and characters came about when I noticed that my to-read pile was increasingly made up of back issues of British comics rather than books and American comics. And even the American comics I did have in my pile tended to be of the non-superhero kind - let's hear it for Action Philosophers (a real title!).

Most of my reading enjoyment was coming from revisiting the wild, wacky and weird world of British creations from the '50s through to the mid-'70s. Roughly speaking from TV Comic and Eagle through to the end of Smash and Valiant. And when I spoke to people at comic marts they were finding the same thing. American comics were losing it and readers were looking for something different. It seemed that everyone I spoke to was on the threshold of discovering the same thing I had: British comics delivered on entertainment and high strangeness in abundance.

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