The above title is an homage to the alliterative story titles of various DC Comics classics of the sixties, rather than an actual allegation against Messrs Thorpe & Porter of Oadby, Leicestershire (I’m thinking specifically of immortal tales such as ‘the Clockwork Crimes of the Time Commander’, and indeed ‘the Tick Tock Traps of the Time Commander’. Evidently, the Commander was a character who inspired such deathless prose). However, with the best will in the world, one cannot help but feel there is something just a little bit suspect about the legitimacy of TP’s line of ‘Double Double Comics’ sold from 1967 onwards, perhaps some of the strangest beasts ever ‘published’ towards the tail end of a decade which saw more than its share of ‘four color’ oddities.    

    A little background for the uninitiated: Thorpe & Porter published a range of comics in Britain in the 1950s, most of them black and white reprints of American material, published in a format closer to the American one than the traditional British comics of the time (in fact, TP’s books were slightly squarer and shorter than the US comics of the period, a format also later adopted by Alan Class Comics.  These comics included material from various publishers, and included titles such as ‘Justice Traps the Guilty’, ‘Mr. District Attorney’, ‘Mystery in Space’, ‘Out of This World’, ‘Race for the Moon’, ‘Miracle Man’, ‘Forbidden Worlds’, ‘Adventures into the Unknown’, ‘Young Love’, ‘Classics Illustrated’, ‘Lone Ranger’, ‘Mad’ and even DC’s ‘Blackhawk’ and ‘Flash’, amongst many others. They continued to publish titles of their own into the 1960s, including ‘The Avengers’ (drawn by Marvelman creator Mick Anglo and based on the popular ABC TV series) in 1966.  In 1959, they also began importing actual American titles; Marvel comics distributed in Britain throughout the sixties included the line ‘sole distributors in the UK, Thorpe & Porter’ in the indicia. They didn’t play favourites though; they imported rivals DC, too!

    So, it’s interesting to speculate what those two monolithic American companies, in general so protective of their material, would have made of the ‘Double Double’ comics, assuming they actually knew of their existence (which seems unlikely). These titles have never been definitively catalogued as far as I know, but it’s generally believed there were a couple of dozen released between 1967 and 1970. Titles included ‘Action’, ‘Adventure’, ‘Lois Lane’, ‘Jimmy Olsen’, ‘Batman’, ‘Detective’, ‘Superboy’, ‘World’s Finest’, ‘Strange Adventures’ and ‘Justice League Double Double Comics’, with at least a couple of those titles having more than one issue (‘Action’ certainly had at least three). What they were, basically, were four American comics, presumably unsold copies, rebound and repackaged under a single, new cover (the original covers were presumably simply ripped off and thrown away). Most of these books were DC’s, but the odd Marvel title found its way in alongside them, and the choices as to which comics to include in which title appears to have been pretty random; Justice League Double Double, for instance, would not necessarily include any Justice League stories (one copy of Justice League Double Double actually consists of World’s Finest, Metal Men and Captain Storm), and a copy of Lois Lane Double Double for some reason includes an issue of Metamorpho, the elemental freak seeming slightly out of place alongside three issues worth of adventures of ‘Superman’s Girlfriend’, while Adventure Double Double has a triple dose of Legion of Superheroes backed up by the House of Mystery.

    But if you’re considering collecting these titles, be warned; there may only have been 24 titles released, but snapping up a copy of ‘Batman Double Double’ does not necessarily mean that you actually have the only version of that comic. They appear to have been slapped together in order to use up whichever comics were lying around, meaning that it was quite possible to pick up two copies of the same comic with the same cover and find different content inside each, the first three issues bound into them perhaps being the same in both but the last one entirely different! I myself have a copy of Action Double Double #3 which contains only three issues rather than four (one of them a copy of Amazing Spider-Man #51, sitting uncomfortably alongside DC’s Doom Patrol and Blackhawk) beneath a cover which depicts the Justice League of America about to engage in an almighty punch up with their colleagues from the Justice Society, a story conspicuously absent from the actual interior of the book. I can only assume that they ran out of unsold copies of that particular issue of JLA but had a cover left over. In the circumstances though, calling that particular book a ‘Double Double’ seems to be something of a breach of the trades descriptions act: maybe ‘Triple Comics’ would have been more appropriate?

    Just one more strange story from the long, colourful and frequently, one can’t help but suspect, not entirely legal history of British comics…

    This is currently believed to be a complete list of the Double Double titles released: Action #1-4, Adventure #1-3, Batman #1-3, Detective #1-3, Justice League #1-2, Superboy #1-2, Superman #1-3, and single issues of Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Strange Adventures and World’s Finest. The potential variations, however, are probably far, far more.