According to Steve MacManus in his excellent autobiography
The Mighty One
, the traditional age range for comics readers in the late 70s was the 8-12's (making my golden period 1977- 81). Looking back for that period of British comics (when there were plenty of them about), there was a lot of impressive cover art and a lot of it remains vivid in my mind. Mostly coming from DC Thomson or Fleetway, they were on newsprint with limited colour but delivered plenty of fun on a weekly basis. Nothing like them really exists now (take a look at the shelves in any supermarket to see what I mean) and that, I think, is a great shame.
So to make up for the lack of hand-drawn colour on the shelves these days, here are a selection of covers from the 1970s.
Enjoy...
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| The first issue of the "seven-penny nightmare" I remember seeing |
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| The first issue of 2000AD I can remember buying... |
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| Oh dear, Penny comes to the end of the line (always beware "Important news inside!" messages...) |
, the traditional age range for comics readers in the late 70s was the 8-12's (making my golden period 1977- 81). Looking back for that period of British comics (when there were plenty of them about), there was a lot of impressive cover art and a lot of it remains vivid in my mind. Mostly coming from DC Thomson or Fleetway, they were on newsprint with limited colour but delivered plenty of fun on a weekly basis. Nothing like them really exists now (take a look at the shelves in any supermarket to see what I mean) and that, I think, is a great shame.
Some great artwork there. I agree about the current state of British comics for this age group. It's mostly tie-ins to TV and game franchises, as I'm sure you discovered. I've trained my kid on reprints of early Judge Dredd, which is great, but it's not the same as having a full-colour wraparound cover and the way some of the better comics had strips that referenced each other.
ReplyDeleteCheers Tim and yes, same here, I've been getting into the Dredd collections and showing them to Dude.
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