Dogfight Dixon, Psycho Warriors and Swordsmen

One of the latest batch of hardback Fleetway Picture Library Classics from Book Palace reprints some of my favourite episodes from the pages of Thriller Picture Library. I was always a bit of a fan of Air Ace Picture Library and found by chance some reprints of Dogfight Dixon tales dating from around 1966-67. Many years later, my small collection of Thriller Picture Library is mostly issues of Jet-Ace Logan, John Steel and... Dogfight Dixon.

Four stories are reprinted here, beginning with Donald Oliver Graham (DOG... geddit?) Dixon looking longingly out of the window of his classroom, and even 500 lines can't dull the desire to take to the air. His father has other ideas, and wants him to join his Regiment, the Royal Light Infantry, where a Dixon has served since its formation two hundred years before. Injured, his father looks forward to seeing his son in uniform after learning of his enlistment... and a schism forms when he learns that his son has joined the Royal Flying Corps.

Posted to France, the newly nicknamed Dogfight is given the job of checking out the situation of an infantry battalion, pinned down by German shelling. Dogfight destroys a siege gun only to discover two more on the way and it requires all his flying skills and courage to take them out of action. And the stubborn Colonel who had refused any help from the R.F.C.—Dogfight's own father!

I'm always surprised at how good these old stories are, and the depth of emotion some of them managed to convey amongst the action. There is enough excitement and aerial action to thrill the schoolboy readership the books were originally aimed at, but they can be appreciated by an older audience too, for their fine artwork and the storytelling talent on display.

Dogfight's original writer was Ralph Coveney, with artwork by Dino Battaglia. The rest of the tales are the work of Donne Avenell, Ian Kellie and Michael Moorcock, with artwork by Aldoma Puig, Amador Garcia and Allen Pollack. Of these, 'Hawks of the Desert' sees Dogfight joining a mysterious Professor of Islamic Studies in a secret desert mission to stop Turkish forces sweeping into Cairo; 'The Phantom Camel' pits Dogfight against a German ace over Western Front; and 'The Zeppelin Menace' sees 13 Squadron escorting bombers on a mission to destroy Zeppelin sheds that fails badly, without a bomb falling on the target...

Moving forward in time to the Second World War, Jorge Moliterni's Psycho War Stories may be a slightly overstated title, but it contains some excellent tales from the pages of War and Battle picture libraries. Reading the introduction (a welcome addition to the book), it is editor Peter Richardson who found Moliterni's work compelling when he stumbled upon it at the age of nine. He went on to discover that Moliterni's stories often had a dark, menacing theme and characters whose pathological hatred knew no bounds. 

I first came across Moliterni aged 12 in the pages of another picture library, Top Secret, and loved his work. His work was still as dramatic as ever, and it's great to see where Moliterni's journey in the UK began with the reprinting of these earlier stories.

Fighting of a different kind can be found in By the Sword!, a collection of six stories from Thriller Picture Library featuring a variety of classic heroes, from The Three Musketeers and Rob Roy to Claude Duval and Dick Turpin. It's a fine volume that will also introduce you to a range of artists who began making their names around this period, including Graham Coton, CL Doughty, Fred Holmes, Patrick Nicolle, Arthur Horowicz and Reg Bunn. 

The latter, especially, will surprise fans who only know his work from 'The Spider'. As he was pushed to deliver more pages each week, he concentrated on foreground figures and used cross-hatching to fill the backgrounds on many pages. Here you can see Bunn putting in far more detail in his artwork, packing in far more characters (their faces unmistakable even this early in Bunn's career), and bringing far more polish to the pages. Not to dismiss his later work, but , given time, I've always thought that the Spider strip could have been even better than it was. 

There's a nice introduction to the various characters by Norman Wright, who probably knows his way around Thriller better than anyone. Introductions are a nice addition to these volumes of older material, and I hope that Book Palace will continue with them in future.

Jorge Moliterni's Psycho War Stories. Book Palace Books ISBN 978-191354864-3, 24 March 2025, 276pp, £25.00. Available via Amazon.
By the Sword. Book Palace Books ISBN 978-191354866-7, 24 March 2025, 272pp, £25.00. Available via Amazon.
Dogfight Dixon. Book Palace Books ISBN 978-191354867-4, 17 March 2025, 268pp, £25.00. Available via Amazon.

Robot Archie and the World of the Future

I was reading occasional issues of Lion around the period that this latest collection of Robot Archie  stories reprints. My seven-year-old self wasn't especially impressed by Archie's time travel shenanigans, which didn't compare well to the cross-time adventures of Tim Kelly and Doc Diamond, and the artwork by Solano Lopez on the latter was more dynamic than that of Ernest Kearon—I know now that Lopez had been drawing comics for longer than Kearon by a couple of years, but Kearon's artwork seems not to have evolved over time as much as some of his contemporaries. Some of his characters look as stiff as Archie.

But... and it's a big but... I found myself enjoying these stories as I was reading the book. Trying to follow a story based on isolated episodes may explain why 'Kelly's Eye' was so much better. I knew what was going on, and, looking back, my favourites in Lion included things like Zip Nolan, whose adventures were complete each week. Of the ongoing stories, Paddy Payne, another favourite, was being drawn by Joe Colquhoun, Frank Hampson was drawing Dan Dare (both were reprints, but I didn't know that at the time) and Solano Lopez was drawing 'Gargan', three impeccable artists whose work always impressed.

In the world of the future, humans have been at peace for thousands of years and have forgotten how to fight, so when an invasion force of Krulls arrives, Archie can defend only part of the city they have landed in. While he shows the inhabitants the basics of warfare and makes bows and arrows, more Krulls attack. Archie now thinks himself to be a Warlord and arms his followers with swords and other ancient weapons from museums to stave off the attacks.

Ted Cowan's storyline is filled with extraordinary images—a wave of 'tin cans' forms into a mechanical serpent that Archie is able to ride like a bucking bronco, an abandoned tropical island where cars seem to drive themselves, Archie piloting a World War I bomber... indeed, the third story in which Archie and his companions Ted Ritchie and Ken Dale land during the Great War is the best of the bunch, with Ernest Kearon's artwork coming alive ashe tackles tanks, planes, ships and submarines rather than the clunky science fictional hover-cars and ray-guns of previous tales.

There are two back-up stories, one from an annual and one from a later holiday special which pitched Archie against another of Ted Cowan's creations, The Spider. 

Read in full, you can't deny that the stories are entertaining. They're not the best Lion had to offer, but Archie is an icon and deserves his place in the pantheon of weird heroes that the Treasury of British Comics is unearthing.

Robot Archie and the World of the Future by E. George Cowan & Ernest Kearon.
Rebellion ISBN 978-183786554-3, 11 September 2025, 144pp, £16.99. Available via Amazon.

Illustrators #48 — Summer 2025

It has been a couple of years since I last saw Illustrators, so it's good to be able to say that it hasn't lost any of its design or quality aesthetic and there are still major names to be covered in depth, this issue highlighting three in the shapes of Mark Schults, Chris Moore and Graham Humphreys.

Schultz I recall from his early days as the creator of Xenozoic Tales (aka Cadillacs and Dinosaurs); he was definitely one of the artists I wanted to interview for Comic World back in the early 1990s, but I think he was writing more than illustrating at the time. I've always admired the more realistic school of artwork, figures that you feel could walk off the page and not collapse under the weight of their own breasts. ANd, yes, I mean men or women.

Schultz wrote tie-ins (Alien, Predator, Star Wars) and was on Superman: The Man of Steel for almost 50 issues (1999-2003), since when he has been the writer of the 'Prince Valiant' newspaper strip. The interview published here is heavily illustrated with Schultz's Conan artwork, but also has a few illustrations from an unfinished Xenozoic graphic novel, which I would buy in an instant! Come on, Mark!

Chris Moore painted science fiction and thriller covers, but that doesn't mean his artwork wasn't realistic. I grew up on Moore's air-brushed spaceships during my peak SF reading period in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And, thanks to his domination of the SF Masterworks, I've probably seen more of his artwork than that of any other artist since the turn of the Millennium. His work has appeared on the covers of everyone from Frederick Forsyth and Thomas Harris to Hammond Innes and Jackie Collins and just about every major SF author out there. Sadly, Chris died in February 2025.

Graham Humphreys has painted iconic horror images since the early 1980s when he produced a poster for the Amicus horror anthology The Monster Club. His poster artwork for The Evil Dead and A Nightmare on Elm Street set the benchmark for horror posters in the mid-1980s, Humphreys' use of colours inspired by the bold use of colour he had seen in Thailand. (If you can get hold of a copy of The Amazing Movie Posters of Thailand by Neil Pettigrew and Philip Jablon you'll see what I mean.)

He has since designed and painted Video and DVD covers, posters, prints, LP and CD covers, specialising in horror images. I can't say I was especially aware of his work (I'm more SF than horror), but the attraction is easy to see. Indeed, Humphreys is one of the artists highlighted in Anthony Taylor's Classic Monsters, Modern Art (Insight Editions, 2025), which is discussed in the final few pages of the latest issue.

As ever, For more information on Illustrators and back issues, visit the Book Palace website, where you can also find details of their online editions, and news of upcoming issues. Issue 49 will feature Gregory Manchess, Frank Cho and Hannah Gillingham, plus a complete Wes Slade story.  Looking further ahead, issue 50 will have features on David Palumbo, Mike Noble and Ron Embleton.

Irish Conflict in Comics by James Bacon

There are very few studies of historical events as they are portrayed through comics. An introduction may tackle the origins of individual characters, but generally speaking books about comics are usually about the comics themselves (histories of individual titles or broader histories by Denis Gifford, Paul Gravett or David Roach) and subjects (the war and football comics covered by Adam Riches).

James Bacon's book hones in on the story of Irish conflicts through the ages, dating back to historical depictions of Ireland: the era of Arthurian legend in Prince Valiant and the 15th century in Kevin the Bold; he finds dozens of Irish characters in war books and weeklies; through to stories set in The Troubles in the pages of Crisis; and the continuing depiction in the 21st century.

The intention of the book is to shine a light on a vast number of stories that have remained hidden by simply being buried under the thousands of others that have appeared over years, some of them obscure titles previously only found in lists such as Island of Hate in Battleground (#14, 1964) or A Bit of the Irish in Combat Picture Library (#524, 1972). 

Being interested in British comics, these are the entries that I gravitated to, firstly to Charley's War where correspondence reveals how Pat Mills had intended to continue the epic of Charley's family by featuring Charley's son in World War Two and his grandson in Northern Ireland (don't forget, Pat's mother was Irish). But these are stories that were never written. 

Introducing a section that covers many war libraries of the 1960s, James notes that "even when an Irish character is portrayed as a bruiser, or cheat, they often redeem themselves, because this is either seen as 'clever', using initiative or deploying a dynamic approach which wins out ... the Irish 'strength' of being a doughty fighter is of course played up and allows for antagonism and positive aggression against the enemy, the Germans." This treatment may stem from having stories written by real-life veterans of the war—scriptwriters for Fleetway and DC Thomson fought in all three services in some of the War's greatest battles—and was at odds with the "no dogs, no blacks, no Irish" attitude of some, and the boorish depiction of the Irish as thick by comedians.

Some surprises include the likes of Come Home, Kathleen in Bunty (1977-78), in which a mistreated Irish lass is worked hard by an English family with airs and graces above their means, and then evacuated (due to the war) to the clutches of Miss Jardine, who maltreats her even more. The Fifth Swan Child (Judy, 1981) sees a troupe of child performers trapped in France just as the Germans invade and James's summation ("the bleakness and tragic end, I was stunned") makes me wish it was available as a reprint.

This is a thoroughly researched book, not just of British comics but also American comics dating back to the war years. There are, of course, mentions of Irish writers such as Stephen Walsh (Commando) and Garth Ennis (everywhere!) who have tried to tackle Irish conflicts in their work. You'll also find entries for a fair few French, Dutch and Italian comics. 

James Bacon packs an awful lot into 260 A4 pages. While the subject matter may seem focused and maybe not your cup of tea, there's a lot of contextual material about how war and conflict is portrayed in comics and its likely that one of your favourites, be it Hellblazer or Daredevil, will have a sneaky Irish connection you've forgotten about.

Irish Conflict in Comics by James Bacon
Limit Break Comics ISBN 978-106841973-7, August 2025, 260pp, £12.99 [$15.00]. Available via Amazon. 

Bob Haberfield & His Art

In his introduction to the latest book from Jayde Design, Ben Haberfield relates his father's story: Bob Haberfield was raised by his mother in Melbourne, Australia, after his father was killed during WW2, leaving school at 13 to become an apprentice mechanic. Quitting after a couple of years, he attended Melbourne Tech from the age of 16 doing a night course in graphic design and life drawing while working as a layout and design trainee with an advertising firm.

He was taught and influenced by artists Clifton Pugh and Ian Stone who encouraged him to paint, particularly abstract painting, which he first exhibited in 1964 to positive reviews. He met Melanie, a young Englishwoman who had worked as an au pair in Paris, and she became his second wife in 1967; their honeymoon was Bob's first experience of travel outside Australia.

Renting an apartment in Paris, Bob painted record sleeves and perfected his talents as a flamenco guitarist, but moved to London when Melanie fell pregnant. The strain of having to earn a living yet to not compromise his artistic vision proved too much; while Melanie took their son Ben on holiday to Italy, Bob emptied their flat in Elgin Avenue and disappeared. Introduced to Buddhism, he joined a commune in Wales.

He was by then regularly painting covers for Mayflower, and the Buddhist influence can be seen in many of these painted in the early 1970s. Although Melanie tracked him down and joined him in Wales, commune life became increasingly controlling and she left. Bob also left, destitute (all his earnings from painting went to the commune) and living on the streets around King's Cross until a friend paid his fare back to Australia.

He returned to advertising, working hard and drinking hard. The loss of his girlfriend to breast cancer saw him heartbroken and he returned to London in 1981 to try to reconnect with his son, whose mother was running a clothes shop in Camden Road. Shortly after, he moved to a commune in Manchester, and later to a house in Wales, but his drinking was getting worse. A blazing row with his son meant he cut off contact for a year before phoning to admit that he had been wrong and that he had been sober ever since. The two developed a relationship that was to last.

Retiring from his career in illustration, Bob spent his time painting and listening to music until his death in 2021, aged 83.

This semi-tragic tale lay behind the dozens of covers and illustrations that Bob Haberfield painted for records, books and magazines, as well as his years in advertising between the early 1960s and his death 60 years later. Across the pages of two books, hundreds of pieces are presented for the first time for anyone outside of Bob's family as—beyond a handful in his early days—he never exhibited or sold his work. 

In the first book we are introduced to Bob Haberfield The Man, with essays by his son Ben Haberfield and friend Garry Kinnane, and some 300 pages of artwork; in the second we have Bob Haberfield His Art, which is a curated gallery of his career, including books—memorable and instantly recognisable from the covers of Moorcock, Jack Vance, Cordwainer Smith, Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg, Roger Zelazny, etc.—records and an incredibly diverse range of illustrations and advertisements. This volume also includes the reminiscences of various friends and followers.

This is the volume for me. Bob Haberfield's covers were a mix of surrealism, Hindi and Buddhist imagery and bright, rainbow colours. If your knowledge of the surreal is Dali or Ernst, these are more subtle pieces in a trippier headspace. It lends itself to horror stories, of which he illustrated plenty, most notably Clark Ashton Smith and HP Lovecraft for Panther in around 1973-74, and one of his most outstanding images, the motorcycle-riding Hitler on Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream. But from the same brush came covers for children's books by Enid Blyton and Paul Galico, and it is a treat just to wander through the rich imagination on show throughout both books, whether you want something realist or something abstract.

This is a beautifully printed pair of books designed by John Coulthart, that slip into a sturdy case, published by Jayde Design who you'll have met here at Bear Alley as they published James Cawthorn: The Man and His Art and Cawthorn's The Stormbringer Sessions some years ago. The quality of the books is up to that earlier standard.

Bob Haberfield: The Man and His Art compiled by Ben Haberfield, with John Davey and John Guy Collick. Jayde Design ISBN 978-106838612-1, 28 July 2025, 376+232pp, £52.00 [slipcase edition, price includes shipping within the UK]. Order from Jayde Design.

Note: Bob Haberfield has an official website.

A Lilliput Magazine Anthology, edited by Chris Harte

Chris Harte was responsible for a history and bibliography of Lilliput, the famous pocket magazine that ran from 1937 to 1960. He has now edited two anthologies collecting some of the best stories and writing from the magazine.

The first volume covers the first ten years, 1937 to 1946 and includes work from an incredible range of authors, from Ernest Hemingway to George Bernard Shaw. There's an informative introduction about the how Lilliput came to exist and the background of its creator and first editor, Stefan Lorant. How it was put together by Lorant with the aid of Alison Blair and photographer Zoltan Glass is itself a fascinating story, expanded upon in Harte's History and Bibliography, which is still available.

The stories include some relatively well-known pieces, like Karol Capek's 'The Fortune-Teller', first published in 1929 about a woman who is taken to court after giving a card reading to a policeman's wife, but for the most part the stories are obscure and little known.

Some of the bigger names include journalist and novelist John Brophy, MP and campaigner George Lansbury, literary critic V. S. Pritchett, crime and science fiction novelist Margot Bennett and Hornblower-creator C. S. Forester. Forty-nine short pieces in all.

Volume two contains seventy-one pieces and is almost 100 pages longer, filled with the same mix of stories and features by names you'll know and others that are now obscured by time. Claud Cockburn, Bill Naughton, Hector Bolitho, Patrick Campbell, Paul Tabori, Richard Gordon, Eric Ambler and Dennis Bardens (probably the only Lilliput author I have a letter from). Maurice Richardson, who debuted in the earlier volume with one feature, here has fourteen, including the story of the Rev. Harold Davidson, nicknamed the prostitutes padre, who died in the jaws of a lion in 1937. Richardson had an important part to play in slowing the magazine's decline, a reliable hand while editors came and went during the 1950s.

These two volumes are a fascinating trip into history, charting the changing attitudes of a period that covered war, austerity, affluence and the emergence of terms ranging from "crumpet" to "the establishment". Social history aside, they are also great books to have on your bedside table as you can dip in whenever sleep eludes you.

Lilliput Magazine: A History and Bibliography by Chris Harte. Sports History Publishing ISBN 978-189801018-0, 3 June 2024, 362pp, £29.95. Available via Amazon.
A Lilliput Magazine Anthology by Chris Harte. Sports History Publishing ISBN 978-189801019-7, November 1924, 164pp, £14.95. Available via Amazon.
A Second Lilliput Magazine Anthology by Chris Harte. Sports History Publishing ISBN 978-189801021-0, April 2025, 258pp, £14.95. Available via Amazon.

The Fantastic Art of Ron Turner

Landing with a hefty thump on my doormat, The Fantastic Art of Ron Turner is a comprehensive and hugely informative biography of the artist by his long-serving friend and agent, John Lawrence. The book was a long time in the works as John spent years meticulously studying Turner's work. Sadly, he will not see the book in its printed form—he died shortly after completing the text in 2023. The final book was shepherded into production by Philip Harbottle and editor Stephen James Walker and it stands as a tribute to both Ron Turner and John Lawrence.

Ron Turner was a private man—and his agent, Greg Hall, made sure nobody got to talk to him—and little was known about him for the decades that he was active—the 1950s through the 1970s—and it wasn't until John became his agent in the mid-1980s that snippets of information began to sneak out. For some years it was thought that his name was Roland Turner, which is how he signed one of his early book covers (Denis Gifford listed him as Rowland Turner in his British Comic Catalogue, just to confuse matters further).

Turner's life was at times joyful, at times tragic. He was born in Norwich but grew up in Southend-on-Sea, showing an early talent for drawing, stimulated by reading science fiction. His mother arranged an interview at Odhams, who took him on as a junior, which meant making tea, delivering art, and running errands. Eventually he was allowed to produce spot illustrations for Modern World and received his first commission for a spread featuring German aircraft in 1941. Unfortunately, one of the planes he depicted dropped a bomb on Odhams, destroying the building. Miraculously, the artwork survived the bombing, only to be turned into papier-mâché by rain.

After his own close call with German weaponry (he was shot in the leg whilst serving in Italy) led to him being "excused boots", Turner spent some time in the Far East, returning to Odhams in 1947. In 1948, he began drawing comic strips for Scion, which led to producing dozens of covers for that company's paperbacks, quickly establishing himself as the best SF cover artist of the paperbacks.

His technical background and interest in hardware meant that his covers had an authenticity to them that most lacked, even if it all came from Turner's imagination. Whether it was a comic strip drawn for the Tit-Bits Science Fiction Comics series, or the latest Vargo Statten or Volsted Gridban novel, Turner threw himself into creating futuristic images that dazzled the reader.

Success meant Turner could buy his dream car (a Jowett Jupiter Sports) and move out of the family home in Romford. Working on 'Space Ace' and 'Rick Random' kept him busy, as did marriage and a growing family in the late 1950s. However, Rick's adventures came to an end in 1959 and Turner turned to war strips to keep his career on track and even produced a sample SF strip for Buster which only now sees the light of day.

In the early 1960s, Turner was employed drawing paint-by-numbers guides for Craft Master, to the detriment of his comic strip output. That changed in 1965 when he began drawing Gerry Anderson tie-in strips and was then offered 'The Daleks'. He returned to Fleetway for 'The Robot Builders' but this lasted only six months and Turner found himself filling his time drawing for annuals and dot-to-dot books.

He was rescued from this drudgery by Bob Paynter, editor of Whizzer & Chips, who hired Ron to draw 'Wonder-Car'. Commissions for annuals and fill-ins kept Turner going until Tiger again came to the rescue with 'The Tigers', that ran for three years (1971-74). Whizzer & Chips and war libraries kept him busy until the call came from Pat Mills to draw 'The Robot Wars', a classic early Judge Dredd yarn. While Turner was able to adapt to the open panel style of 2000 AD (something he had developed in 'The Daleks', using bodies and machinery as panel borders and having Daleks burst out of the page), his was the gleaming utopian future he dreamt of in the years after WW2, not the grimy, grungy, overcrowded dystopian future of punk-era 2000 AD.

Thankfully he was offered 'The Spinball Slaves' in Action, which survived the transition to Battle-Action as 'The Spinball Wars'. Meanwhile, an attempt to revive 'Rick Random' at 2000 AD came to a grinding halt as Turner let the deadline for the final episode slip past and the editor had to turn to Carlos Ezquerra to draw the last few pages. Similarly, a potential line of work with Dr Who Weekly was lost when Turner chose 'Journey to the Stars' in Speed, letting down the editor of Who at the very last minute. The editors of Britain's two longest-running science fiction titles chose to never employ him again. DC Thomson took a similar attitude when Turner's agent prevaricated over Turner's brief work for Scoop, and decided not to offer him more work.

The arrival of 'New' Eagle in 1982 might have been perfect for Turner had his agent not nixed any notion of editor Barrie Tomlinson meeting with Turner in order to explain what precisely he wanted for the new Dan Dare strip. Gerry Embleton was hired instead. It was around this same time that Turner was divorced from his wife and moved to a small house on the Thames and then to a dilapidated houseboat on the river.

He was cajoled into accepting work on 'Action Force'. He argued that he would not be able to keep up the supply of four pages a week but was persuaded to take it on... and suffered an attack of angina as a result. Hall, too, was not well, and a stroke left him incapacitated and Turner, completely cut off from the industry, with no work. Not that Hall was solely to blame.... Turner himself could be temperamental and unpredictable, ignoring commissions where he didn't like the script and stopping work on a war story when he discovered that it had been written by a woman (probably Mary Feldwick).

Thankfully, by then John Lawrence had tracked down Turner to his houseboat and managed to introduce himself. This led to the final phase of Turner's career as John and Phil Harbottle kept Turner busy with their own stories (Nick Hazard, Kalgan the Golden), colour recreations of Turner's earlier book covers and a  number of new commissions. There were also many disappointments over the next few years, many false starts and let downs; even Turner's houseboat was condemned as unsafe and he was forced back onto land.

For a few years, Turner was the cover artist for dozens of reprint sf and crime novels published in America by Gary Lovesi's Gryphon Book (I arranged and introduced a couple of crime reprints for him and was very happy when copies turned up with Turner's fabulous covers). His finest work, however, was perhaps his return after thirty odd years to drawing a new Daleks strip for Doctor Who Magazine in 1997.

Turner was hospitalised after suffering a stroke the following year and a second stroke shortly after returning home proved fatal.

The book, of course, goes into far greater detail over its 384 pages. You'll learn the background of names like Vargo Statten and Rick Random, what Turner's reaction was to saving the life of a child, the blame game battle between artist and agent, and what he really thought of some of the strips he worked on. It's an astonishingly honest portrait of all involved. This is not a hagiography, but nor is it a a knife to the back. It honestly portrays the highs and lows of Turner's career and how the artist, as flawed a human as we all are, reacted to each turn of events. Forewords by his four children offer some deeply personal views and stories that help reveal Turner's character.

Like most, I'm also here for the art and you won't be disappointed. Having designed a book or two myself, I know it isn't always easy as you want to use the best quality artwork for your full-page pictures. This means they tend to be Turner's recreations of covers rather than the original covers themselves. That said, the cover reproductions are never more than four to a page, which means that they are still great to look at.

Comic strips, on the other hand, suffer a little depending on the size of the original. A Rick Random has legible text, but you might strain to read a page reproduced from Tiger.

I should add that the book covers are amazing. A lot of my Vargo Statten's have old tape marks and other defects which are beyond my Photoshopping skills. It speaks to the quality of the books that they have been read and re-read over a period of 75 years. To finally have the covers all in mint condition is a joy. In fact, the whole book is a joy from first page to last.

The Fantastic Art of Ron Turner by John Lawrence.
Telos Publishing ISBN 978-184583235-3, 15 March 2025, 384pp, £49.99. Available via Amazon.

The Redemption of Andy Capp by Paul Slade

I doubt if there is a reader of this blog who hasn't heard of Andy Capp and I imagine nine out of ten has an opinion of the strip, good or bad. The strip began appearing in 1957 and is still a part of the Daily Mirror. I grew up in a house where the Mirror was our daily newspaper, but my favourite strips were 'The Perishers' and 'Garth'. As a kid I didn't need to read about a hard-drinking northerner, always arguing with his wife. I had enough of that at home.

Andy Capp has often been denounced as a drunken wife-beater and that's an accusation Paul Slade dives straight into in his essay collection The Redemption of Andy Capp. There must be more going on for the strip to have lasted almost seventy years, 15,000 strips drawn by his creator Reg Smythe, who died in 1998, at which time the strip was being syndicated to over 1,700 newspapers around the globe, translated into 14 languages and read daily by an estimated 250 million in 52 countries. There has to be more.

"It was a different time," some will argue, and indeed it was, with slapping and smacking far more acceptable than nowadays. Let's not forget that one in eleven women over the age of 16 suffers domestic abuse even now; things were a lot worse in the 1950s and 1960s. But Smythe was already cutting back on strips that involved violence by the early 1960s... or at least disguising the violence as a cloud of dust with a couple of fists and feet sticking out—impossible to know whether Andy or Flo was getting the better of the other.

Slade quotes Smythe, his niece (Helene de Klerk, author of My Dancing Bear) and others on the subject that Flo is no doormat in their relationship but the fact is that the strip has moved away from domestic violence  to the occasional thrown pan. Co-author Lawrence Goldsmith says of Andy's violent past "People still refer to Andy like that, but he hasn't actually been that way for over 40 years."

Slade's account of Smythe's upbringing paints the artist's parents as the models for Andy and Flo, Richard Smyth a heavy-drinking boat-builder in a flat cap  and Florrie Smyth (née Pearce) an argumentative barmaid, her hair in curlers and held in place with a scarf. Young Reg saw nothing more of his father after joining the army at 18., but his mother would later confirm that it was her relationship with Richard that was the basis for Andy and Flo.

After the war, Smythe found work as a clerk with the G.P.O., but his interest in drawing led him to approach editors and an agent, Charles Gilbert, who managed to sell two of his cartoons to Everybody's, earning the artist more than he earned from the Post Office. Thereafter, he churned out 60 cartoons a week in his evenings which meant he could marry and set up home.

He added the 'e' to his signature in the 1950s because he thought it looked classier and was soon working regularly for the Daily Mirror. In July 1957, while visiting his mother at 37 Durham Street, Hartlepool (later to become Andy & Flo's address), he received a telegram: "Mr Cudlipp needs a cartoon to appeal to Northern readers. You are wanted straight away." This was to appear on the 'Laughter' cartoon page of the Manchester edition of the paper.

Andy first appeared on 5 August 1957... but the rest of Andy's (and Reg Smythe's) story is for Paul Slade to tell, as he does in detail in his essay that takes up over 70 pages of his latest 190-page book. While Andy gives his name to the book's title, the eight essays and reviews in the book cover a broad range of comic-related subjects, including Tintin, Frank Miller's Born Again and Elektra: Assassin, and Peter Jackson's London is Stranger Than Fiction (full disclosure: there's a quote from me in the latter essay which caught me by surprise because I'd forgotten all about Paul mailing me some questions about Jackson).

The final piece was inspired by a nature talk given by David Attenborough about a caterpillar that fools ants into thinking it is an ant larvae; they treat it like a Queen until a butterfly emerges... but sometimes wasps lay their eggs in the caterpillar larvae and wasps emerge. It all sound horrifying and Slade has turned it into a very creepy comic strip (drawn by Hans Rickhelt).

Along the way there's a look at superhero court cases between Marvel and various creators (Jack Kirby, Siegel & Schuster, Steve Gerber, etc.) and a brief interview with 'Alex' co-creator Russell Taylor.

There should be something here for everyone and the centrepiece essay on Andy Capp is a fully-referenced and compelling argument that the character should be reassessed and not condemned for how he was—a wastrel born out of Smythe's own experiences—but appreciated for the world famous character he is.

The Redemption of Andy Capp by Paul Slade.
Self published, 26 August 2024, 191pp, £9.80. Available via Amazon.

Lilliput Magazine: A History and Bibliography

Chris Harte has published yet another huge volume dedicated to a single magazine, as he has done with various sports titles over the past few years. This latest, dedicated to a tiny magazine, clocks in at 362 A4 pages, and lists the contents of every issue and spin-off, along with indexes of authors, illustrators, photo-journalists, and an astonishing number of photos of authors, artists and editorial staff scattered throughout.

While the indexes may prove invaluable in years to come (as have those in Harte's The Captain which I've grabbed from the shelf on several occasions), the best part of the book is the 40-or-so-page introduction covering the history of Lilliput.

The story begins in Hungary when 13-year-old Istvan Reich buys a camera. A chance snap of a former foreign secretary was used in the Budapest weekly Erdekes Usag, and the young boy decides he wants to be a photo-journalist. During the Great War, Reich works with Sandor Kellner on the trade journal Szinhazi Elet—Kellner would later change his name to Alexander Korda, a huge name in the film industry. Reich also involves himself in films as a photographer, screenwriter and cameraman in Germany.

In 1923 he changes his name to Stefan Lorant and edits various German picture magazines. In 1933 Hitler comes to power and Lorant is arrested and held in jail for six months. Freed after months of effort by the Hungarian Consulate General, he is released, returns to Budapest but soon makes his way to Paris and then London.

There he becomes the founding editor of the influential Weekly Illustrated, but leaves after only five months, citing a lack of appreciation by management. While freelancing, he was introduced to Alison Hooper; a year later Lorant invited her to holiday with him in the south of France. There, with other refugees, the discussion turned to producing a pocket magazine along the lines of the American Coronet.

With financial backing from Alison (who under her maiden name of Blair was assistant editor) Lilliput became a reality, albeit a loss-maker until it established itself and began taking advertising. Before long, Lorant was able to sell the magazine to Hulton Press for £20,000. Hulton was able to grow the magazine's circulation even during the war, doubling from 250,000 in 1940 to 500,000 in 1947. Lorant also created Picture Post for Hulton, which was selling over a million copies by its third issue.

Lorant's personal life included a number of acknowledged and unacknowledged children. Alison had his daughter and, with her other two daughters, moved to America. Lorant was classified as an enemy alien and he, too, fled to America, where he remained the rest of his life.

Much of the introduction is dedicated to a survey of the history of the magazine, its contents and the problems Lorant faced behind the scenes from Edward Hulton, with whom he disagreed on many things. Tom Hopkinson took over as editor in 1940 with Kaye Webb his assistant editor. Its easy style and mix of articles, stories, photos and cartoons made it entertaining reading during the blackout and increasing sales offset the increased costs of wartime production. Big name writers from George Bernard Shaw to Ernest Hemingway contributed and the occasional nude helped sales along.

Richard Bennett became editor in 1946 and Kaye Webb was let go in 1947, the contents began to change; there was greater interference from Edward Hulton, who thought the paper was publishing too much from left wing writers. At the same time, fewer writers from across Europe were appearing, changing the tone and removing one of the magazine's unique aspects.

Bennett was replaced by Jack Hargreaves in 1951 and dropped many of its contributors in a desperate attempt to modernise. Hargreaves was promoted to managing editor within months, and Colin Willock briefly installed as editor. Sales continued to fall, and Hulton took the unusual move of trying to tempt Stefan Lorant back from the USA. Lorant, however, owed money to the taxman and decided to stay in America.

New editor Michael Middleton didn't last long; Lilliput was enlarged in size at the suggestion of advertising management and Willock returned with plans to reverse many changes made by his recent predecessors. Advertorials, puff pieces and, in 1955, photographic covers of models. Mark Boxer and William Richardson occupied the editorial chair, the latter drawing heavily on American reprints from Saturday Evening Post, Collier's and Playboy. Richardson was promoted out of harm's way in 1958, and the magazine given a makeover... and another makeover six months later, these masterminded by executive editor Willock and assistant editor Denis Pitts, who became editor in 1959.

Pitts made some bold choices as editor, but it was too late, and Lilliput was merged with Men Only in August 1960, after 277 issues.

This, of course, is a brief precis of Lilliput's history, which is much expanded upon by Chris Harte. Along with checklists, indexes and an absolutely astonishing number of photographs of Lilliput's contributors (I haven't counted how many, but there are pages of them!), this is the ultimate trip through the history of this fascinating magazine.

Lilliput Magazine: A History and Bibliography by Chris Harte
Sports History Publishing ISBN 978-189801018-0, 3 June 2024, 362pp, £29.95. Available via Amazon.

A Ridge of High Laughter! by Alan Clark

Alan Clark's latest book is a 300-page full-colour look at the 'Wonderful World of Radio Fun', the Amalgamated Press's weekly comic that ran for 1,152 issues between 1938 and 1961. The comic was filled with the stars of the wireless that helped see Britain through the war years when the nascent BBC television service was forced to shut down on 1 September 1939, only resuming transmission on 7 June 1946.

Radio Fun got off to an odd start, putting a non-radio character (Roy Wilson's 'George the Jolly Gee-Gee') on the colour front page; this lasted a few months before George was replaced by Arthur Askey from Band Waggon, where "Big-hearted" Arthur was teamed with Richard "Stinker" Murdoch. The show only ran for 52 episodes in three short series between 1938 and 1939, but was so popular that it became a film and stage show in 1940; Arthur's move from back cover to front cover reflected his popularity in Radio Fun.

Tommy Handley also began as a strip in the early 1940s, but took over the cover in around 1945, by which time Handley was firmly established as a top radio attraction, starring in ITMA (It's That Man Again). It almost never happened, as the first series had to be abandoned when war broke out. It restarted a few week's later, but in a revamped format that really took off.

Radio Fun included dozens of now forgotten stars like Sandy Powell, Duggie Wakefield and the duo Haver and Lee; but it also featured Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon, Kenneth Horne, Petula Clark, Gracie Fields, Peter Brough, Arthur English, Benny Hill and Norman Wisdom, plus singing trio The Beverley Sisters. Listeners to Radio 4 Extra should recognise most of those names.

For adventure, readers had text stories starring Inspector Stanley "The man with a thousand secrets", who battled a remarkable criminal known as The Falcon. The Falcon eventually escaped Stanley's clutches to star in his own comic strip. Shirley Eaton, before she became James Bond's golden girl, was an adventuress, caught up in—and solving—countless crimes. 'Jane X' also began as a text series that turned into a comic strip, replacing Shirley Eaton.

As with all of Clark's books, this one is filled with brief biographies of artists and artistes, so even the most obscure radio star will be an old friend by the end of the book. It's another marvelous volume from the prolific and entertaining writer of a dozen other volumes, often covering comics from the Victorian and Edwardian ages.

A Ridge of High Laughter! The Wonderful World of Radio Fun by Alan Clark
Alan Clark [no ISBN], (October) 2023, 302pp, £30.00 including p&p. Available via Ebay, where you will also find other titles that are still available. This includes an updated edition of Clark's book about the works of C. H. Ross, Sugar-Plums & Tootletum, with an additional 20 pages.

Miniature Marvels: The Book-Cover Art of James E McConnell

If you collect fiction from the four decades between the 1930s and 1960s, ‘Jas E McConnell’ is a signature that most will recognise. Between 1931 and 1968, James Edwin McConnell – to give him his full name – painted over 2,000 book covers, over a third of which you’ll find in the pages of Steve Chibnall’s study of the artists’ work, Miniature Marvels: The Book Cover Art Of James E McConnell.  

At the beginning in the 1930s, McConnell was chiefly associated with crime novels, especially the works of Peter Cheyney, Berkeley Grey, Victor Gunn, Vernon Warren and Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu. His output in crime was only eclipsed by the 600 or so Western covers he produced for Amalgamated Press, Fiction House, Mills & Boon and T V Boardman. His 28 Western covers for Corgi Books, who had probably the best line of quality wild west novels in the 1950s and ‘60s, are a testament to McConnell’s incredible imagination, with no two covers alike (thematically yes, artistically no).

At the same time, he was producing romantic and historical covers – his covers for Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels and Raphael Sabatini’s romances of the Spanish Main for Pan may well be amongst his most memorable as they were so widely available in the 1960s.

McConnell’s heroes were square-jawed and he occasionally got into trouble for having the same face he imagined to be heroic on too many covers. Hiring models might have solved the problem; he hired costumes from a shop in Holborn and would have the model dress up, only occasionally photographing them for reference. For the most part he thought hiring models a waste of time, preferring his imagination and using reference material to make sure that details were authentic, although he was not above using an actress from the pages of Picturegoer as a model.

Chiefly he worked in gouache, occasionally in oils, his painting produced ‘twice up’ – double the size of the printed version. He didn’t do any of the lettering… just left enough space for it.

Steve Chibnall’s book expands on McConnell’s life, adding absorbing insights into his career thanks to a 1991 interview with the artist and the assistance of his daughter, Ann. This means that Steve has been able to include photos and many personal anecdotes that flesh out the story of McConnell’s life, which he does over eight chapters, including a running biography and chapters dedicated to various genres, crime, western, romance and others.

These include some fascinating details, such as McConnell’s introduction to Pan Books in November 1957. It is no coincidence that Reginald Heade had died a month earlier and McConnell was commissioned to produce the kind of realistic, delicately-hued covers that would previously have gone to Heade. McConnell and Heade had other connections, not only working for many of the same publishers but both starting out in the dust-jacket market in 1931.

Chibnall catalogues over 1,700 covers identified from McConnell’s own records, with over 750 of them included in this 350 page volume, which is a must-have for anyone who appreciates the art of the book cover.

Miniature Marvels. The book-cover art of James E McConnell by Steve Chibnall. Telos Publishing ISBN 978-184583210-0, 15 June 2023, 352pp, £44.99. Available from Telos.

Fleetway Picture Library Classics

They're like buses... you wait for ages and three come along at once. I'm talking the latest releases from The Book Palace, of course.

The latest trio are collections of pocket libraries, namely a second volume of Larrigan westerns entitled Larrigan Rides Again, a gathering of four of Gino D'Antonio's Frontline War Stories, and Captain Blood, which brings together four pirate yarns.

I can cover all three at reasonable pace, because we have seen quite a few of these volumes in the past - I think there has been ten volumes already, bringing together scarce issues of Thriller, Super Detective, Lone Rider, War and Battle picture libraries. The slight difference here is that these latest volumes are proper hardcovers rather than the flexiback covers of earlier volumes, which makes them even sturdier.

The first Larrigan collection brought together episodes drawn by Arturo Del Castillo for Lone Rider Picture Library (with one episode being slipped into the Cowboy Picture Library when Lone Rider folded). This volume picks up the remaining four episodes that appeared in Lone Rider and Cowboy, three drawn by Emilio Frejo and one by Carlos Roume. Frejo did his best to keep some continuity of look with Del Castillo's issues, but frankly need not have bothered; he was shaking off the influence by his last story ('Ghost Town') and it's my favourite of the three. Roume's rugged, square-jawed cowboys are always welcome.

Larrigan was one of those drifting cowboys who would arrive in town and finds himself caught up in a feud between cattlemen and rustlers or a local sheriff and invading gunfighters long before Sergio Leone filmed A Fistful of Dollars, which owed a debt to Kurosawa's Yojimbo, which itself owed a debt to Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest.

Captain Blood is also a sequel - to Pirates! - but this volume concentrates on Rafael Sabatini's classic pirate yarns, Captain Blood: His Odyssey (1922) and two collections The Chronicles of Captain Blood (1931) and The Fortunes of Captain Blood (1936). The Thriller Picture Library versions of the latter two adapted four  (of ten) stories from the first and two (of six) from the second. The artwork changed from issue to issue: C. E. Drury, Robert Forrest and Guido Buzelli drew these, with Forrest also drawing The Black Swan adapting another Sabatini pirate novel from 1932.

The third volume is a collection of four stories drawn by Gino D'Antonio. I love D'Antonio's work in War and Battle picture libraries and reprinted quite a bit when I had the opportunity a decade or so ago. His war work is simply amazing and any collection of his 34 full-length war stories is a winner in my eyes.

D'Antonio was drawing these stories through the studio of Roy D'Ami and even there he was admired by his fellow artists for the skill with which he depicted men in the middle of fighting mayhem.

Captain Blood (Fleetway Picture Library Classics)
Book Palace Books ISBN 978-191334842-1, 2023. 272pp, £25.00. Available via Amazon.

Gino D'Antonio's Frontline War Stories (Fleetway Picture Library Archives)
Book Palace Books ISBN 978-191334834-6, 2023, 272pp, £25.00. Available via Amazon.

Larrigan Rides Again (Fleetway Picture Library Classics)
Book Palace Books ISBN 978-191334841-4, 2023, 268pp, £25.00. Available via Amazon.

It's About Time by Brian Bolland

Brian Bolland has produced a memoir so unlike any other that it takes a few minutes to settle in to what he is trying to achieve. Laid out in rigid six-square panels, any page may contain a photograph of Brian in his twenties or in his fifties followed by a photograph of a brick wall, or a dead bird, or a photograph of fruit, or coins, or a starfish, or another photo of a schoolfriend, a girlfriend or tightly packed envelopes, or magazines. Each page is a collage of differing images and I guess it's up to the reader to try and decode Bolland's intentions in picking a certain image.

It's all about texture. Many photographs are closeups of brickwork, wood, the detritus on woodland floors, fruit, and rust... colours and textures that catch the artist's eye. They seem to be thrown in at random, but that can't be the case. I don't have Bolland's artistic eye, but I know what I like and there's something pleasing about the clusters of images on each page and the slow, steady revelations about his childhood, his schooldays and his career as an artist, although there's more about his holidays than about the time he spent drawing Judge Dredd or covers for Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Wonder Woman, etc., etc. This is not an art book -- see Joe Pruett's The Art of Brian Bolland (Image, 2006) for the definitive overview of Bolland's career or collections like Bolland Strips (Knockabout/Palmano Bennett, 2004) or the Illustrators Special (2019) edited by Peter Richardson if you just want artwork.

This is Bolland inviting you into his world and his psyche... I'm sure there will be psychologists studying these pages trying to figure out why he put in a particular photograph and juxtaposed it with another image... and I, because I am not a psychologist, will say that I strongly suspect he did it because he thought it looked nice, or he was in an impish mood the day he put together those pages. My big worry, since I am still some way from finishing the book, is that with 330 pages x 6 panels = 1,980 images, I just haven't yet come across the ones that, when you rearrange them and decipher their meaning, spell out the words "I WILL KILL AGAIN".

It's fascinating and intriguing in equal measure. Flipping through to a random page I just stumbled upon David Wright's Carol Day; later there are a series of photos of Bolland looking pensive at his drawing board, a Judge Dredd cover visible in some, thumbnails for Camelot 3000 in others; an earlier page has Rupert the Bear being carried off by a balloon and a fifties 'space gun' on the opposite page. You never know what the next page will bring.

Bolland covers his life meticulously through images and photographs. Some day, someone will discover row upon row of neatly written diaries bound in human skin inhis studio. Then we'll look back at this book and say "Well, all the clues were there. We just didn't realise." Until that day arrives, you can enjoy the book for what it is: a beautifully produced, colourful, humorous history of Bolland, his family, his holidays, his fascinations and his artwork.

It's About Time: A Memoir in Pictures and Words by Brian Bolland
Book Palace Books ISBN 978-191354833-9, March 2023, 330pp, £39.00.  Available from Book Palace Books. There is also a slipcase edition limited to 100 copies.