Sunday 7 February 2010

An exclusive on the way... nearly there


In the words of the immortal Rolf - can you tell what it is yet?

Best Of Buster



Got this before Christmas but only got round to waffling about it now. Its a pretty nifty, with a good diverse selection of strips. personally, i'd rather have seen more of Mr Baxendale and Reid, especially the latter and his brilliant Faceache creation.
Highly recommended, only available in WH Smiths and, at least before Crimbo, quite hard to track down. Dunno if that's still the case now.

Wednesday 3 February 2010

Best Of Battle - Johnny Red


Hello chums, time for another update and we're delving back into the really rather nifty Best Of Battle and another of my favourites from my school days.
Think the appeal of Johnny Red was that it coincided with me getting into Airfix kits big-time, so i was reading the strip at exactly the same time as being surrounded by my own Hurricane's, Heinkel 111's and Stuka's.
What's great about the collected strips here is that they're the first few, with brilliant art by Joe Colquhoun, which i haven't reread since it started in 1977.
Up until now i've only had hazy memories of those times, with my main memories being of the strip after it'd occured to me to keep hold of my copies and they consisted of the really rather silly tales of Johnny having a red skull painted on his plane and really rather not-so-good art by John Cooper.
Anyway, the selection here shows how leisurely the pace was to get to the premise of Johnny fighting alongside the Falcons - its 3 issues before he meets them and 5 until he decides to join them.
Along the way we get brilliant art and lovely action sequences, favourite being the blasting of a rockface to make an avalanche to wipe out the German tank squadron.
Its been proposed often enough that there'll be a graphic novel and i can't wait. If it does show up i ain't doing an "Aieeee!" Watch on it as 1977 seems to be a golden year for such exclamations.

Evidence below M'lud:
"AIEEEE!" WATCH:
An unusual "H" popping up and a frankly uneccesary SIX "E"'s from a freshly machinegunned German pilot - "Ahieeeeee!"
Yakob has a war cry derivitive - "Haaaieeee!"
The Russian Front really seems to make the German's produce a lot of "E"'s and go heavy on the "H". A tank gets blown up with this heard from inside - "Ahieeeeeeegh!"