Hookjaw - the collected edition

While Spitfire Comics have to be commended both for putting this out, and having the nice touch of making it similar in style to the Titan reprints, the hideous wait after prepaying (over a year!), kinda soured things for when it did arrive.

Now the sourness has gone and i can look at it objectively, its great to read all the tales together but... boy does it go downhill all of a sudden.

Book One: The Oil Rig is a bona fide classic, with stunning, nasty artwork from Ramon Sola and an equally nasty character in boss McNally. There are so many iconic images from this period that i could fill a good couple of web pages with them alone, and i might do so bit by bit.

Once McNally is so memorably dispatched, we go into Book Two: Paradise Island - and hit the skids big-time.

So Mason now works for an equally unpleasent boss but this time at a resort in the Gulf of Mexico. Hookjaw turns up and each episode dips lower and lower in quality in both script (voodoo rituals to get rid of him????) and art.

Can't believe its Sola as the artist throughout this tale, especially towards the end.

And there. apart from the lengthy wait, is my problem with this collection. Its tried so hard to emulate the Titan style of reprints, and done it very well, but they never went the final stretch and had a preface detailing the origins of the strip, indepth biogs of those involved, nor an introduction from Pat Mills (who i'm sure would've been up fo it).

This is Volume 1 and maybe they'll correct that for Vol 2, but i won't be buying. I have the next strips and the art is even worse. And when he gets to England...

Action - nice while it lasted

Lets see. Febuary 1976, i was 13. Just about right i'd say for this one to have the impact it was supposed to.

And boy did it - suddenly comics had an edge greater than ever seen before and here we were in the playground reading strips that were downright nasty.

Back then i kinda (70's talk again) liked Dredger, but after a few weeks i got bored with the same sort of set-up and pay-off each week (and the art went downhill REAL fast there).

No, my fav's were Hookjaw and Hellman. And here have example's from that first issue.

Hellman, 'cause i was still into war strips via Battle's Johhny Red, Charlie's War, Rat Pack and Major Easy. But as you can see here Mike Conroy's art was as dark as Joe Coloquen on Charlie's War, but even grittier.

And Hookjaw because, again, the bad guys are the more interesting. Abd you don't get any badder than him.

Interesting to see here with this first ever shot of him, how small he is - no swallowing divers in one gulp yet.

Why another Blog. An introduction.

To answer that is to delve back to my childhood.
The family maintain i could read before i started school, and it was mainly on DC comics, especially Batman. Don't have any recollection of that - aside from one issue, which i'll come to in due course - but what i have plenty of recollections of are the comics i was reading in the late 60's right up to adulthood (?) in the late 70's.

British Boys Comics.

Yup, every one i could get me grubby mitts on i devoured (except, for some reason i can't fathom, Hotspur). The beauty of them was the diverse range of subjects on offer. If it wasn't a war comic like Battle and Warlord or action like, er, Action, each title would have drama (read and loved), comedy (ditto if it was Leo Baxendale or Ken Reid), mystery (ditto) and sport (avoided like the plague).

A large part of the appeal were the often outlandish set-ups and characters, but mainly it was the fantastic art on offer, with some of the moodiest and downright scary black and white work ever. The love of this style resonates now - to me, British comics should be b/w and never colour.

So, the point of this Blog. With the likes of the Albion mini series and many classic characters turning up in the excellent Jack Staff, i figured there'd be plenty of the sites on the Net springing up to showcase this brilliant back catalogue.
Aside from a couple of nifty sites (which i'll get to in due course), that hasn't really happened.
Feeling an urge to set down what i think of this alternative Britain, i've gone ahead an created this here Blog.

What you're gonna (always "gonna" from now on - we're in the 70's see?) get are my thoughts on my favourite characters and titles. Its a one sided fanboy view, a love letter to 1968 - 1978.

E