British Comics Of The 50s, 60s And 70s – Nostalgia Vital

World War II, cowboys and football have been the tripod on which boys’ comics have been built in the Fifties and Sixties.

DC Thomson and Fleetway have been in difficult competition with their comics, despite the fact that Thomsons were clean winners with their ageless twins, The Dandy and The Beano which had no real opposite numbers.

Fleetway, in the meantime, led effortlessly with their nursery comics, Jack and Jill, Playhour and Harold Hare towards Thomson’s Bimbo and Longacre’s Robin, which had been all prettily produced in shade.

The comics presented a world of constant, dependable friends and dependable traditions. Easter constantly added loads of adventures concerning eggs. In August, the solar continually shone on the sands, the cliffs, the lighthouses, the sparkling sea and the crabs.

In November, the pages and the name whirled with sparks and whooshing rockets. And at Christmas – aside from slap-up feasts of round puds and cigars – there might constantly be snow on the lettering and a cascade of offers and overflowing stockings, regularly distributed from the open cockpit of a plane by a genial Santa Claus.

The comics shared a common vocabulary of emotive phrases like “Tee-hee”, “Haw-haw”, “Aaargh”, “Gulp”, “Zzzzzzzz”, “Yikes”, “Splat”, “Eeek”, “Yeeow” and “Glub” (as while sinking right into a pool of mud) and a shared technique to food – someone became constantly being rewarded with a “slap-up” meal or a “excellent tuck-in”, typically related to a hen leg, a slice of fruit cake dripping with icing, or a pile of bangers and mash in which the sausages stuck out of a mountain of mashed potato like fats hands.

Reading them required, of route, a entire recognition of humans rolling downhill engulfed in a monster snowball; of puppies, snakes, horses, bears and ostriches having the ability to speak; and of lightbulbs soaring over humans’s heads containing the word “Idea”.

The creators of those comics knew instinctively an adolescent’s unconscious desire to become invisible at will, or to fly like a hen, or to wipe the floor with the competition through an remarkable display of skill at soccer, cricket, going for walks, boxing or pole vaulting. And so memories concerned anti-gravitation bracelets or cream to make you invisible, or mysterious masked players leading a flagging crew to victory (every now and then it wouldn’t be a masked participant, however a kangaroo or a robotic).

Young readers wallowed fortuitously via jungles, towns, prairies and misplaced planets, inside the organization of human beings (or robots) who grappled with pterodactyls, stopped villains of their tracks with a freezing ray, leapt over double-decker buses, prevented tanks with the aid of smearing ice cream over the street, burrowed via the earth in a vehicle like a large outsized timber screw, hacked at the tentacles of large squids coiled around ocean liners, or beat off several thousand baffled tribesmen with not anything more than a cricket bat.

Girls’ comics featured younger ladies who perpetually went to posh boarding schools with dorms, matrons, gets rid of and tuck shops.

Heroines had names like Hetty, Bubbles, Cherry and Babs and male family called Jago, Rodney and Pongo (the latter typically reserved for an obnoxious brother). But especially, ladies regarded to have a penchant for forming secret societies.

Skillfully woven into the thrilling yarns about the mysteries and japes befalling residence captains, prefects, ballerinas and ice skaters were impeccable moral codes. Impressionable young readers were left in absolute confidence in anyway approximately the difference between proper and wrong. It turned into a international wherein cheats, liars, spiteful girls and sneaks were by no means allowed to prosper; in which top usually triumphed positively over evil, leaving no messy gray areas to blur standards.

To maintain loyalty and to inspire new readers, the comics regularly gave away Exciting Free Gifts – the card gun that fired elastic bands, the paper fish that told your fortune by way of curling up in the palm of your hand, the balloon beeper, the Super Squirt Ring, the Terrifying Bull Roarer, the whizzing disc, the mirth-provoking nail-thru finger joke and hundreds of others.

This isn't an exhaustive listing of British comics from the 50s, 60s and 70s. It is a recollection of a number of the comics which are both private favourites or which can be especially consultant of the technology or genre.

• 2000 AD
• The Beano
• The Beezer
• Bullet
• Bunty
• Buster
• Cor!!
• Cracker
• The Crunch
• The Dandy
• Eagle
• Girl
• Girls Crystal
• The Hotspur
• Jack and Jill
• Jackie
• Jag
• Jinty
• Judy
• Lion
• Look and Learn
• Mandy
• Monster Fun
• Playhour
• Plug
• Robin
• The Rover
• Roy of the Rovers
• School Friend
• Scorcher
• Shiver and Shake
• Sparky
• Starblazer
• Starlord
• Tammy
• Thunder
• Tiger
• The Topper
• TV21/TV Century 21
• TV Comic
• Twinkle
• Valiant
• Victor
• Whizzer and Chips
• Whoopee!
• The Wizard