I wrote recently about how, back in 2014, I got to realise a childhood ambition by editing a one-off edition of TV21. I’d been drawing the characters and hardware from the Gerry Anderson series since I was old enough to make marks with a pen or pencil, and from the age of eight had been creating my own comics. This, I told myself (and anyone who asked) was what I would do for a living when I grew up. I was partly right, but mostly wrong.
As you might imagine, my first attempts at comics were crude affairs, drawn in biro, pencil crayon and felt-tip pens, laughable for the childish excitability of their plots (plots?), and the scribbly nature of my early artwork. Almost every strip ended in an explosion, none more memorably than my take on the ITC action adventure series Department S. To avoid having to draw the characters, I had them race around in a vehicle I christened the ‘Department S van’. After two episodes of dodging bullets and swerving through minefields, it plunged over a ledge and exploded…
This risible endeavour had formed part of a comic I drew some time around 1970 or 71, which I chistened TV Exciting. I misspelled the masthead every time, so that its actual title was ‘TV Exiting’. Its contents included UFO, Fireball XL5, Thunderbirds and Star Trek in addition to the aforementioned Department S, and like all my comic endeavours at that time, it lasted for only two editions. A year or so earlier, I’d started drawing a large picture of Captain Scarlet in coloured pencils. It was evidently too much for me and I set it aside, adding a note at the bottom of the page as a reminder to myself: ‘half finished – do another time.’ That pretty well summed up all of my creative endeavours and to some extent still does. The ‘two issue’ rule applied to every home made comic I ever created. Some never made it to one issue, whilst others didn’t even get as far as a completed front cover. But all rules were made to be broken, and in my case there was one notable exception...
It was during the long summer holiday in 1974 that I embarked on my most ambitious project to date – my own version of TV21. It had newspaper-style covers, and content that reflected the 1965 era of the original. I christened this new project ‘Scoop!’ – taking as my inspiration the headline on the cover of issue 13 of the original run of TV21, which I’d seen reproduced in an annual. I based my new comic on the first year of TV21, and like the original, I gave it a dateline in the future: Issue one was cover dated August 16 2064, ninety years and one week from the day I started drawing it, Friday 9 August 1974.
My new 10-page comic featured Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Stingray, a Stop Press page, some humour strips (Oink the seal, Zoonie the Lazoon and Mitch Monkey) and on the back cover, The Daleks (of course). Lady Penelope didn’t get a look in: I simply could not draw female characters. For the same reason, Marina and Atlanta were conspicuously absent from my Stingray strip, and I think Venus managed just two appearances in Fireball XL5.
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| Page from my 1974 diary: I didn't have time for much else, and it wasn't even half term! |
The storylines were a mash-up of ideas and plot lines drawn from pretty well every Gerry Anderson comic I’d ever seen, with plenty of concepts borrowed from TV episodes. I knew Stingray, Fireball XL5 and The Daleks well enough, but was fairly clueless when it came to Supercar, a series I’d not seen since the age of two, and of which I owned no books or comics. The strip reached a height of absurdity in an episode that sees Supercar called to London airport where a Fireflash airliner has just crashed, only to find Masterspy waiting in a police uniform with a camera hidden in his cap badge... if in doubt, rip off an episode of Thunderbirds…
Elsewhere, I borrowed ideas by the truckload, usually from TV21. My first Fireball XL5 serial featured the famous Astran characters, and the next storyline saw the ship shot to pieces by an escaped convict, revisiting the ‘Electrode 909’ storyline, which I’d come across in our school’s comic box a few years earlier. None of the plots made a great deal of sense, which was unsurprising, given that I was making them up as I went along. But what I lacked in editorial style, I made up for in enthusiasm and work ethic.
By the time the school holidays drew to a close I was already onto issue 3. Drawing Scoop! took up every spare minute I could find, usually on Sunday afternoons to the accompaniment of the Top 40 rundown. To this day, should I chance to hear Paper Lace’s single ‘The Black Eyed Boys’ (a chart entry during those weeks), I can almost see the exact frame I was drawing at the time. I would draw in my customary position, lying full length on the floor. I’ve tried to work out why I favoured this unusual method and can only conclude that it allowed me to get my face right up close to the page I was working on. I didn’t need glasses, but bending over a table can be back breaking. Maybe I’d made a breakthrough in ergonomics...
Either way, those Sunday afternoons fairly flew by, fuelled by our mum’s ‘bun loaf’ and sardines on toast. The autumn wore on and I just kept on drawing. Fifty years ago this week, my diary reports that I had already reached issue number eleven. Eleven!!? This was unheard of!
For the first few weeks, I was drawing more or less entirely from memory. References? I didn’t need them: I could draw pretty well all the Gerry Anderson vehicles and characters in my sleep. But from issue four onwards, I began to copy frames from Mike Noble’s Fireball XL5 strip, using Countdown reprints as reference. The quality of my artwork suddenly went up appreciably – but only for those frames where I had an original to copy. Elsewhere, my figure work was as dodgy as ever, and some of my framing left a lot to be desired, with speech balloons sometimes obscuring a character’s whole body! I did the same thing with Stingray, and revisiting those comics today, it’s immediately obvious where I’ve copied a Ron Embleton original. That said, my copying was of a pretty high standard, especially as I was trying to reproduce in biro and felt tip effects that the original artists had created with inks and airbrush.
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| Fireball XL5 drawn in my best Mike Noble knock-off style. Scoop! No. 4, September 1974 |
By the time I reached issue seven or eight, Scoop! had become a Mike Yarwood version of TV21, with all the strips based on my impressions of the originals. If I’d had a style of my own, I was leaving it behind. Only Supercar remained ‘all my own work’, and in contrast to the other strips, was not drawn in the manner of TV21 (which had inexplicably turned it into a humour strip).
At issue 9, I upped the page count to twelve, dropping the Oink, Zoonie and Mitch strips and bringing in Get Smart! and Burke’s Law. I’d avoided the latter for the simple reason of knowing nothing about the series, but during the autumn had chanced upon a copy of the first TV21 Annual at a jumble sale. It contained a couple of Burke’s Law strips, which gave me enough to go on.
My output remained prolific. By Monday 18 November, I was already up to issue 12. That’s almost a whole comic every week since starting it in August. All this was on top of any homework we’d been set, and in addition to various other illustrative efforts, including a comic based on the adventures of a friend from school who looked and acted like Peter Tork out of the Monkees. I was a one-man publishing venture, at the age of 13. I was also up to issue number 13 by now, which introduced real photographic covers, featuring pictures snipped out of old editions of TV21. I saw nothing wrong with such mutilation: I’d been compiling TV21 photos into scrapbooks for some time, with the result that my 1968-69 era copies were beginning to look somewhat battle-scarred.
In the run up to Christmas 74, things slowed down somewhat. By this time I was also drawing a Scoop! Annual alongside the weekly comic. I worked right up to the 22nd of December when Christmas stuff like visits to relatives and watching all the festive episodes on television kicked drawing activities into touch.
Number 13 was finished on Tuesday 14 January 1975, and I made a start on the cover of No.14. Then, on 25 January 1975, I pushed the envelope a little too far…
Anyone who knows the history of British comics will be familiar with the phenomenon of a publisher starting too many titles and resorting to closure and amalgamation. And that’s exactly what happened with me. Alongside Scoop!, I decided to start a companion comic, based loosely on the line-up from TV Tornado, with strips including Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and The Man from UNCLE. It even came with a free gift in the shape of an UNCLE identity badge. I called this new endeavour Ricochet, and according to my diary it was ‘intended for June ‘75’ – forward planning, no less!
Issue number one of this new comic was, staggeringly, completed in less than twenty four hours, and by Monday 27 January I was onto issue 2 with its free gift of an elastic band-firing Man From UNCLE gun. Comic editing and marketing? I had it taped, and I wasn’t yet fourteen.
Meanwhile, Hodgibits – the comic featuring the Peter Tork lookalike – completed its third issue on Friday 31 January. By Sunday 2 February, I was still working on Scoop! 14 and a separate Thunderbirds special (which got no further than a front cover). Sunday 16 February saw me working on Ricochet No. 2 and the Scoop! Annual (which would eventually get finished). A week later, as if I hadn’t given myself enough to do, I embarked on a Cybermen Annual, getting as far as a cover and a couple of text stories. This was still a work in progress on Sunday 2 March, but two days later came the fatal diary entry: ‘Leave the Cybermen Annual for a while as there is no time to do it.’ The time to do it never came, but the Cybermen Annual still exists in its incompleted form, a testament to over enthusiasm if nothing else.
I wasn’t finished, either: Saturday 15 March saw me start yet another drawing project, no less than a Tintin book, ambitiously entitled The Second Moon. It wasn’t my first such effort either. This one had a cover, drawn in my best Hergé knock-off felt tip and biro style, and… not a lot else. From the success of Scoop! I’d fallen back into the old ways: ‘half finished… do another time.’
I wasn’t done with Scoop! just yet, though – my most successful creation to date was still getting some attention on Saturday 22 March, when I added a Supercar story to the still incomplete annual. But this was to be the last mention of Scoop! in the diary for two months. On Friday 23 May I finally finished number 14 of the comic and the following day started work on number 15, possibly inspired by ITV having been blacked out by industrial action.
Whilst it had taken TV21 52 issues to introduce a Thunderbirds strip, I couldn’t wait that long. My work rate may have been prodigious, but there was no way I could complete that many editions. So it was that, with issue 16 of Scoop! I yet again revamped the format. Photos were now featuring not only on the covers but on the inside Stop Press pages, saving me a bit of drawing, but exacting a heavy price on my surviving copies of TV21.
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| Thunderbirds joins the line-up, Scoop! No.16, June 1975 |
Scoop! 16 was still in progress in mid June, when I embarked on a second Fireball XL5 Annual. Hang on, I hear you say: a ‘second’ Fireball XL5 Annual? Well, yes. My summer holiday project of 1973 had been a Fireball XL5 Annual, inspired by a dream of seeing the cover and contents of a non-existent edition. This took me through into the early summer of 1974, and it can’t have been long after completing it that I set out on the Scoop! project.
By 10 July, I was working on issue 17 of the comic, telling my diary that I would ‘catch up on Scoop in the summer holiday.’ Fine words, no parsnips buttered. However, I was about to cause a minor sensation when I exhibited Scoop! at our school hobbies competition. Surprisingly, perhaps, no one scoffed at the sight of a 14-year-old showing off comics of Gerry Anderson series. After all, I’d drawn 17 issues of a comic and you couldn’t argue with that level of productivity. The comics looked quite impressive set out on my drawing board (I know… I’d had a drawing board since Christmas 1972 but I still lay on the living room floor to make my comics).
Everyone who saw my creations was impressed. The exhibition was open to parents, one of whom was involved in the print business in some way, and gave me his business card. This was widely interpreted as my having ‘made it’ in some way – as if this guy was somehow going to set me up in business when in reality he just saw me as a potential client who might want his comics printing. I knew differently. These weren’t original creations – they were based on copyrights owned by ATV/ITC and I couldn’t just go printing and distributing them willy-nilly. Even at that age, I knew what I was doing in my self-made publishing empire – copyrights, marketing, promotion…
After its success at the hobbies competition, you might have expected me to make good on my promise to ‘catch up on Scoop’ during the summer holidays. But no. Change was on the horizon – change in the shape of a brand-new Gerry Anderson series, Space:1999. I can’t adequately describe the excitement of seeing this lavish new production when it aired on Thursday 4 September 1975. The following week, immediately after watching episode 2 (Force of Life), I started work on a new Space:1999 comic. It couldn’t go into Scoop! in much the same way that Joe 90 couldn’t go into TV21, so it got a title to itself. Never mind that I barely knew the series after just two weeks on air: I already had the annual, and had read a couple of the prematurely published novelisations earlier in the year. The plot managed to cram in practically everything we came to know, love and laugh at about Space:1999 – huge alien spaceships, Eagle crashes, Alphans going mad on the lunar surface, people being killed and brought back to life, massive planets that appear out of nowhere, lost space probes that reappear mysteriously from the past... it was also completely incoherent – exactly like the real thing.
Despite this new venture, I kept up with Scoop! and by Sunday 9 November was working on issue 20. Then, on Saturday 29 November, on top of everything else, I started making another new annual, this time based on Supercar – whereby hangs a tale that must wait to be told another time.
Issue 20 looked as if it might be the end of Scoop! Looking back over more than a year’s work, I could see the improvements that had taken place. My drawing was now a lot better, and the hand-lettered headlines that had looked a bit cranky on the first few editions were now greatly improved. Maybe it was time to start again?
It would me take nearly a year to get around to it, but Scoop! was briefly revived in much improved quality in 1976. This time I had a typewriter with which to produce the newspaper-style covers, and my drawing style had matured considerably. By Saturday 15 January 1977, I was working on the third of a new series, and had already got going on a brand new Scoop! Annual as early as October of the previous year. The new series of the comic had reached number 6 by late March, but wouldn’t get any further. This was, after all, the year in which I was expected to sit for my ‘O’ levels.
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| Scoop!'s short-lived second series, 1976-77 |
For the best part of four years, I’d devoted a vast tranche of my spare time to drawing Gerry Anderson comics, but now I’d reached the end of the line. A few years later, a real-life comic called Scoop appeared in newsagents. But – horror – it was about football (I have always detested football). How dare they use my comic’s title for a bloody soccer magazine! And how inappropriate a title! Football comics had titles like Score, Scorcher or Striker. I suppose Scoop also began with the letter S…
In a way, it seems ironic that my Gerry Anderson comic title should have been appropriated by a football publication, because that’s exactly what happened to the original TV21 – an editorial team took charge who neither understood nor cared about the comic they’d inherited and immediately introduced inappropriate content – ie. football features – to howls of derision from loyal readers.
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My home-made comics may be 50 years old, but they have all survived, more or less intact. The staples have long ago turned to rust, and any sellotape I may have used in appending photographs has yellowed and dried out. I wonder what will become of them when I’m no longer around to curate my own personal history? Will they be a source of mirth to some house clearance company charged with sending them to recycling? Will someone discover them and bring them together in a kind of naive art publication? I’m not sure that my teenage comics would be deserving of that kind of immortality. I created them to amuse myself, to practise drawing and to while away the hours when I wasn’t at school, asleep or watching television. They’re probably a testament to something or other – naive ambition, persistence, teenage enthusiasm, I don’t know.
One further question to be answered is when and why did I stop making comics? I was still drawing strips up to around 1982, but the following year I started my first job. This, I'm sure, was a major factor in bringing an end to my creative endeavours – lack of available time. All the titles shown in this blog were created in a sustained burst of activity lasting from 1973 to 77, a work rate which simply couldn't be maintained and to which I never returned. Back in 1975, if anyone had asked me what career path I might follow, I'd have answered without hesitation: comics. Of course, I didn’t know anything of the reality of life for the long-distance comic creator: poor pay, long hours, no rights in your own creations, struggling to make ends meet, tied to the drawing board with impossible deadlines to meet, mental and physical illness, nervous breakdown... As the saying goes, you should be careful what you wish for.
Perhaps I was too careful, because aside from a year or so working on nursery comics for the BBC back in the 1990s, comics and I have never come together. It took until 2014 for me to stake out my own little bit of Gerry Anderson territory, forty years on from Scoop! That’s now ten years in the past, Scoop! has reached its half century and am I any closer to being recognised as a ‘name’ in the world of comic creators? Well, you know the answer to that one...
Keep scrolling down and you'll see a few more examples from my 'archives'...
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| Some of my output spanning the years 1973-76. Two of the 'annuals' were completed, but often they got no further than a cover and a few pages. |
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| Stingray, featuring frames copied from Ron Embleton's originals, Scoop! No.5, September 1974 |
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| The last page from the last edition, The Daleks, drawn in the manner of Richard Jennings, 1977 |