Did exactly what it said on the masthead

 

TV Comic: a personal reminiscence

It was a forward-looking publication, the first British comic to feature content derived from TV programmes, and it went on to become one of the longest lasting of such endeavours, enduring all the way to 1984. It came from the Daily Mirror group, and it did exactly what it said on the masthead. Its name was TV Comic.

My first sighting of it was at Christmas 1965, in the form of that year’s annual (above), bought for my brother. It was quite a bit too old for him, being aimed, I would guess, at readers in the 8-10 age range (my brother was just two and a half). The purchase was probably a mistake: the previous year, he’d been given TV Land Annual, a publication intended for much younger readers. TV Comic had also, originally, been targeted at the very young, featuring Muffin the Mule as its cover star when it debuted in November 1951.

By the time I set eyes on TV Comic, its contents had been revamped to appeal to a slightly older age group. It certainly didn’t appeal to me, as it included three of my least favourite TV shows: Dr. Who, Space Patrol and The Telegoons. I was scared of all of them in their TV incarnations, but in comic strip form they were a bit easier to take. Dr. Who is interesting, because we avoided watching the series in our house: I found the music, and the Daleks much too frightening. So what little knowledge I had of the show came principally from that annual; and Dr. Who was very different in its TV Comic incarnation. There were no Daleks – not yet, at any rate – and the Doctor’s travelling companions were two children, John and Gillian, who referred to him as their ‘grandfather’. This tinkering with the format was the result of licensing deals with the BBC which allowed for the use of the name Dr. Who, the likeness of William Hartnell, and the Tardis, but did not extend to his on-screen companions or any of the monsters, all of whom required separate licensing agreements with their creators.

TV Comic Annual was, therefore, a book that I approached with a certain amount of trepidation. Its endpapers featured two colour photographs of the cast of Space Patrol, which I avoided looking at, as the puppets were so creepy. The strip stories, on the other hand, I could just about tolerate. The same applied to The Telegoons. On TV, the puppet characters – based on the radio originals – were simply too grotesque. Bill Titcombe’s illustrations toned down their appearance somewhat.

This trio were not the only stories originating on TV. There was also a comic strip derived from The Dickie Henderson Show, a variety/comedy format of which I was only dimly aware – and a humour strip based on British animation studio Halas and Batchelor’s Foo Foo series. These had certainly been shown on TV, but by the mid 60s had been off the air for nearly five years. There was also a Popeye comic strip, another character whose appearance I found off-putting. If a comic editor had set out to create a publication designed specifically not to appeal to me, then he couldn’t have done a better job than TV Comic circa 1965!

Had we been bought the previous year’s annual, things might have looked a little different, for two Gerry Anderson series were strongly featured in colour comic strips. Supercar and Fireball XL5 had been mainstays of TV Comic for several years, but in 1965 were lost to the new kid on the block that was TV Century 21. Thus it was that, some two years after its screen debut, Roberta Leigh’s Space Patrol joined the line-up. It was nicely drawn by Bill Mevin, who intriguingly gave Galasphere crew members Slim and Husky blue and green skins respectively, whereas the photos showed them with normal flesh tones.*

Alongside all this TV originated content, TV Comic had its own cast of characters, who would prove to be remarkably enduring: Mighty Moth was a simple tale of the titular insect’s war with a character known only as ‘Dad’, while TV Terrors were a gang of kids who constantly tried to sneak into the local TV studio, whose uniformed commissionaire Hoppit would send them on their way with a kick up the arse. Different times…

There was one contributor to this annual whose work puzzled me, then as now. Neville Main had been TV Comic’s cover artist back in 1951, with a naive line and wash style that was ideally suited to the juvenile content of the publication’s early years. By 1962, however, he was drawing Fireball XL5, in a style which, whilst faithful to the cartoonish appearance of the characters, was seriously at odds with the more dramatic work being produced elsewhere. In the 1966 annual, his contributions amounted to two Dr. Who strips, and a few pages of jokes, two of which I didn’t understand then or now. He was also allowed to sign his work, which few comic artists did at the time. When I say ‘sign’, what he actually did was to write out his name in his distinctive wobbly capitals...

What's the gag here? Neville Main's oblique, nay inexplicable humour from a page in the 1966 TV Comic Annual.

As a child, I was very aware of the work of artists in comics. There were those whose work I liked – Eric Eden in the Fireball XL5 Annuals, Ron Embleton in TV Century 21 – and those whose drawings I found either creepy or unappealing or both. Neville Main certainly belonged in the latter category. Much later, I saw some of his ‘Muffin’ covers, and his work on Gerry Anderson’s Four Feather Falls, and there’s no denying that, given the right subject matter, he was perfectly cast, as it were. But in his hands, Dr. Who looked naive and silly.

The 1966 annual was my only encounter with TV Comic for a good few years. I didn’t actually get to read the comic itself until 1969, by which time its cover now featured a strip cartoon of Ken Dodd’s Diddymen, drawn by Bill Titcombe (who for some reason liked drawing secondary outlines around his characters). Dr. Who was still present, in colour across the centrespread and now in the (slightly) more conventional hands of John Canning. I was still avoiding the show itself, but was vaguely aware of the changes that had occurred in the format, which were reflected in the strip. Another new arrival from television was The Avengers, a series I’d been introduced to on Saturday evenings around 1967. Space Patrol was, by this time, long gone.

I’m not sure how often I was bought TV Comic in this era: my recollection is of its being a one-off purchase. Our mum sometimes bought us a different comic when our regular title was unavailable for whatever reason. It wasn’t until 1971 that I began to receive TV Comic on a regular basis, and by this time it had settled into a format that placed more emphasis on humour. Tom and Jerry were now the cover stars, and over the next few years the comic would find room for The Pink Panther, The Inspector, Droopy and even Dad’s Army. Dr. Who had been drafted into sibling publication Countdown earlier in the year, but The Avengers was, surprisingly, still running. This format would see TV Comic through the next couple of years with only minor changes. In the summer of 1973, it absorbed Polystyle’s ailing TV Action, but my interest in comics was on the wane, and I stopped reading it around this time.

Following the 1966 annual (published 1965), there was a gap of a few years before I got to see another example. This would have been around 1970. There was a visual quirk with the TV Comic Annuals in that their covers tended to favour yellow backgrounds. On the 1966 edition, the yellowy sky lends a threatening, thundery appearance to the illustration of a helicopter packed with the comic’s cartoon stars, but the examples from the 70s had a brighter, more saturated look. The contents were still the same mix of full colour and duotone illustration.

The idea of a comic based on television was certainly innovative in its day, but it had its drawbacks in that once a particular series had vanished from the screen, it would also need to be replaced on paper. Revamping contents is one way in which comics editors sought to keep their young readers’ interest levels up, but it meant that a title like TV Comic couldn’t settle into the kind of decades-long formatting beloved of other publishers like D.C. Thomson. Anyone reading in 1960 wouldn’t have recognised the comic in its 1965 incarnation, and it was different again by the end of the decade. Only the old troupers Mighty Moth and TV Terrors along with the perennial Popeye kept up any kind of continuity with the past.

On account of its Dr. Who associations, the mid 60s run of TV Comic can now command high prices on ebay, Some, it must be said, are outrageously over priced. In 1967, the publication finally gained a licence to use The Daleks, and the issues around their return are considered especially desirable. Compared to other British comics of the same era, TV Comic offered above average production values (being printed on magazine quality paper as opposed to the pulps favoured by D.C. Thomson and others), and the artwork was always of a high standard, especially those strips featuring animated characters. It rode the wave of interest in television admirably, but once the medium ceased to be such a novelty, it fell into decline. When I last had sight of a copy in the early 80s, it was a shadow of its former self.

As a footnote, in the early 2000s I laughingly thought of myself as a comics illustrator, and drew strips for a number of publications. One week, flipping through the latest edition in search of my contribution, I noticed some illustrations in a familiar style, and instantly recognised the hand of Bill Titcombe, illustrating the adventures of some boy band or other, and still using his 'secondary outlines' technique. He'd come a long way from The Telegoons, I reflected. I just wasn't sure in what direction...

I didn't get it then and I still don't: what's happening here? Is it meant to be a dog driving? It looks more like a rabbit.
Why is that sign on the boot? Another 'classic' from Neville Main.

* Although no colour stills exist from Space Patrol's second series of thirteen episodes, close inspection of the monochrome tones does suggest that the puppets had been repainted in the colours used by Bill Mevin, and their uniforms upgraded from monochrome to red.