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We weren’t allowed out in the rain at junior school. On wet days, we were kept inside during breaks and lunchtimes. Most classrooms had a stash of comics kept inside a cupboard, donated by pupils, and on days of heavy rain, these would be doled out: I can well remember sitting in the assembly hall with piles of comics lying around on the tiled floor. This was a good way of discovering titles you hadn’t already seen, or delving through back numbers you’d missed out on. One particular classroom contained a pile of TV21s from the mid-60s, dating from a time before I’d been a regular reader. It was rare to find sequential copies, so if you were trying to follow a particular strip, you got it piecemeal. Another comic I discovered on those rainy days was one with which I was mostly unfamiliar.
Smash! and Pow! was the result of a merger between two of Odhams’ near legendary ‘power comics’. I’d actually been bought the first edition of Pow! back in January 1967, in order to own a free gift Spider Man gun, but never became a regular reader. A year later, the title absorbed the humour comic Wham!, launched in 1964 as an attempt to out-Beano the Beano with a raft of characters from Bash Street kids creator Leo Baxendale. The merged title didn’t see out the year, and in September 1968 was merged into Smash! at which point the Wham! title vanished and the dual title was rechristened Smash! and Pow!
There is an interesting socio-economic background behind the merger of Odhams’ five ‘power comics’ that is too long to relate here, but can be found on Wikipedia*. In short, the comics’ reprints of strips licensed from Marvel in the USA (and paid for in dollars) became too expensive to maintain, following the sterling crisis of 1967-8. Comic sales were in steep decline already, a process driven by the rise of television, and the ‘power’ titles were expensive at around 7d each: more than double the cost of D.C. Thompson’s Dandy and Beano. By the end of the 60s, Smash! was the last man standing, having absorbed Wham!, Pow!, Fantastic and Terrific, and would itself disappear into Valiant in 1971.
The copies I discovered during our rained-off playtimes dated from the few months in 1968 when Smash! and Pow! had been running together. The first edition I flicked through contained an intriguing strip, drawn in an eccentric manner that set it apart from its surroundings. The two-page story depicted the adventures of an odd-looking character who had no facial features aside from eyes and mouth, and wore a black trilby hat and cloak, the latter garment providing him with his name: The Cloak. The strip’s blend of bizarre adventure and quirky humour appealed to me in a way that the conventional superhero strips never did, and I was instantly hooked. I began to look forward to rainy lunchtimes and break times in order to catch up on further adventures of The Cloak and his pals. Aside from the basics, I remember next to nothing of the strip today, but it became a favourite at the time.
I would guess this to have been around 1969 or 1970. It was certainly later than March ‘69, for reasons which will become apparent in a moment. On those days when we were kept in the school hall, I would make a bee-line for any piles of Smash! and Pow! that happened to be lying around. I didn’t realise it, but I was destined for disappointment in my pursuit of The Cloak.
The character had originated in issue 18 of Pow! (20.05.67), surviving the mergers with Wham! and Smash! and by the beginning of 1969 was still a feature of Smash! – whose masthead had now dropped all reference to the Cloak’s source comic. But 1969 had begun with the collapse of Odhams Press, and its comics imprints were now the property of IPC. Change was afoot, and in mid-March, Smash! was relaunched, declaring itself ‘Britain’s biggest boys’ paper’, and adopting a new, action-adventure format that saw all the old humour strips dropped. The Cloak, with a foot in both camps and a highly individualistic look, had no place in the new Smash! and was done away with. With a touch of irony, his final appearance came in the issue cover dated one day after my eighth birthday.
Some time later, utterly oblivious to these developments, I was working my way through the old Cloak strips in the school’s stash of Smash! and Pow! I decided I wanted more of my new favourite comic strip, and one Saturday afternoon accompanied my mum to the newsagent just down the road from our grandparents’ house where we would every week pick up a copy of the Birmingham Evening Mail for our grandad. I can still see that shop interior and its sloping counter shelved with confectionery. I checked the comics on display: no sign of Smash! and Pow! We asked the newsagent. He may even have looked in his order book. But it was all in vain. There was certainly a comic called Smash! on sale in the shop, but it was nothing like the ones I’d been reading at school. Thus ended my pursuit of The Cloak.
Many years later, courtesy of the internet, I looked into the history of The Cloak and was intrigued to discover that, like me, he hailed from Birmingham – specifically, the studio of comic artist Mike Higgs, whose Moonbird strip I used to follow in the Evening Mail. I’d had no idea that my lost comic favourite had such local connections. Maybe this had been part of his appeal? Or was it just the quirky art and the character’s novel appearance? The Cloak was gone but not entirely forgotten: the character made a brief reappearance alongside an interview with his creator in issue 13 of the Comic journal Crikey, and is claimed to have been amongst the characters included in a six-issue series Albion (2005) intended as a revival for various IPC-owned properties. There have been no strip collections, and the only way I’ll get to see him again is in old copies of Pow! and Smash! of which, at time of writing, I own precicely none.
The big question here is, would I still find The Cloak entertaining today, more than fifty years later? Or is that even relevant? Higgs’ quirky strip wasn’t aimed at 63-year-old men, and it’s enough that I found it appealing at the age of eight or nine. Looking at the few pages available online, I’m surprised at how crude the art appears, with its childlike qualities. But that was part of its charm. In some respects, it reminds me of the work of Tove Janssen, whose Moomin books (see my last post) would soon become another object of fascination for my nine-year-old self.
My thwarted pursuit of The Cloak serves as a reminder of how ephemeral comic characters can be. The true icons of comics – Desperate Dan, Dennis the Menace et al – endure over decades while others come and go, sometimes in a matter of weeks or months. The Cloak didn’t do so badly, clocking up two years of adventures, and it was just my bad luck to discover him mere weeks after he’d ridden off into the sunset.
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