themagicrobot

I knew the British Editions were published by Pembertons/World Distributors of Manchester but I never realised they were printed by the Co-Operative Society which began in 1844 as a chain of Grocery shops and later expanded into Insurance and Banking.

PS: Isn't the small print interesting. Published by Love Romances Publishing Co. Inc.!!

Comic collecting in my pre-teenage years was a very healthy pursuit. What cash I received was spent not on sweets or chocolate but on adding to my small but growing collection. If I was given busfare money to go to the nearest town I would often walk there instead as that would enable the purchase of an extra (second hand) comic. I would think nothing of cycling five or six miles to other towns when they had friday and saturday market stalls. It was exciting because in 1965 when I went comic hunting I had no idea what I would be returning with.

Fast forward (and it has moved fast hasn't it?) to today and here I am a couch potato buying a (second hand) comic at 7.59AM whilst barely moving a muscle. The comic I have just purchased was one of the earliest comics I recall with fondness. How could you not want to know the origin of Green Kryptonite or the origin of Superman's costume? Who or what was Mr Mxyzptlk? Superboy's first day at school! The whole thing was intriguing. Even the back cover fascinated me. I read that comic over and over. What happened to it? Eventually I would have traded it with a friend, desperate to read something new. But now I am looking forward to reading it again in a few days time.  

To discover a DC comic dated before 1963 when I began seriously collecting them in 1965 was like finding an ancient antique even though it was a mere four or five years old. Yet, with their colourful covers they had survived in greater numbers than the originally far more plentiful UK newsprint comics of a similar age.  It was different for the hardback UK Annuals which still exist in reasonable numbers to this day. A relative gave me this 1951 Dandy Annual in 1966. It looked positively prehistoric and it was a window into a long-gone world.

Does anyone else collect this short-lived pulp-sized early 1990s UK magazine?

I'm currently reading this 1978 paperback which is a nice pastiche of pulps and the people who wrote them. Originally published in 1949, Fredric Brown produced a large number of shorter stories in a number of genres.

He was very popular in Europe. Looking at eBay there are currently far more of his books for sale in France than here in the UK. Many French paperbacks appear quite modern with photo covers which is surprising when his most recent work was in 1951.

I love the above odd cover interpretation of a British bobby!. Slim Callaghan featured in "They never say when" was a British detective so Mr Cheyney didn't only write in "the American style" or set everything in the US. He seems to have been a larger than life character who lived his life in a similar manner to the characters he wrote about. Anyone who sported a monacle had to be eccentric! I'm looking out for this book about his life, but preferbly one that is cheaper than AU $100 and available on my side of the planet.

When I find an old paperback written by someone I've never heard of I like to do a quick Interweb search to find out more. It seems Reginald Evelyn Peter Southouse-Cheyney (1896 - 1951) was British, but wrote most of his books about an FBI agent by the odd name of  Lemmy Caution. More oddness. He started his career by winning a bet that he couldn't write a novel in "the American style". Extreme oddness. Lemmy Caution featured in 15 movies, mostly French and none of them were English-speaking. Ultimate oddness. The final Lemmy Caution movie was the 1965 Science Fiction movie Alphaville.

PS In the movies Lemmy Caution was always played by the expat American actor Eddie Constantine. I know the DC character John Constantine was originally based on the appearance of Sting, but I wonder if Alan Moore had seen Alphaville and recalled, even if subconsciously the surname of the lead?  It is certainly the sort of thing he would do.