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The GA in Australia
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336 posts in this topic

Since 26 January is Australia Day, I thought I'd mark the occasion with some Australian GA comics.

 

Some Aussie comics were reprints of US comics or newspaper strips, although the interiors don't usually match up to the same cover on the US editions. The ones with a 6d (sixpence = 5 c) cover price are cheap in every sense of the word. They have non glossy paper covers and the interiors are mostly b&w, although some of the better sellers like WDC&S had colour pages for a wrap or two. They were also shorter in page length - my Australian WDC&S 31 (below) has 24 pages. The 9d (ninepence = 7.5 c) copies are on slightly better paper and with more colour, and the 1/- (1 shilling = 10c) are often colour throughout, though B&W wasn't unusual in Australian comics right into the 1970s.

 

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of documentation of these, except for an excellent site on Australian Disneys and one on Australian DCs. There's nothing similar for Marvels or any others. Incidentally, I didn't see a Marvel in colour until the late 1970s when import laws changed and it wasn't until the late 80s that I realised that SA Marvels were in colour (or color, as the case may be)! There were reprints of hundreds of US titles. I was at a fair last year and found an Australian reprint of Piracy #3- the first EC reprint that I know of. I have no idea if there are other EC titles. I'd like an Australian Weird Science - but no one I have spoken to knew there were any Aussie ECs, so who knows?

 

There is one book on Australian comics that I can't recommend highly enough for anyone interested in comics outside the US. Called 'Bonzer: Australian comics 1900s - 1990s', about two thirds of the book is GA and it mostly focuses on Australian original characters (Felix the Cat is one) and titles (The Potts, Silver Starr, Supa Dupa Man etc etc). This book has a checklist of original Australian comics (but not reprints) and goes a long way to filling a gap. A lot of long time collectors still get surprised when a collection comes to market and stuff that no one knew about pops up.

 

As for the pre-code covers, I think Australian editions were a bit tamer than some of the more lurid GA ones. These days we're culturally more like the US, but right up to the 70s we were very much an outpost of more conservative Britain. (You can tell by comparing an Australian TV guide from the 60s with one today.) But even with the tamer covers, there were anti-comic drives and laws passed in the states of Victoria (where I grew up) and Queensland. When I get the time, I want to track down some Parliamentary speeches and other anti-comic rants, and I'll add them to this thread.

 

Most of the Australian GA comics aren't common. Comic collecting here has never had the profile it has in America (or maybe even England from what I've seen). There are no comic stores with back issues of that sort, and the most active community of collectors are Disney and Phantom (in production here continuously since 1946 and now up to #1600-odd and commanding big prices for the early issues, $10k+). eBay is the outlet of preference - no CLink, Heritage...

 

As a kid I certainly haunted the local equivalent of Bonnet's, and I never saw most of the comics reproduced in the book, mostly Disney, Phantom, Gold Key and Harvey reprints.

 

I've sometimes thought that it would make a nice retirement project to see what I could find and set up a website. I now wish I'd copied more cover images from Diamond on eBay - Geppi's collection of Australian comics may have been the world's best. You can see the latest ones here. (Some Archies and Tarzans in there that might be of interest to some here.)

 

Anyway, this thread is useless without pictures, as they say in the clasics, so here we go...

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First up, some reprints. Here's a couple of Disneys from my collection.

 

WDC&S began in Australia in late 1946, five years after the US series. We picked up on the most recent issue, so the numbers are offset by sixty or so. So #31 has the cover of Dell's #91:

No_031.thumb.jpg.2dee678ed5c95d8a6175d7d726157307.jpg

This pocket sized book was an early reprint. It's digest size suggests WWII paper shortages.

AJ_mummy_front.jpg.8eab8c5f681cb4f10686a0393f81b0a1.jpg

And just for Bill, an Australian D-ickTracy

5a2b5954b81fd_spoontracey.thumb.jpg.f2ec502270e9be1232503bae365682cc.jpg

 

 

(The last one is from the Bonzer book - as are the ones to follow.)

 

 

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Australia had its own superhero comics. Here's a couple of them:

 

Captain Atom, at one time the most popular comic in Australia (probably didn't hurt that it was colour when most of the competition wasn't:

atom.thumb.jpg.f1bfefe2ecca18f3d282827d54266524.jpg

(Most Australian comics were the standard layout, but there were plenty of landscape formatted comics too.)

Here's the Crimson Comet - classic GA stuff:

CrimsonComet_15.thumb.jpg.e9304ec32f334d3825c8b49f66317d6c.jpg

And an 'Adventure' style title:

blake.thumb.jpg.aaf087ea7ef613032349ee5bc03290a9.jpg

And Dr Mensana - he took pills to be either super-strong or super-smart:

mensana.thumb.jpg.5ee3b91e50c59ad8be293b824d98a099.jpg

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And one last bunch.

Felix the Cat was originally a WWI vintage work of Australian artist Pat Sullivan. He went on to fame and fortune in America (kind of the Nicole Kidman of his day I suppose) before coming back home as reprints.

felix.thumb.jpg.2ecdc1afcfde05826011fe0f5fbae25e.jpg

I'm struggling to explain 'Boofhead' properly (although there's a few of them on the boards). It roughly translates into 'stupid but mostly harmless'. Maybe 'bumpkin' comes close? (Duffman, help me out here. Either a definition or a demonstration will do. ;) )

This one looks to me like a swipe from a US book:

amaze.thumb.jpg.9cc0f0ab107d5d0e410f9af1bc72a5cf.jpg

And last, but certainly not least, we had GGA too (such as it was - Moira Bertram started working in comics at 14 and her work was always 'good for a 14 year old' - even 20 years later.)

love.thumb.jpg.f88661c86211a5e2ababb5847d6a7f9f.jpg

Thanks for looking, and have a bonzer Australia Day!

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Interesting thread. Why didnt they just import US Books and stamp them like in England? When came the G.I.s to Australia (to prevent a japanese attack) and when did they leave? 1942-1945? In this time frame they must have brought US GA comics to australia?

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Interesting thread. Why didnt they just import US Books and stamp them like in England? When came the G.I.s to Australia (to prevent a japanese attack) and when did they leave? 1942-1945? In this time frame they must have brought US GA comics to australia?

 

Good questions.

 

US books couldn't be imported into Australia because of import restrictions. When the dust settled at the end of WWII, Australia was a very reluctant entrant into free trade agreements due to the dependence of the local economy on agriculture, which was a subsidised industry. Most local manufacture was protected by high tariffs, import restrictions or both. That included comic books. The last restrictions were raised in (I think) the late 1970s. The last Australian Disneys of the ongoing series came out in 1978, when Gold Key/Whitman issues replaced them. (There were two later attempts to start up Australian Disney comics, one in 1984 and again about 5 or 6 years ago. Neither lasted long due to the smaller overall market for comics and the competition from imports.)

 

Presumably G.I.s brought comics with them when they arrived here in 1942, and I have wondered if US comics were available on Australian bases. I saw Dell once with 'for sale to US personnel only' stamped on it, but I don't know for sure that is the explanation. But I think that comics brought here by soldiers would have been a tiny fraction of the total market, and they don't seem to have left much of a footprint 65 years on.

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And one last bunch.

 

Felix the Cat was originally a WWI vintage work of Australian artist Pat Sullivan. He went on to fame and fortune in America (kind of the Nicole Kidman of his day I suppose) before coming back home as reprints.

 

I'm struggling to explain 'Boofhead' properly (although there's a few of them on the boards). It roughly translates into 'stupid but mostly harmless'. Maybe 'bumpkin' comes close? (Duffman, help me out here. Either a definition or a demonstration will do. ;) )

 

felix.jpg

 

This one looks to me like a swipe from something familiar to all of you:

 

amaze.jpg

 

And last, but certainly not least, we had GGA too:

 

love.jpg

 

 

Thanks for looking, and have a bonzer Australia Day!

 

Wait a minute - I resemble those remarks.

 

I have a few things Boofhead around the place, and the closest analogy to a known US strip would be Carl Anderson's Henry both in concept and execution. A gentle gag strip of three or four panels each, drawn in a naive style.

 

It ran in the local papers for almost 30 years until author Clark's death in 1970. It is reported that although it was a successful (and popular) offering, Clark was embarrassed by what he regarded as a his poor draughtsmanship. He wanted to take lessons to improve "the look" but his editors would have none of it - they knew the strip's appeal lay in its "basic" nature.

 

Here's a scan of the cover of one of the collections and another that will give a flavour of its attraction:

 

BoofheadCover824x1044.jpg

 

BoofheadP3462x600.jpg

 

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Anyway, thanks to AJD I've dragged and scanned a few things GA that rarely see the light of day.

 

First up is Silver Starr #5, done by arguably the best GA artist Oz produced, Stanley Pitt. He drew in a very Raymondesque style that later got him work with the "Big Two" - Marvel and DC.

 

SilverStarr5446x600.jpg

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Here's one of the oddities of OZ GA.

 

"Tim Valour" was produced in a landscape format. The comic is hinged.staples at the top and has to be turned sideways to be read.

 

Some may recognise the author - John Dixon went on to write and draw the very successful newspaper strip "Air Hawk and the Flying Doctors". In the early offering, his interest in aviation is already obvious.

 

TimValour811x1130.jpg

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Well, that was fun, Andrew. I am jealousof the Captain Atom - I have been trying to get samples/representative copies for years without result. Some years ago I bumped into artist/writer Arthur Mather in Melbourne and didn't even think of asking if he had any available doh!

 

He just turned 84, so I'd better get cracking though . . .

 

 

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I see you had an earlier question, Andrew, that I ignored (Boofhead that I am).

 

There were some EC reprints in Oz, but very, very few. I have this one:

 

Campaign738x1042.jpg

 

 

Now, this is a flimsy pamphlet of 24 pages, including covers, that reprints Campaign! and Grant! from Two Fisted Tales #31 and Warrior! from TFT #37.

 

I get the impression that the Oz outlet was a little wary about these offerings in terms of a growing outcry regarding the evils of comic books here (as in the US) in the fifties.

 

The upshot is that these reprints are heavily (and hamfistedly) censored from the originals.

 

Forget white-out - we'll just excise entire panels - and leave the resulting blanks in the page lol

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Duffman_Comics said:
Lastly, here's one that falls into the "Funny Animal" genre - as if Koalas weren't funny enough already.

 

Oh yeah, good point. A thread on Australian comics without marsupials - what was I thinking? doh!

Here's another from that well-known publisher All Australasian Comics to make up for it:

kanga.jpg.2b7d8091125b51c000502a3c17ffbb1f.jpg

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Part Superman, part Doc Savage, part Flash Gordon, part Adam Strange (though he of cxourse, had yet to be invented) Garth, man of mystery first appeared in a british paper, The Daily Mirror, Saturday 24th July, 1943.

 

He was still going strong in the 1960's when I discovered him as a child, and I was enraptured.

 

What made Garth unique was that he died many times over, only to be inexplicably reincarnated in a succession of different times and locations, giving the storytellers license to place him in settings as diverse as the Mexico of the Aztecs, the Wild West, Victorian London - and outer space.

 

The stories were generally better than the art, until the 1970s, when the great Frank Bellamy took over. His stunning black and white artwork brought out the exoticism of the tightly spun tales.

 

I was amazed years later to learn that his stories had been reprinted as far afield as Italy, New Zealand, Australia, France - and even the The Menomonee Falls Gazette. (And he is apparently very popular in India). Apart from the Bellamy strips, relatively few of Garth's adventures were ever published in the UK.

 

Here are a couple of links:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garth_%28comic_strip%29

 

http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/g/garth.htm

 

 

So, begging your indulgence -and since as another boardie has pointed out it is Australia day, I will contentedly post some covers to the Australian series - which reprint the earliest adventures.

 

They are incredibly scarce - this set was part of Steve Geppi's collection until I snaffled them on ebay after years of fruitless searching.

 

But first, an example of the early stories:

 

GarthLastGoddess.jpg

 

garth1.jpg

 

garth2.jpg

 

garth3-3.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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There is one book on Australian comics that I can't recommend highly enough for anyone interested in comics outside the US. Called 'Bonzer: Australian comics 1900s - 1990s', about two thirds of the book is GA and it mostly focuses on Australian original characters (Felix the Cat is one) and titles (The Potts, Silver Starr, Supa Dupa Man etc etc). This book has a checklist of original Australian comics (but not reprints) and goes a long way to filling a gap. A lot of long time collectors still get surprised when a collection comes to market and stuff that no one knew about pops up.

(thumbs u BONZER is indeed a great book. It has hundreds of pictures of weird Australian comic books you'll probably see nowhere else.
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Today is the 90th anniversary of one of Australia's favourite comic strips.

Ginger Meggs first saw the light of day on November 13 1921 (ok, not GA, but I wasn't going to start a thread for Australian platinum). He's had four artists over the years which has seen the strip constantly in print.

 

James C Bancks 1921 - 1952

Ron Vivian 1953-73

Lloyd Piper 1973-84

James Kensley 1984-2007

Since then it has been drawn by Jason Chatfield.

This strip appeared in today's paper, and I think it's a nice tribute:

 

ginger_meggs.thumb.jpg.a9fc9763a8d8969bd6c56ab673dbce98.jpg

I just wish it had been printed larger - but that's the case with all comics in papers.

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Anyway, thanks to AJD I've dragged and scanned a few things GA that rarely see the light of day.

 

First up is Silver Starr #5, done by arguably the best GA artist Oz produced, Stanley Pitt. He drew in a very Raymondesque style that later got him work with the "Big Two" - Marvel and DC.

 

SilverStarr5446x600.jpg

 

He is arguably a better artist than Raymond.

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