A Flight with the Swift: Part 4

This will be the final part of my review of Swift, the Reverend Marcus Morris’s fourth title in his little group of redtop comics published by Hulton Press, appearing between 1954 and 1963. Swift was aimed at boys and girls aged somewhere from seven to ten years old. It was intended as a stepping-stone from the little kids paper, Robin, to where its audience would divide on gender lines between the stable’s star paper, Eagle and its female equivalent, Girl. I’m working from a two DVD compilation that features some 174 issues in total, plus five random Annuals.
This final part begins with volume 5 no 32, cover-dated 9 August 1958. Swift consists of sixteen pages weekly, appearing on Tuesdays, in full colour on the front and back covers and the centrespread, the rest in black and white. As we rejoin the comic, it has just changed its front cover feature for the first time since it started, introducing Smiley, a young Australian kid who had starred in two popular kids comedy films.
Smiley got the Tarna format: a full colour cover page, a half page black and white, the rest of page 2 given over to adverts, every other week Dennis Mallet’s ‘Then and Now’, advertising gas in an amusing and entertaining manner. I’ll reserve comment on Smiley until I’ve seen more than one episode but as it started with a kangaroo getting shot for eating grass in a drought, it’s got an uphill climb.
Page 3 features television’s Dixon of Dock Green, using Jack Warner’s likeness: it was a sort of serious version of PC 49 in which Dixon’s cases would always have young kids getting involved. Meanwhile, page 4 continues the adventures of Our Gang, a veteran of issue 1, also the work of Dennis Mallet, an ever fresh comic strip featuring Tubby, Teena and Tich, which is outstanding in actually still being funny after all these years. Wyatt Earp occupies page 5 whilst the next page is a prose serial, featuring Babs, Mark and Debbie, plus their friends the twins – Peter and Paul (absent in this occasion to permit a competition to be run).
Jassy of Juniper Farm still runs on page 7, featuring Jassy and her brother Jack. It’s still undemanding and unexciting, offering very little story: it’s the last series to feature a female lead and I’m assuming it’s directed at girls who are believed to favour domestic, everyday farm-life stories.
The centrespread carries the life story of Tammy, a sheepdog (drawn by George Backhouse), which has long since lost all interest, the nature feature British Birds and their Nests and, across the bottom half the cleanly-drawn The Rolling Stones, Johnny, Pam and Midge Stone, who are part of a circus acrobat family.
Tarna Jungle Boy, a junior Tarzan, plus his pals Toto the chimpanzee, Zoro the black panther, and Peggy, another ten year old, who lives with him has been displaced onto pages 10 and 11 but still only gets a page and a half, now all black and white.
Sammy, a strip that’s modulated from earthbound adventures with his Speedsub to a full-blown junior Dan Dare space story with his cousin Jill lies opposite the editorial page. Page 14 is split between brief Great Lives and the half-page strip Roddy the Road Agent, which is rarely remotely funny but manages to remain palatable in its unfunniness.
The last two series are, like Tarna and Roddy, veterans from issue 1. Nicky Nobody and his dog Chum is an orphan living with Private investigator Sir Giles Horton, who assists him in solving crimes whilst the back page is a full page comic strip advertisement for Ladybird clothes that makes Tommy Walls of Eagle memory look like War and Peace.
This is Swift in the high summer of 1958. There are only three months of continuous issues left on the DVD, plus a handful of Annuals and a smattering of information about the remainder of the comic’s history.

The new prose serial was The Secret of The Indian Queen. The was the fourth ‘Secret of…’ serial, but up until now Mark, the oldest boy, had been referred to as if he was the leader. Now, suddenly, his older sister Babs was given pride of place. That ties in with the comment I referred to last time, about how though Swift was meant for boys and girls, it started to sideline its female characters into prose as it was believed girls grew out of pictures sooner than boys (the readers of Girl, not to mention Bunty, Mandy, Tina, Jinty and countless others may wish to be heard upon this theory).
To my horror, just when I thought it had been killed off long ago, the horrendously unfunny Artie & Crafty, an appallingly bad cartoon about two sailors, reappeared after several months to share Tarna’s second page. Let this be a one-off, please! But it wasn’t.
The Nicky Nobody story took an unexpected turn in no. 35. It was ingenious to use marbles as a smuggling device but when they contained a bitter white powder suggested to be a drug, that was just as much a strange step as Peggie getting all possessive and huggy over Tarna had been. Who’s the audience again?
Changes, once begun, have a habit of accumulating. Both the ‘Secret of…’ serial and Jassy came to an end in no 37, and, less prominently, so too did Tammy the Sheepdog, whilst a Smiley free gift was promised for the following issue. It appears to have made that particular Swift very popular and as a result rare for it is the last gap in the DVD (PS, it was a boomerang. What else could it have been?). The new serial, The Call of the Drum, was set in Napoleonic times about Tom Sharp, who ran away from home to become a drummer boy in the Army, searching for his father, missing in Portugal and the school story that replaced Jassy was Castle & Co, three boys at what looked like boarding school. So the last female lead lost her series, and the gang with two girls disappeared as well. Interesting.
As for Tammy, his corner spot went to Wizard, the Wolf Dog. Oh dear. Another surprise was to find that The Rolling Stones had their space cut by a quarter to make room for a four panel, colour revival of… Captain Pugwash! Yes, John Ryan’s classic creation, by now a BBC animated short, was back.
So, what about Smiley? All I can say is, I hope the film (and the original novel) was better. The comics series is dull and lifeless. All Smiley’s got going for it is that it’s Australian, so we get kangaroos, aborigines, stockmen and the odd use of cobber and bonzer, but nothing happens to get interested in. The guy who shot the ‘roo in the first episode has a grudge against Smiley but is bloody useless at doing anything about it.
The only problem with Stanley Pettigrew is that he’s too clever. He outsmarts everyone and, thinks at least three episodes ahead, which means that he takes over the story and makes Nicky redundant. If I didn’t know better I’d be expecting him to take the strip over himself. Castle & Co was lively, drawn in an unfussy sketchy style and dull as ditchwater.
With no. 46, The Call of the Drum went into its ninth instalment, with no sign yet of an ending. That made it Swift’s longest running prose serial so far. But so far, for my purpose, comes to an end a week later, volume 5 no. 47, cover date 22 November 1958. Smiley’s pet kangaroo is shot by his enemy, the incredibly boorish and boring Kafkey. Dixon of Dock Green starts a new story. Tom Sharp drums on. Castle & Co and Tarna progress. Sammy ends his adventure on Ceres. Nicky Nobody’s story ended ludicrously, with an appalling racial stereotype Chinaman and the ‘drugs’ turning out to be castor sugar, smuggled to avoid wartime rationing which had ended years before: apparently the crooks hadn’t noticed that the War had ended a mere thirteen years earlier. Oi vey.

But this is the last of the all-but continuous run of issues on the DVD. Swift has been around for just over four and a half years. It will run for just under another four and a half years before its death by merger into Eagle. Information about the second half of its run is scanty to say the least.
What I do know, from Wikipedia primarily, is that in 1959 the comic transferred from Hulton Press to Odhams, along with Eagle and its other stablemates, and that shortly after Marcus Morris departed, leaving Clifford Makins to take over as editor. Sometime about August, Swift absorbed Odhams’ comic Zip and inherited some of its features. These would have included the Don Lawrence drawn ‘Wells Fargo’ and ‘Pony Express’, both westerns, and ‘Strongbow the Mighty’, itself a reprint from Comet, which would go on to have quite a different history.
The partial list of Swift features in Wikipedia makes reference to ‘Ginger & Co’, drawn by future Modesty Blaise artist Neville Colvin, appearing 1960 – 62, an adaptation of The Prisoner of Zenda in 1961, and the undated strips ‘Lochinvar’s Ride’ and Gerry Embleton’s ‘The Phantom Patrol’, both presumably from that era.
Further, in 1961 the comic was re-sized to match Eagle’s tabloid layout and shifted further upmarket to appeal to the same audience age range. Probably around the same point, the last vestiges of any female interest were eliminated: Peggy in Tarna would be ousted in favour of a male friend to wing through the jungle with. Perhaps one day I will get my hands on a DVD of this period of the comic’s history.
For now, all that is left are four random issues and five (out of nine) Annuals to glean any evidence from.
The first two issues are consecutive ones from eleven months later, 10 and 17 October 1959. Oddly enough, the cover still has it published by Hulton Press (and it’s still 4½d). The line-up is still very familiar at the start, though new arrivals Wells Fargo and Nigel Tawney, Explorer, another Zip alumnus, occupy pages 5 and 6 and the school story on page 7 is now Merrick of Merryhill. The Rolling Stones still occupy the centrespread but yet another dog has the top left corner: there is no Pugwash. Peggy’s still hanging around Tarna but there’s a new full page cartoon serial on page 12, The Bouncers. They really didn’t think much of their audience with this one.
Morrison’s editorial confirms what I’d already suspected, that this was indeed the merger with Zip issue. Skippy, also from the latter, it’s former cover story, got half a black and white page on page 14, coupled with Showbiz Notes from the then famous Jimmy Hanley (whose hotshot blonde daughter Jenny would grow up to co-present Magpie in 1971 in hotpants and boots: irrelevant but memorable.) Nicky Nobody was immovable but now the back page was given to Captain Grant’s Children, a well-drawn full-colour serial set in South America, some time in the past, it seemed.

There was nothing more to add from the following issue, after which there was a jump of more than two years, to volume 8 no 46, 18 November 1961. Swift is now 5d and it’s logo has been re-designed to the horizontal with, for some reason, an arrow through its letters. The cover is a full-colour though badly-painted plug for a feature inside.First up inside is the very familiar figure of Blackbow the Cheyenne, about which we know a tremendous amount. The final third of his last page explains the cover. Next up, Famous Flyers featured Alcock and Brown whilst pages 6 and 7 featured the final part of an adaptation of Rafael Sabatini’s classic pirate novel, Captain Blood (to be followed the next week by Rob Roy).The centrespread was completely remade, featuring the Prisoner of Zenda adaptation I mentioned above in full colour over one and a half pages, the rest being an advert. Nicky Nobody and Chum were still going, now separated from Sir Giles Horton, an orphan boy all alone in the world, making me suspect this to be a reprint from that first year of the comic that I don’t have. Tarna gets a single page, still with Peggy. No editorial but instead a full page ad, followed by real-life adventure Incredible But True.There was a new cartoon half-page on page 14, the slapstick silly Guy D Guide (Reg Parlett I presume), the aforementioned Ginger & Co, more school stuff and, on the back, it’s still the bloody Ladybird Secret Club! No Our Gang, no Rolling Stones: I was genuinely sorry to see these go.The final available issue was just over two months later, volume 9 no. 4, 27 January 1962, a little bit more than thirteen months from the end. Ironically, it featured the last episode of Rob Roy, which was appallingly badly drawn, whilst the centrespread was another last episode, of Robin Hood and Kazar the Turk: yeah, me neither. This was clearly the cusp of change because Nicky Nobody found a home (and not with Sir Giles – this one really puzzles me), to make space for, you guessed it, The Phantom Patrol. There’s a nostalgic full-pager for Our Gang, but that’s being replaced next week by an adaptation of Lochinvar’s Ride, a nostalgic half-page Roddy the Roadscout, whilst Tarna finishes his story, Peggy having been replaced by the larger boy, Tim Bourne.A full page plug promotes five new series the next week, the ones so far unmentioned being an adaptation of Max Bravo and yet one more new school story, New Boy. Plus four weeks of free gifts. This latter is to replace Ginger & Co. Lastly, the Ladybird adventurers are finally gone from the back cover, which features navy crests and flags of the United Nations. And that’s done.

Apart from a handful of Annuals, numbers 1, 4, 5, 7 and 9. Nor is there much to say about them. They follow the format of the Eagle Annuals in offering a roughly equal split between comic strips, prose stories and features, including games, and the strips roughly match up to what is appearing in the comic that year. Oddly enough, Annual 1 (1955) has a blue, not a red cover. It also contains a Tubby solo strip (with Tich as a silent character) as well as Our Gang. And in later years, just as Eagle had characters like Waldorf & Cecil, and Professors Meek & Mild, who only appeared in Annuals, Swift offered clumsy pirates Swash & Buckle, far funnier and far better drawn that Artie and Crafty ever were.
Still, one thing that surprised me was that the contents pages for each Annual included separate lists of all the contributors, writers and artists, in alphabetical order. There was nothing but any perception the reader might have to attach creator to creation but this was astonishing, given that no such facility was ever given to an Eagle Annual. I wonder why.
For me, though, the very last item on the DVD, Annual 9, for 1963, proved to be the treasure trove. I would swear blind to never having seen the cover in my life but once I opened it up, it was clear that I had once owned this. Practically every comic page, every panel, jumped out and bashed me in the eyeballs with recognition. I must have read it to pieces once. It was pure uncut crystal meth nostalgia.
A summary, then. Though I’m having to base this on what is not much more than a third of the comic’s run, I have to describe Swift as what I’ve said all along: a kid’s comic, exactly as intended. It was meant to be a bridge between First Readers and the pre- to early teenage audience who could be offered more complex stories that not only satisfied them but challenged them to think and dream further. Swift was limited, intentionally, and as such it’s insufficiently appealing to the older reader, being aimed too far beneath them.
And by older reader I don’t just mean adults like myself. It’s one thing to call Swift a kid’s comic, but then they all are. The better ones display an intelligence and a level of art to go with the craft, and can give enjoyment and pleasure to the adults in addition to the natural audience. Very few of Swift‘s features could have been transferred over to Eagle without looking out of place, perhaps only The Red Rider when Jim Holdaway was drawing it. And even so it would still have needed better, more character-oriented dialogue.
But it’s always good to know. And if anyone ever does make available a more comprehensive run, especially for 1959-1963, I’ll be back. At present, the only place I know that offers a complete set is the British Library, which is just not feasible on so many grounds, many of them being the number of pounds required to buy a train ticket…

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A Flight with the Swift: Part 3

Even newer readers begin here: Between 1954 and 1963, the Reverend Marcus Morris’s little group of redtop comics published by Hulton Press had a fourth paper appear. This was Swift, a sixteen page, smaller-sized weekly comic, appearing on Tuesdays, aimed at boys and girls aged somewhere from seven to ten years old. It was intended as a stepping-stone from the little kids paper, Robin, to where its audience would divide on gender lines between the stable’s star paper, Eagle and its female equivalent, Girl. I’m working from a two DVD compilation that features some 174 issues in total, plus five random Annuals.
This third part begins with volume 4 no 26, cover-dated 29 June 1957, consists of sixteen pages weekly, appearing on Tuesdays, in full colour on the front and back covers and the centrespread, the rest in black and white. As we rejoin the comic, it consists of the following, starting with the front cover:
Tarna Jungle Boy, a junior Tarzan, plus his pals Toto the chimpanzee, Zoro the black panther, and Peggy, another ten year old, who lives with him. Tarna extends to half a page in black & white on page 2, shared with advertising space that ever other week features the fatuously drawn Koola Kids, suckers, literally, for Koola Fruta ice lollies. But just as we pick things up, a dumb cartoon about two sailors, Artie and Crafty, is restored, having had a four week run earlier in the year. It’s creators, Geoffrey Bond and Martin Aitchison, did far far better on Luck of the Legion.
Sue Carter stars on page 3. She’s a globe-trotting adventurer and righter of wrongs, currently in Crete, despite being only about nine years old. Next up is the long-running Our Gang, a cheerful cartoon strip about Tubby, Teena and Titch, drawn by Dennis Mallet: I have to admit thoroughly enjoying this far from one-note series, the only one for which I have any nostalgia.
Mountie Sgt. Samson, aka The Red River, offers a decent adventure series pitched a bit higher than the other features, but it’s backed by the prose tales of All About Dunkle, unending sub-juvenile ‘humour’ that I simply scroll past every time.
Page 7 Jassy of Juniper Farm is a nondescript and unexciting series that sees the title character and her brother Jack just back after running away from strict and mean relatives on a northern farm.
The centrespread splits between the life story of Tammy, a sheepdog (drawn by George Backhouse), which has long since gone all ‘Lassie’ and the nature feature Animals and their Young across the top, whilst the bottom half is still occupied by the cleanly-drawn The Rolling Stones, Johnny, Pam and Midge Stone, who are part of a circus acrobat family.
The great Frank Bellamy still occupied pages 10 and 11 with his second Robin Hood adventure, co-starring Maid Marion. Superb art not really being exploited, the strip works in discreet square panels, containing speech bubbles but with typeset narrative underneath. Rather too babyish for the work.
Sammy in Space, the follow-up to Sammy and his Speedsub sees Sammy and his cousin Jill having adventures on the Moon opposite the editorial page. Though no-one from the main continuity ever appears, this is obviously feeding off the Spacefleet of Dan Dare in Eagle, as may be imagined from a series drawn by Desmond Walduck and Bruce Cornwell, both sometime assistants to Frank Hampson.
Page 13 is split between brief Bible Stories, presently offering short Saint’s lives and the half-page strip Roddy the Road Agent, which is rarely remotely funny but manages to remain palatable in its unfunniness.
The last two series are, like Tarna and Roddy, veterans from issue 1. Nicky Nobody and his dog Chum is an orphan living with Private investigator Sir Giles Horton, who assists him in solving crimes pertaining to girls his own age – except that at this point, with a his new adventure, the girls disappear for good, unless the cat was female! – whilst the back page is a full page comic strip advertisement for Ladybird clothes that makes Tommy Walls of Eagle memory look like War and Peace.

This is Swift in the middle of 1957. From here to late November 1958, DVD2 is missing only two issues.
A week letter, to my surprise, Red Rider’s artist signed his name, not a usual Swift trait, so now I know the work to be by John Canning. Though he didn’t get away with it every week.
Dunkle went missing for two weeks, giving me hope, but it was only to accommodate competition pages, whilst Artie and Crafty were a recurring feature, presumably running in weeks when the comic failed to sell the advertising space. Sell better, you sods!
I’ve enjoyed the Robin Hood series, and King Arthur before it, as who wouldn’t when they were drawn by Frank Bellamy, but he was too good an artist to be left to the youngsters forever. Eagle was calling, and in no. 33, Robin Hood and Maid Marion was wrapped up and off he went. Sticking with classical characters and literature, his replacement was The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, drawn by Storm Nelson’s Richard Jennings. The new series, which bore virtually no resemblance to the actual sequel of the same name from Defoe himself, followed the same format and started off with a touch of Treasure Island with a former pirate producing a treasure map that induces the now prosperous and settled (but clearly not that prosperous and settled) Crusoe to charter a ship again, along with his man friday, Man Friday. I fear the worst.
Nor was I wrong. After crewing the ship with old pirates who mutinied to take it over, Crusoe discovered that the ship’s doctor was his long-missing elder brother Tom, exiled from England for killing a man in a duel, ex-pirate and Jacobite who won’t return to the country under King William (IV): blimey, are you sure you haven’t left anything out?
I’m sorry to go on about this series but it’s astonishing that, with a mutinous crew surrounding them, the Crusoe brothers trust them and trust them and trust them again and again despite being let down, tricked, their weapons nicked and being drugged. They’re total nitwits and a very bad example to their readers.
All of this was just an extended prelude to getting everyone marooned on a desert island in no. 41: about time, it had taken eight weeks. Meanwhile, on page 2, both Artie and Crafty and the feeble Koola Kids had been missing for weeks: would that All About Dunkle would do one too. But it was not permanent. On the other hand, no. 44 bade farewell to Dunkle: for good? I held my breath.

In the meantime, The Red Rider reached the end of his run to be replaced on page 5 by Wyatt Earp, as advertised by Morris over the past couple of weeks, whilst Dunkle gave way to a serial, The Secret of the Big House, about five kids spending a six week summer holiday with Great-Uncle Saul whilst their parents were on a job in India: classic set-up, redolent of Penny Warrender in the Lone Pine books.
Only at this point, after far too long, did I suddenly recognise the art on Sammy in Space, confirming the men responsible from a Google search.
Just two weeks after this revelation, Sammy and Jill finished their adventure on the Moon and found themselves back on Earth, enrolled as pupils of the Space Cadet School, the series being renamed Sammy and the Missing Test Pilot.
But change was in the air after a mostly settled line-up covering the last couple of years for this was also the end of Sue Carter’s globe-trotting adventures. Her replacement, as trailed by Morris for the previous three weeks, was the adaptation of a BBC television series, the famous Dixon of Dock Green (evening, all). Dixon was a fixture of Saturday night early evening TV and I remember it’s introduction very well, though not so much of the programme, as its appearance was usually the signal for my Uncle to run my parents and I back to our home in Openshaw after spending Saturday afternoon with my grandparents in Droylsden. His story started in Xmas week and the next issue was the last of 1957.
I’ve not said much about Our Gang though it’s been consistently good throughout. The gang are Tubby, a stout kid with glasses, blazer, shorts and a smug superiority that is regularly punctured by Teena, a skinny girl with a black pageboy bob, wearing a hooped jersey and cut-off jeans and her younger brother Tich, with a blond tuft sticking up from under a bobble hat, wearing black dungarees. It’s a very democratic strip in that any one can be leading, or getting into trouble indiscriminately, though Teena and Tich usually stick together. For Xmas, Tich is determined to prove Father Christmas does come down the chimney, by mixing soot and water in the grate so that Santa will leave dirty great dirty footprints from there to Tich’s bedroom. So the other two team up to play a trick, in the grand tradition of the strip, only this time it’s covering the floor with newspapers and building a great big bootprint stencil so that when Tich wakes up on Xmas Day morning, he’s got the evidence he believes in. A lovely, friendly little tale, worth commemorating.
In the same issue Tammy the Sheepdog got home to Scotland and, instead of ‘More Next Week’ it was ‘The End’. Was it? No, just the end of this adventure, with a new one starting in the first week of the New Year, though The Secret of the Big House was resolved that week, and a new story in the wings to succeed it. No long, ‘complex’ serial here, it was over in two weeks. So was the next one.
Advertisers must have been pulling their horns in for 1958 because Artie & Crafty went on a long run with very few interruptions.
Robinson Crusoe’s story continued to meander, taking a fatuous turn in no. 5 when he had the option of being rescued from the island where he and his Jacobite brother Tom are marooned. A French ship lands and takes Tom and most of the crew off to France but fathead Robinson refuses a lift, not even to be dropped off in the Azores, because he is loyal to King William and therefore won’t accept a favour from a Jacobite. What a maroon!
Tammy’s new adventure was a bit of a disturbing one. Suddenly he’s mistaken for a sheep-worrier and local farmers want to shoot him, which is a bit grim. I wonder how disturbing it was to the audience.
The new prose serial, The Mysterious Island, started off with some disturbingly chauvinistic attitudes for a comic aimed at boys and girls equally, but was more of a proper story, doubling the two week mark. Meanwhile, Crusoe got rescued again, this time for good, ending his story in no 7. His replacement was ‘Son of Drake’, which sounded intriguing and trepidatious simultaneously. The son was Lance, an adopted heir, setting out on a mission to South America with Sir Francis, but getting separated and having to make his own way. At the same time, Dixon and Sammy (Jill gets no credit) started new adventures with Tarna following suit a week later.

Let’s take a moment out to note how Swift has changed. It’s supposed to be a comic for girls as well as boys, and there are still girls about: Peggy in Tarna, Jill in Sammy. But only Jassy is the star of a series. Sue Carter’s gone, as has Chickadee, and Nicky Nobody hasn’t bumped into a girl for several stories now (alright, there is one in his present tale but she’s bossy and unpleasant and he gets on better with her brother anyway). One of the comments I’d read about the comic was that it gradually de-emphasised the female characters, on the alleged grounds that girls grow out of pictures sooner than boys, and this is now evident. I foresee Jassy being the next to go.
No. 14 had a very unusual theme in Tarna. The current story has the Jungle Boy and Peggy returning a lost girl to her tribe, meaning Tarna has to pay especial attention to her, carry her on his back whilst swinging through the trees, the upshot of this being that Peggy gets tearfully jealous. Just think about that for a moment. It’s as utterly sexless as it could possibly be, yet it’s there, in a comic produced for a definitely pre-pubescent audience. It is, in fact, more ‘sexual’ than the entire nineteen year run of Eagle collectively.
The kids of Secret of the Big House were brought back for the next serial, The Secret of the Tin Mine.
The following issue, the advertising slot on page 2 saw the debut of Then and Now, and of Mr Therm, by Dennis Mallet. This was a clear forerunner of the long-running Gas Council adverts in Eagle, here in black and white but with the same rhyming approach. Once again, I query the approach of a cartoon gas advert being aimed at little kids who were not that likely to start badgering their parents for a heated bathroom cupboard as opposed to Ladybird sweaters but give how long the series lasted, it must have been seen to have some profitable result. In Swift it established a fortnightly routine. Even better, weeks were going by with no Artie and Crafty until it was clear that that particular low spot was done with.
Nevertheless, it was actually fun in itself, setting out how things were done in olden times that were now easy and instant with gas cooking etc., but Mallet never skipped on his attention to the past procedures, Strangely delightful stuff.
Another artist’s signature was spotted the same issue, that of Roland Davies on Wyatt Earp.
I haven’t mentioned yet that the Bible slot had turned to a long adaptation of the classic Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s Seventeenth Century allegory. It’s not a book I’ve either read nor wished to, and from the evidence here, that’s not a bad decision. On the other hand, it’s unfair to judge the book by a weekly half-page comic version aimed at little kids but the overall impression it left was leaden plainness, in which subtlety of any kind was definitely not the watchword.
It was the end, at least temporarily, of the Bible slot for the next week it was replaced by Great Lives, introduced by the life of the great former slave Booker T Washington. This looked promising.
The first of two single issue gaps covered the start of the new serial featuring the five kids, the Secret this time being the Captain’s Museum.

No 30. saw a new Nicky Nobody story start, featuring the return of self-confident, hyper-competent boy inventor Stanley Pettigrew, who’d obviously gone down well with the audience. Marcus Morris also announced the debut of Smiley for no. 32. Smiley was obviously a name expected to be familiar with Swift readers, a young Australian boy from Murrumbilla, out on the Bush, star of a series of films. He meant nothing to me, but Wikipedia was informative enough. There had been a successful comedy film based on the 1945 Moore Raymond novel, plus a sequel, and though the whole thing was Australian it had clearly had success in Britain. Incidentally, Colin Peterson, who played Smiley, later became the drummer with The Bee Gees when they were first big in Britain.
The five children were now well-established in the serial slot, with another eight part adventure coming. Curiously enough, though the Story So Far box referred to Mark (the oldest boy) and his sisters and friends, the tag advertising the next story named them as ‘Babs & Co’ (the oldest child).
What Morris didn’t reveal, until the following issue, was the biggest change in Swift‘s history to date, that Smiley was taking over the front page, with Tarna being despatched to pages 10 and 11, replacing the tedious Son of Drake after his adventure concluded. Which is an appropriate point to end Part 3.

A Flight with the Swift: Part 2

New readers begin here: Between 1954 and 1963, the Reverend Marcus Morris’s little group of redtop comics published by Hulton Press had a fourth paper appear. This was Swift, a sixteen page, smaller-sized weekly comic, appearing on Tuesdays, aimed at boys and girls aged somewhere from seven to ten years old. It was intended as a stepping-stone from the little kids paper, Robin, to where its audience would divide on gender lines between the stable’s star paper, Eagle and its female equivalent, Girl. I’m working from a two DVD compilation that features some 174 issues in total, plus five random Annuals.
Resuming this account, the DVD has had a five issue blank covering all the issues of June 1956, and the story resumes the next month. A new series, Jassy of Juniper Farm, started in the first issue of the gap. As we pick things up with Volume 3 no. 26, have there been any other changes? The answer is no.
So what then is Swift at the start of July 1956? The cover story is still Tarna Jungle Boy, extending to a half page in black and white inside. It’s a long time since Tarna’s seen a jungle but he’s still got his pals Toto the chimpanzee and Zoro the black panther helping him out, along with Peggy and her grandfather. The rest of page 2 belongs to Chickadee in Shadowland, a Robin-age lonely girl, whose possibly imaginary friend Shadow Boy is constantly taking her off for adventures in places like the Country of Yesteryear.
Sue Carter gets page 3. This is a seriously strange strip about a nine year old girl and her younger brother constantly going off on adventures in foreign lands where she is treated as as much a hero as any adult troubleshooter. Our Gang, a cheerful cartoon strip about Tubby, Teena and Titch, is the one Swift feature I remember, and find charmingly nostalgic, whilst the Red Rider is a full-page adventure story drawn by the great Jim Holdaway, featuring one of only two adult heroes, Sgt Samson of the Mounties.
Page 6 is for the prose feature. A new series, All About Dunkle (The Topsy Turvy Village with the Topsy Turvy People), was introduced in the last featured issue and is every bit as dreadful as it sounds.
Jassy of Juniper Farm is, as the title clearly indicates, about a girl living on a farm. In the first episode, her Mum has to take a lodger, a Miss Ironside Jones, an elderly spinster who expects the entire farm, including its animals, to adapt itself to her strict Governess-esque ways: not a promising start.
The centrespread is in colour, split between the very scrunched up life story of Tammy, a sheepdog (drawn by George Backhouse who did many of the superb nature features in Eagle but who is having to produce a six panel strip in an upper corner), a Pets Scrapbook that temporarily replaced the series about Great Moments in Grand Books and, in the ‘Luck of the Legion’ format and position, The Rolling Stones, three kid circus acrobats.
Frank Bellamy gets two pages for Robin Hood, a hybrid between a strip and an illustrated story, followed by Sammy and his Speedsub, an implausible forerunner of Gerry Anderson in that he’s a little kid with a pre-Supercar who goes around rescuing people and things and is accepted as an adult instead of Social Services confiscating his Speedsub as something too dangerous for anyone that young to play with.
Page 14 is divided half-and-half between Bible Stories and Robby the Road Agent, a forgotten figure more common to the decade where the real-life versions would have been flitting round for the AA or the RAC. Nicky Nobody gets the inside back cover. He’s an orphan with a dog who’s staying for an extended period with Sir Giles Horton, an aristocratic private investigator who defers to Nicky’s greater crime-solving abilities.
Finally, the back page, in colour, is a full page advertisement for Ladybird clothing, in the form of an even more ludicrous kids Adventure Club set-up, and is the only feature in the entire comic to have creative credits on it.
The leap from Swift to the older papers is considerably broader than the one from Robin to here.

The only significant development in the series over the five week gap comes in Sue Carter’s story, in that the villains are no longer after the dance secrets of Lunkor but rather its golden treasure. Nicky Nobody’s current adventure finally gets him to Holland where he meets another little girl of his own age. That makes her the third he’s teamed up with in as many stories: my oh my. I’m shocked that Marcus Morris was allowing such philandering…
Tammy’s interminable adventure about getting back to his true master finally terminated in no. 33. It wasn’t bad, I suppose, but its postage stamp size made reading it difficult and it was far too easy to overlook. Nevertheless, it was popular enough to be continued into a new story, which saw the sheepdog off to Australia to appear in a film: that idea was bad.
Tarna’s next adventure involved him taking Peggy off into the jungle to live with him. I advise you to ignore thoughts like that, but this is one development that really reminds us that the Fifties were an entirely different time.
The main drawback with reading a bunch of Swifts is that, even with the better drawn strips, the comic’s overall simplicity of tone makes it wearying to read too many at a time. Furthermore, the range of stories is not so varied, so that, say, three months reading at a time starts to quickly feel stale, because the imagination is not being stretched or tested in any way.
No. 45, coming out the day before my first birthday, was notable not for that anniversary but for the simultaneous endings of the current Sue Carter and Red Rider stories. The latter has established itself as joint-strongest series in the comic, alongside Robin Hood: surely it’s no coincidence that the two series with the best art are inspiring the best writing? Red Rider would not need a great deal of uplifting to be a good fit for Eagle.
Sue and her brother are out in China, entering it by driving through a tunnel under the Great Wall and into what at first sight seems to be an unrealistic and indeed archaic China of mounted bandits and Forbidden Cities, as opposed to the domain of Chairman Mao of the real late 1956. Where this one might go, I have as yet no idea, but I’m beginning to get a clearer idea of where this series comes from. I don’t remember, not by a long chalk, all the books I have read and certainly not those from when I was very young. Those I do remember, like Enid Blyton, Arthur Ransome and Malcolm Saville, made an indelible mark, but there were dozens more, including the odd one here and there whose title or author are forever lost, that never attained that level of immortality, yet entertained me insatiably as I grew up. There’s a stage in children’s fiction that we go through, when the story is superficially realistic, but in which the children heroes, real youngsters like ourselves at that age, are the proper heroes, having all the agency of an adult hero. Sue Carter, as well as Sammy Speedsub, represent that stage. They are direct heroes, and as readers we don’t find anything strange about it, we just assume that’s ok, because we are identifying with these kids and because we are too young and unfamiliar with the world to understand, or come to that, care, that such things are totally beyond plausibility.
So yes, I might rag on Sue Carter for falling far short of the standards of verisimilitude that applies to Eagle but that’s to forget how different a reader is between the ages of six and ten.

Elsewhere, the interminable Tammy is making very heavy weather of even getting to Australia, having taken about ten times as long to reach Australia as the real-life voyage might have done. And it’s noticeable, as the long story of St Francis of Assissi comes to its end, to be followed by the life of St Brigit, that Swift has, from its outset, had an inflexible god-slot, whereas Eagle may have started with the life of St Paul, but varied its back page stories with other famous men, and was never directly religious week-in, week-out.
And just to record, Nicky Nobody’s new girlfriend is called Mary. How does he keep finding them?
In Xmas week, Robin Hood’s story took a new direction with the return of King Richard from the Crusades. I feel compelled to mention this for the final panel, of the mail-clad King kneeling, saying ‘England! My beloved England!’, and kissing the earth according to the caption. This from a King who so loved his country that he spent rather more than half his brief reign fighting wars abroad. Still, save in lapidary inscription, no man is on oath, eh?

Just to recap, as the comic moves on into 1957, it’s still 16 pages, in colour on both covers and the centrespread and, save for the box-like feature in the top right corner of the latter, unchanged from the beginning of this post.
Of course, no sooner do I say that than change springs upon us, Jim Holdaway leaving The Red Rider in no. 2 and a much inferior artist replacing him. As for Sammy, it only took him three weeks later to wreck his Speedsub but get invited – subject to getting his parents’ permission of course – to join an expedition to the Moon. Yes, in 1957, a year after the ‘first one’… The series was now renamed Sammy in Space. I don’t suppose it’s going to be another Dan Dare, though, even if the uniforms looked vaguely familiar. What’s more, there was already a Moon Colony and among its residents were cousin Jill.
That now makes three long-standing features where the little boy heroes have a girl sidekick. Dearie me. Mind you, she has her own Rocket Car…
Little Chickadee finally discovered that Shadowland was her own home all the time and went back to bed to sleep, making room for Artie and Crafty to take over her half page from issue 9. These were two cartoon sailors, one tall and thin, the other short and stout. Two weeks were enough exposure to wish Chickadee back.
Robin Hood also moved on in the same issue. We had had the return of King Richard the previous week and the pardoning of the outlaws but, without any delay, Richard had gone off to be killed in France, despite having bold Robin at his side and with King John now on the throne, everyone was heading back to the woods, this time including two lasses called Gwen and Marion. And Maid Marion was getting her name added to the series title.
The third anniversary passed uneventfully, though it was revealed that Nicky Nobody’s new adventure involved finding a kidnap victim – a girl of his own age. Spot the theme?
Artie and Crafty only lasted four weeks before they were bounced out of their slot on page 2 in favour of a cartoon advertisement, The Koola Kids, a silent pantomime advertising Koola Fruts, which appeared to be some kind of iced lollie. Meanwhile, in the same issue, Sammy rescued a spaceship passenger in a very familiar Spacefleet spacesuit, whilst the creators of the Scarlet Ladybird back-page advertisement suddenly decided they needed to treat their audience as complete idiots by numbering the panels in reading order on a completely plain four horizontal tiers panel grid.
The Koola Kids were not a fixture but the advertising slot was. Meanwhile, Jassy of Juniper Farm took a change of direction as Mrs Thompson is ordered to rest and Jassy and her brother are sent off to an Uncle who has a sheep farm in the north. What difference this might make is debatable: Jassy is a dull series of little incidents, set against a background of financial struggle that never causes any serious threat. It doesn’t involve itself sufficiently in the possibilities of the farm setting and Jassy herself has no more personality than a pancake. Her brother Jack is more of a character than her and he’s only a stereotypical mischievous younger brother.
After completing her wholly anachronistic Chinese adventure, Sue Carter next fetched up in Crete. Social Services were seriously lax in those days… As for Jassy and Jack, theirs was a change of direction but in the most sadly unimaginative fashion, their Aunt and Uncle being bog standard miserable skinflints and tyrants, with neither a redeeming quality nor a fresh idea. They end up running away.
Volume 4 no. 19, 11 May 1957, was missing from the DVD. It cut off the end of Tarna’s latest story but once things started up again, it was noticeable that Peggy was still living with him in the jungle. And the last issue on DVD1 was no 25, 22 June, making this a convenient point to end part 2, with every series in the middle of things save for Jassy and Jack, who get back to Juniper Farm just when their mother feels well enough to get up and start resuming her chores. Sort of pointless, really, that storyline, and neither the northern farm nor the running away ever gets mentioned again.

A Flight with the Swift: Part 1

As a little boy, being introduced to comics in the very late Fifties, I read such things as TV Comic, Harold Hare Weekly and Robin. This latter, edited by the Reverend Marcus Morris, was for the little brothers and sisters of the boys and girls who read Eagle and Girl. In November 1963, I would move to Eagle via a dozen very cheap issues bought for me by my Dad at the back end of a Church Bring-and-Buy Sale.
But there was an intermediate comic in Morris’s little stable, designed to mediate between Robin and Eagle, and this was Swift. When I jumped to Eagle it was not there any more, having been merged into the older title earlier in 1963, after being founded in 1954.
I have some very vague memories of seeing things from Swift, largely indistinct images featuring characters smaller and slimmer than those from Eagle, as befitted the younger age range it catered to. I do not believe I ever read, or even saw, an issue of the title. It’s repute and collectability has never come anywhere near that of Eagle. But in its pages, there were features and stories by artists who worked on Eagle, and there is after all the completist’s compulsion to know all, or as much as can be determined.
So I have acquired a two DVFD run of Swift: incomplete, of course, but no better record exists unless I am to move to London to consult the set in the British Library. Time once again to venture into a hidden corner, drag out what I can find and explain it for those who are interested.

In total, 460 issues of Swift were published, coming out on Tuesday with a Saturday cover date, between 20 March 1954 and 2 March 1963, just two-and-a-half weeks short of nine years. The DVD set I am using has 174 issues and five Annuals, so it’s spread a bit thin. It includes the first issue, though that exists in isolation: the next available issue is 2 July 1955, over fifteen months later.
After that there’s a mostly continuous run until November 1958, and beyond, only four issues from the remaining four and a bit years of the title, including its great transformation in 1961. So this can only be a partial survey of the comic, but at least it seems to be representative of Swift as conceived and edited by Marcus Morris.
Looking at issue 1 alone convinces me that I must at some point have had, or several times read, a Swift Annual, because I immediately recognised more features than I anticipated. What did Swift no. 1 consist of?
It consisted of twenty pages, mixing colour with black and white. The cover feature was Tarna the Jungle Boy, a pre-adolescent Tarzan, (1½ pp, the internal half page in B&W); Mono the Moon-Man, (½p cartoon serial); Nicky Nobody, about an orphan and his dog (1p); Educating Archie (½p cartoon based on the popular radio ventriloquist); Things to Amuse You (½p); Tom Tex and Pinto, a western (1p); The Wreck of the Morning Mist (1p Coastguard prose adventure), plus one-tier strip Kono the Bushbaby; The Fleet Family in Island of Secrets (1p); full-colour 2pp centrespread incorporating natural world feature This Wonderful World, Men in Action, Speed and John Ryan’s Sir Boldasbrass; Paul English – adventures of a cabin boy (1p); three cartoons across one page, Roddy the Roadscout, The Topple Twins (both two tiers) and Daisy (one tier); Sammy and his Speedsub (½p) and Our Gang (½ ); editorial page; The Boy David and Sally of Fern Farm (½p each); Heroes of Today – no. 1 Sterling Moss (1p); The Sign of the Scarlet Ladybird (1p, full colour, back page – a sponsored strip in the mould of Eagle‘s Tommy Walls, this time promoting Ladybird children’s shirts). A veritable mixed bag.
Tarna I knew about, but Nicky Nobody, Our Gang and Roddy the Road Scout jumped out at me by name and, in the case of the latter two, art style. These two I had seen before. Indeed, Our Gang was a refreshing, endlessly inventive and attractive cartoon, drawn throughout by Dennis Mallet, who went on to draw the Mr Therm Gas adverts in Eagle around the turn of the decade.
Reviewing the initial line-up is something of a fool’s errand, especially if the next available issue is fifteen months later, but two things sprang immediately to mind. The first was that whereas Eagle‘s series were about adult adventurers (PC49’s Boy’s Club and the much-later Jack O’Lantern being the major exceptions), Swift is aiming for exact contemporaries of its readership, and direct identification.
The other was that whilst the cartoon strips, the Ladybird series and The Boy David were straight comic series, the other strips used a combination of in-panel speech-bubbles and the pre-War out-dated typed under-panel captions, as maintained in Rupert the Bear. It gave the comic a very archaic feel, and whilst I won’t use the word condescending as being too pejorative, it did give the impression that the readership weren’t exactly trusted to get what was going on without having it spelled out for them. And remember, these readers were older than the babies for whom Robin was produced.
And though they don’t look it, The Fleet Family and Paul English are being drawn by Frank Bellamy. Unlike Eagle, there were no credits on or attached to the art, with the exception of Peters signing Mono the Moon-Man (I wouldn’t).
The Swift of July 1955, Vol 2 no. 27 is only 16 pages. It still has Tarna on the cover, but Roddy the Road-Scout has moved up to replace Mono. Sue Carter, in Children of the Kite, now occupied page 3, with Tim, whom I’m guessing is her brother. Our Gang, consisting of Tubby, Teena and Tich, the latter pair being siblings, have gone up to a full page (though they will end up spending more time at three tiers on a four tier page), whilst Tom Tex has added Buckskin, an adult cowboy who he tells what to do. Page 6 still hosts the prose series, which is now The Magic Penknife, about another brother/sister combination who own a, guess what? Frank Bellamy’s adaptation of Swiss Family Robinson was in full swing, but you still wouldn’t know it was him.
The centrespread was still in colour and This Wonderful World up to instalment 66, accompanied by In Other Lands 39, but the bottom half was now The Rolling Stones – clearly not those ones, but a family of little kid acrobats, a boy and two girls, Johnny, Pam and Midge, who are part of a circus family.
Paul English survived but as a captioned one page story, with six square panels of illustrations: hardly a comics page. Page 11 offers The Bentine Bumblies, a creation of Michael Bentine, again in captions. As befits the former Goon, it’s silly but vivid. Remembering his later Children’s programme Potty Time, I checked Wikipedia to discover that this was how the Bumblies originated.
Sammy and his Speedsub was still going, now at a full page, with the editorial page on page 13. Picture Stories from the Bible shared the next page with the Topple Twins, Nicky Nobody on page 15 and the Ladybird strip still on the back page. As to the fortunes and fates of all the other starters, it’s anybody’s guess.

This too was an isolated issue but there were only three missing before I got into the straight run, allowing me to really get to grips with the title. Three weeks it might have been but it was enough for Swiss Family Robinson to have completed and be replaced by The Strong Family, who live on a tramcar-boat. Instead, Bellamy had started his King Arthur and all his Knights on pp 10 and 11, and this time he looked the artist we know him to have been, with room to breathe. Paul English had also disappeared, a very fair trade.
Tex Tom was replaced by another western, Cliff McCoy and Slicker (his horse again), boy hero for adult cowboy, written by the very familiar figure of Charles Chilton.
An initial seven week run was enough for me to come to some informed judgements, and the most important one is that Swift is very much a children’s comic in the way that neither Eagle nor any other of the British weekly’s I’ve read these past few years have been. They’ve all been children’s comics, but at the same time, much of the material had been inventive, energetic, clever and engaging, drawing their readership on and upwards.
In contrast, Swift is simple and simplistic, and without actually talking down to its generation of readers, takes care not to be in any way difficult for them. King Arthur is head and shoulders the best thing about it so far, with striking, positive art, but both its captions and especially its dialogue is unchallenging. No-one talks with any naturalness, nor personality. Everything is purely descriptive, and no-one is allowed to use a contraction. It must always be ‘It is’, and never ‘it’s’. Bellamy draws strong images but they are closed off and captioned boxes, without movement and certainly without his usual dynamism.
As for the rest of the features, only Sue Carter is a genuine serial, with a long running story. Not much happens each week but we are still reading Children of the Kite, ten episodes thus far (without any explanation of who Sue or Tim is or why they’re there). This is brave stuff. Tarna, Sammy and Nicky Nobody are far less complex. Tarna and Nicky’s stories go on for several weeks , whilst Sammy very rarely exceeds three weeks, and never more than four. The rest are all more-or-less one-offs.
The Magic Penknife is written to an unvarying formula. Sally and Bobby White own a magic penknife that has two blades, not that they use either for cutting anything, not in Swift, in case they give the readers the idea of using a penknife to cut anything, probably their own fingers. Instead, they rub the blades against things. The big blade ‘makes things what they could be’, which means they get bigger (and realer) until the Whites can no longer control them, then they chase after it to rub the little blade against it, to turn it back into the toy it was, without anyone else knowing.
Nor are the stakes high enough to be called adventures. It’s comfortable and cosy. It’s bound and determined not to give anybody nightmares, which means that the stories are not that interesting. Chilton’s Cliff McCoy is well written, but in common with the rest of the comic, his dialogue is brief, to the point, and impersonal. Any adult reading these strips is likely only to enjoy them to the extent that the children he’s reading them to are doing. It’s less dumbed-down than dumbed across.
As for the comic comics, Bentine’s Bumblies are the most anarchic but half a page is far too little, but perhaps because it’s the only thing that carries a spark of nostalgia for me, I’m finding Our Gang charming, and often amusing, probably because there’s a bit of opposition between Tubby, the leader, and the sometimes recalcitrant Teena and Tich.
Resuming reading, vol 2 no 38 advertises a new Nicky Nobody story whilst Sue Carter’s serial finally establishes why it’s called ‘Children of the Kite’. The Magic Penknife was used for the last time, replaced next issue by Jack and Judy’s Diary. There were more changes two weeks later, with Chickadee in Shadowland replacing the Bumblies, and a new colour short strip Tammy, about a sheepdog, squeezed into the centrespread to replace the animal feature.
Tammy was the sheepdog’s story from a pup, Chickadee had an Alice in Wonderland feel, a lonely little girl (Robin age) carried away into strange semi-educational lands by her imaginary playmate, Shadow Boy, but Jack and Judy was a quasi-educational notion: two ordinary kids leading ordinary lives and learning useful lessons that the readers could pick up on, like about Guy Fawkes and Bonfire night.
Volume 2 no 46 came out the day after I was born. Am I not allowed to mention that?

King Arthur and his Knights

Chickadee’s story developed quietly on quite imaginative lines. At first, she had crossed into the Shadowlands London, where are the statues came to life and started wanting to see more of the city than their normal spots allowed. Other stories would take her into the Past, the World of Clocks and the time of Jesus Christ. Very simple stuff to us, but for the little kids…
Sammy’s latest adventure featured his favourite footballer, who wasn’t named but was very evidently the great Stanley Matthews.
There was no real story to the Nicky Nobody story, just a change of scene that saw him teaming up with Jenny, an adventurous girl of the same pre-teen age, getting into scrapes that were gentle and appealing without being exciting in the way of, say, a Malcolm Saville Lone Pine adventure.
Sue Carter now started a new adventure, Palaces of Ice, back in England but not for long, Cliff McCoy, whose art was improving greatly, followed suit, whilst Tarna and Chickadee lined up for new stories a week later. Sue’s story had overtones of the concurrent Dan Dare story in Eagle, ‘The Man from Nowhere’, in which Astral College cadet ‘Flamer’ Spry had somewhat implausibly been allowed to join the expedition to Cryptos. Here, Sue and her brother Tim were being welcomed as part of an expedition to the Arctic to find a missing Explorer. Yes, that’s two children aged about seven or eight, joining a Naval submarine crew and being welcomed as potentially valuable assets. Ok, we’re entertaining an audience of seven to ten year olds but the credibility rating here is below zero. Rather like the conditions are going to be.
Needless to say, the Picture Story from the Bible for Christmas week was the birth of Jesus. Nicky Nobody also came to the end of his current adventure, which meant waving Jenny Wilson goodbye.
Jack and Judy’s Diary only lasted until vol. 3 issue 5, when the family emigrated to Italy, and was replaced by Gawky & Co, three boys and a girl, narrated by Jo the girl. Again, it was simplistic, but it felt fresher and had more potential for its audience than its two predecessors. Several weeks of stories confirmed that impression: it was lively and interesting. Though it bore no resemblance to Eagle’s Three Js, it was a worthy equivalent.
Incidentally, it’s noticeable that, unlike Eagle, where Frank Hampson’s influence as Art Director ruled, the only creators’ credits in Swift were on The Sign of the Scarlet Ladybird, and these read only Story by Pasolds Drawn by Canning.
There was another of those stories of the time in no 8., in the Strong Family strip. Youngest son Roger wants to go swimming and finds two ‘negro’ boys already playing. They don’t want him so he ‘blacks up’ with boot polish at which point they accept him. Once it runs in the river, and he goes all streaky, their father turns up to laughingly suggest he cleans himself up and the boys say they like him. To be truthful, there’s nothing in it that I’d suggest was offensive other than the blacking up, which is done in pure innocence, but sensitivities are different now and it feels uncomfortable to say the least. It also interrupted an ongoing arc about the children’s selfish cousin Henry.

The comic celebrated its second birthday with no. 11, 17b March 1956, both in its pages and in some of its strips.
The great difference between the title and its older brother (and quite possibly sister too), is still very much that Eagle is all about adult adventure characters and Swift about children. The readers of the older title look up to ideals, a space pilot, a police constable, a Foreign Legion Sergeant and a seafaring troubleshooter. These stories might be leavened by kids, like PC49’s Boy’s Club, ‘Flamer’ Spry and Kerfuffle Kidd, but they’re not the stars. In contrast, save only for Cliff McCoy and King Arthur, Swift’s stars are contemporaries of their readers, people they can imagine being rather than becoming. It marks a vast difference in the readership that, in real life, is marked only by a few short years.
Perhaps McCoy was an ill-timed example for his series lasted only one week longer, to be replaced by The Red Rider, a Mountie series starring Sergeant Samson. The once-called colonies, and particularly Canada, were sources of fascination for stories in the comics of the Fifties, no doubt because they could feature English-speaking white characters who had wide-open and somewhat more primitive spaces in which to have adventures. Red Rider had strong art, as befitted the work of Jim Holdaway, and started with welcome energy and verve.
Frank Bellamy’s art on King Arthur had been excellent. When that finished he went straight on to Robin Hood, in the same static picture box with dialogue and typescript narration, but his art underwent a leap of intricacy, as if he had been holding back for some time.
Sue Carter has moved on to a new story but it’s still howlingly silly. This time, she and Tim are on their way to Lunkor to protect their traditional dances from being exploited by a westerner (I mean, the dancers are only in England to dance their dances for the public so it’s a bit late to begin with), but when they need to get out east, they’re given a lift by the RAF who are sending a special plane there… I really wish I’d been able to read this from the beginning to see what makes this girl so special that she, maybe nine years old, is treated as being as important and essential to these adventures as, say, James Bond. Even Tarna the Jungle Boy is more firmly based in reality than this.
Sadly, Gawky & Co ended with no. 20, ceding page 6 to All About Dunkle, about a ‘topsy-turvy village’. It sounded appalling and it was, pure kids stuff of a kind better suited to Robin. And The Strong Family were returning to land to make room for Jassy of Juniper Farm, though I was to be delayed in my introduction for that because this was the end of the straight run of 44 issues, ten and a half consecutive months.
The breach was five weeks – the entirety of June 1956 – with a fifty consecutive issue run to follow to the end of disc 1, so let that be the end of part 1.