Geek Syndicate Issue 5 | Page 37

Geek Syndicate man era amongst others. Even rarer were stories from fictitious wars, and a purely Science Fiction sister magazine entitled “Starblazer” was published as a spin-off. This magazine ran for two-hundred and sixteen issues. Image © DC Thompson DC Thomson also published The Victor in 1961. This book featured a recurring roster of wartime heroes. Its front cover always featured a story of valour, usually a true story of a medal being won in combat by British or Commonwealth forces. Other stories featured included tales of “Joe Bones the Human Fly”: a working class lad who could climb anything and was sent on commando raids and the adventures of “Cadman”, a cowardly officer saved constantly by his long suffering batman. As you can probably tell The Victor’s tales were heavily on the “pulp” side of war stories and certainly held strong to that good old-fashioned British obsession with class-based stereotypes. Image © DC Thompson Warlord & Battle Probably the prime era for British War Comics is the nineteen-seventies and early nineteeneighties (during which Commando reached those huge circulation figures). Commando and The Victor were joined on the newsstands by another DC Thomson publication, Warlord, and it’s IPC rival Battle. The fact that this is when my generation - children for whom the war was a story told by their grandparents - started buying comics probably isn’t a co-incidence. War was something exciting yet distant, a narrative eas ily broken into good guys and bad guys, and a world away from the struggling, recession-hit Britain of the age. Whereas Victor included some non-war stories such as “Tough of the Track” (working class lad runs fast) , Warlord, launched in 1974, was a pure war-story comic. It further distinguished itself from its stable mate with a wider scope of conflicts (although most strips were still World War Two based) including a German-character led strip and a couple set around British soldiers attached to American-led theatres such as the Pacific Island campaigns. Battle, launched in response in 1975, was helmed by Pat Mills and John Wagner, and went onto produce one of the greatest british comic series ever written - Charley’s War. Image © DC Thompson, 1977 The Victor 37