Vintage TV ads for comics

[johncorrigan]

I loved comics when growing up and get quite nostalgic about them. My Dad used to bring the Beano and the Topper and the Hotspur and the Bunty and the Judy into the house among others. We read them all, and swapped with pals and cousins. I also had a paper round and remember ambling along reading comics before popping them through the letterboxes.
A couple of years ago a batch of of over 100 early TV adverts for DC Thomson were found in one of their old storage places in Dundee. The National Library of Scotland (NLS) has now smartened them up and made them available. Most are advertising free gifts or a new comic - I was surprised to see that the first edition of the Victor was as late as 1961.
Here's the article from the BBC news pages.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgeyq99ezdwo

and here's the link to the NLS Moving Image Archive:

https://movingimage.nls.uk/search?personality=10087

...and here's a couple of examples of these adverts...
https://movingimage.nls.uk/film/13840
https://movingimage.nls.uk/film/22106

[smittims]

Thanks, John. I didn't know comics had ever been in TV adverts, though I do remember peas and jam being the subject of quite sophisticated adverts in the 1960s.

I was brought up in Marcus Morris' comics, Robin, Swift and Eagle, which he introduced as a riposte to imported American comics which he deplored. I moved on to the oddly-named 'TV Express' , which had no connection with TV and wasn't 'express' in any way. I liked it as it was a bit more 'grown-up'; one of its main stories was about two young men driving to Australia in a new British car called the 'Ascot-Brown ' (a thinly-disguised Aston Martin DB3) . When TV Express suddenly ceased publication I moved on to 'Victor' whch I read for some years , then 'Rover and Wizard' whcih differed in that it was mostly text with few illustratins. I think I stayed with that until 1968 when I changed to the Gramophone . 'Boyhood's End' one might say.

[kernelbogey]

Is anyone here an Eagle fan? I took it from 1956 to its demise and have 7 eagle annuals on my shelves!

[johncorrigan]

Is anyone here an Eagle fan? I took it from 1956 to its demise and have 7 eagle annuals on my shelves!

My pal next door got 'Eagle', so I used to read his sometimes. In the late 70s Dan Dare was resurrected as a way of attracting readers to the newly released comc '200AD', an IPC comic. Our loft still has a healthy (or mouse eaten) few boxes of comics. The 'Eagle' was re-launched in the late seventies too, again by IPC.

[kernelbogey]

Our family also took the News Chronicle.

My eldest brother died in 2019, and his son and daughter were unwilling to go through the boxes of old diaries, letters etc he had left - some of them he had picked up from our Dad's house when he had died 27 years earlier. Knowing that I take a different view of this kind of material, they handed it over to muggins. Among the letters I found one from middle brother to our parents who were away on a week's conference-cum-holiday trip to Paris in 1949, when he was 10. It was written on 'Arkubs' paper, by turns pretentious and childish, but well presented as he confessed to having had a 'rough copy'. I had completely forgotten about Arkubs, but it came back with Proustian elegance as I read - the badges, secret codes etc, all revealed in the News Chronicle:

The Arkubs [from Wikipedia]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japhet_and_Happy

As with other annuals, such as Teddy Tail with the Teddy Tail League, Pip, Squeak and Wilfred with the WLOG and Bobby Bear with the Bobby Bear Club, Japhet and Happy also had a club in the mid-1930s, The Arkubs. The club had a badge, with Happy and AK on it. There were secret codes, hand signs and rules for The Grand United Order of Arkubs. To join the Arkubs, if you were under 15, you had to collect 12 'Happy' Badges from the News Chronicle and send off three pence. You could also get a Japhet and Happy breakfast set of a cup, saucer, plate and egg cup by enrolling 6 new members.

[smittims]

How fascinating. I hadn't heard of that .

Swift ran a 'Swift Club' for some years. I can't remember what its membership benefits or terms of reference were but when they announced they were ending it I felt sufficiently strongly (at the age of 8) to write to Marcus Morris telling him I would stop reading Swift as a protest. He wrote me a very nice letter back sayingh hoped I woilfoind another comic I liked. Of course I simply moved on to Eagle, so he didn't actually lose a reader .