Comics Across the Channel

If ever you needed proof that comic books were, and still are, a global medium, then you need only glance at the contents of most Australian comics published during the 1970s to see that comic book publishing was a truly international business, long before the term 'globalisation' entered our everyday speech.

As we've explored in previous installments, comics from both America and Spain travelled a circuitous path before they appeared between the covers of Australian comic magazines published by such local companies as KG Murray Publishers and Gredown Pty Ltd, particularly during the 1970s.

Yet the recent addition of two British comic books to my collection indicates that the export trade in European comics was already well-established in the immediate postwar era, and resulted in some intriguing exchanges between different nations' comic book publishing industries.

When I first saw this copy of Captain Tornado No.54 displayed above, I initially thought it was some obscure British ‘pirate adventure’ comic from the 1950s. After all, the seal in the top left-hand corner proclaims it is 'Approved - A British Publication'. The publisher is listed as Press Books Ltd, while L. Miller & Son Ltd., a company with long ties to the British comics industry, is named as the distributor.

Yet there was something about the style of the interior artwork which suggested that this comic was not the work of a British illustrator. Also, some of the captions and speech balloons looked as if they had been resized, or edited in some way, which suggested that English was not the original language in which this comic was printed.

Then, tucked away in the corner of a single panel, was the artist's name - Claude Henri. Now that certainly doesn't sound like a traditional English name, does it?

As it turns out, the comic book I was reading was originally called Captaine Tornade, and was the work of a prolific French comics artist, Claude-Henri Juillard, whose career appears to have spanned several decades from the postwar era onwards.

Another intriguing feature about this comic was a small symbol in the bottom left-hand corner of the cover, which featured a masked cowboy's head superimposed over the letter 'Z', with the phrase 'Justice & Loyalty' printed alongside it.

Wait a minute! A masked cowboy? The letter 'Z'? Could this, in fact, be a reference to the original pulp magazine hero known as 'El Zorro'?

Yes, as it turns out, it is. But this was not an American comic strip incarnation of the masked swashbuckler nicknamed 'The Fox' by his enemies. No, this particular Zorro was yet another French comic strip, this time drawn by Andre Oulie, and was the star of the self-titled Zorro (Jeudi-Magazine), which debuted in 1946.

Even more intriguingly, this French version of Zorro also crossed the English Channel, where it was translated and published as a black & white comic book, presumably at some point during the early-to-mid 1950s. My copy of Zorro No.61, while sharing a near-identical format with that of Captain Tornado, lists Mundial Press as the publisher - but L. Miller & Sons are still the same distributor.

Yet both of these comics contain in-house advertisements urging readers to buy "the other Grand Comics in this series", which included Sgt. O'Brien, Robin and Pango - all "on sale at newsagents each month - Price 6D".

While I've come up empty-handed in my search for references to Sgt. O'Brien, the online biography for Andre Oulie lists him as the creator of a 1947 French comic strip, Robin l'Intrépide - which is presumably the source of the English edition Robin comic book?

And as for Pango, a quick search of eBay UK came up with some cover scans to a British comic, this time listing L. Miller & Son as the publisher on the front cover, called Pango, dating from the mid-1950s. This 'jungle boy' adventure comic is, presumably, another translated French comic, reprinted for the UK market - even though its physical format (title masthead, publisher's logo, etc) differs slightly from that of Zorro or Captain Tornado.

We tend to think that the first stage of 'Cross-Channel' exposure between British and French comics (leaving aside the English translations of Asterix and Tintin) occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, partly as a result of the 'new wave' in adult French comics, such as Metal Hurlant (published in the USA as Heavy Metal).

Yet as these 1950s comic book curios show, English schoolkids were already savouring the pleasures of French 'bande dessine', decades before the 'small press sophisticates' of Thatcher's Britain discovered their first issues of Pilote and the like.

(Presumably, Australian kids growing up in the 1950s got to enjoy these translated French comics as well, as it's highly likely that these titles were exported to Australia during that decade.)

How, and why, such French comic strips as Captaine Tornade, Zorro and Robin l'Intrepide came to be translated for the postwar British comics market, may never be fully explained. But these long forgotten sixpence comics amply demonstrate that comic books were already becoming a truly international medium, even as the dust from World War Two had barely settled.

Tony Rafty OAM – Comic Book Pioneer

His signature is familiar to countless readers of the Sydney Sun and Sun-Herald newspapers, where his cartoons and caricatures were a regular feature for forty years.

Yet like so many famous newspaper cartoonists of his generation, Tony Rafty got his start as a comic book artist.

What sets his work apart from his peers is that Tony Rafty is widely credited with producing the first original Australian comic book that helped kick-start the Australian comic book industry.

Born Tony Raftopoulos to Greek migrant parents on 12 October 1915, Rafty grew up in the Sydney suburb of Rose Bay.

During the 1930s, Tony began working as a caddy at the Royal Sydney Golf Club. Not only did it provide his family with much-needed income, but it fuelled Tony’s lifelong passion for the sport that would play a big part in his artistic career.

By this time, Rafty began drawing caricatures of prominent sports personalities, working freelance for local newspapers and magazines.

“I got my first job with a sporting newspaper called The Referee,” recalls Tony. “It was published by Ezra Norton – but then he decided to close the bloody thing down!”

By the end of the decade, Tony began serving as a soldier with the Commonwealth Military Force.

He often spent his military leave in Sydney, knocking on publishers’ doors. “One day I just happened to wander into the offices of the New South Wales Bookstall Company,” he says.

By 1940, the NSW Bookstall Company was nearing its twilight years. Founded by Henry Lloyd in 1879, the business was purchased by Alfred Cecil Rowlandson in 1897, after Lloyd’s death.

Under Rowlandson’s stewardship, the business pioneered cheap paperback book publishing in Australia. At its peak (c.1904-1922), the NSW Bookstall Company produced nearly 5 million books, which it sold through a network of railway & tram-stop bookstalls, private lending libraries and newsagencies.

“That was where I met Brendan Dowling, who was the boss at the time,” according to Tony. “He was a lovely man and I’d always call in on him, whenever I was down in Sydney on leave.”

While the NSW Bookstall Company was no longer the dominant force in local book publishing, it could take advantage of the recently imposed ban on imported periodicals.

“One day, in 1940, Dowling said to me, ‘Will you do a comic strip for us? We’ll print it’.”

“I’d not read many comic books before then, maybe a few Yankee things,” admits Tony, “but I used to enjoy those English tabloid comics, which had lots of humour in them.”

Never having drawn a comic book before didn’t concern him, either. “You know what it’s like when you’re young – the world’s yours for the taking and you rip into it. So, if he asked me to do a comic book, I got stuck into it.”

So began the creation of Australia’s first original comic book – Jimmy Rodney on Secret Service.

“I wrote and drew it myself – but I made up the story as I went along,” he freely admits.

The story centres on a spy gang, led by a hooded figure known as ‘Zon’, to steal the plans for a secret ‘sub-sea ray’ – a weapon with which, according to its inventor, Professor Cooper, “our submarines will be invincible against enemy action.”

When the spies murder Professor Cooper, Jimmy Rodney of the Secret Service is assigned to the case. The killers’ trail takes Rodney aboard a submarine, where he poses as a crew member under the watchful eye of Vance, the gun-toting captain. After taking part in the submarine’s secret military exercises, Rodney defeats the spy ring and helps destroy the vessel.

Published late in 1940, Jimmy Rodney on Secret Service also featured a text story, Phantom Raider (subtitled ‘Enemy agents at work off Australian coast’), written by Rod Maynard. Selling for 4d, it became the first of NSW Bookstall’s wartime comics.

While Rafty’s unfamiliarity with the medium is evident in his awkward page layouts and redundant captions, his brisk, confident rendering evokes the work of comparable artists like Les Such. There is little doubt that, had Rafty been given the opportunity to produce further titles, he could have become a notable comic book artist, with a distinctive, energetic style.

Rafty says he was given free reign with the comic. “But I would’ve shown it to some of my journo mates, to make sure I got the grammar and expression right.”

Because his time with NSW Bookstall was so brief, Rafty never met any of the company’s other comic book artists, such as Terry Powis or Will Donald.

“I mainly associated with the artists from [the newspaper] Smith’s Weekly, such as George Finey, who gave me my first art lessons, Syd Miller, Stan Cross and ‘WEP’ [William Edwin Pidgeon].”

“I can’t recall what I was paid for it [the comic],” says Tony, “or whether Dowling just took me out for a feed as payment!”

While acknowledging his work’s historical importance, Rafty claims that “comic books didn’t catch on [in Australia] until after I left the field, when people like Syd Nicholls came along.”

Rafty’s cartooning career was put ‘on hold’ after he joined the AIF in 1942. He was appointed an official war artist and was stationed in the Pacific, covering the New Guinea campaign and other theatres of war.

After World War Two ended, Rafty was assigned by the Sun newspaper to cover the Indonesian war of independence, where he met, and became friends with, the future President Soekarno.

Travelling to London for the 1948 Olympic Games, Rafty embarked on his lengthy career as a sports cartoonist and caricaturist, as both freelancer and staff illustrator for Associated Newspapers. He retired in 1980 and received an Order of Australia Medal (OAM) in 1990.

The author would like to thank Mick Stone of Camberwell Books and Collectibles for his assistance in preparing this story. This article originally appeared in the December 2006 edition of Collectormania magazine.

Uncovering The Fast Gun

Back in October 2006, I posted an entry about some copies of an Australian 'Western' comic book I'd acquired, called The Fast Gun.

At the time, I stated that the issues in my possession were published by Page Publications in the early 1970s - but speculated that they may have been reprints of a title previously released by Horwitz Publications, back in the early 1960s.

But, to be honest, I wasn't sure if I would ever get the chance to prove if my theory was correct or not. For years, I'd only ever seen those Page Publication editions of The Fast Gun turn up in comic shops, book exchanges or on Internet auction sites - and didn't hold out much hope of ever seeing a Horwitz 'original', if such a thing ever existed!

Thankfully, my luck recently changed when I scored a copy of The Fast Gun No.12, which was published by Horwitz Publications. Although unsigned, the front cover (see above) appears to be the work of Horwitz's longstanding cover artist, Maurice Bramley.

Just for the record, here is a list of the comic strip stories which appear in that issue:

'His Guns Hang Low!' (Artist: Mac L. Pakula - Originally published in Six Gun Western No.2, March 1957)

'In the Heat of Battle' (Artist: Dick Ayers - Originally published in Six Gun Western No.2, March 1957)

'I Dare You to Draw' (Artist: Jay Scott Pike)

'The Last Hour of Hank Borden' (Artist: Joe Orlando - Originally published in Six Gun Western No.2, March 1957)

'The Life and Death of the Abilene Kid!' (Artist: Joe Maneely)

'The Golden Kid' (Uncredited)

It's probably a safe bet to make that those stories listed above which are either uncredited, or aren't attributed to their original American publication source, were most likely drawn from the Timely/Atlas Comics stable, which supplied most of the material appearing in Horwitz Publications range of war, western and superhero comics throughout the 1960s.

(As an aside, those bibliographic details listed above were taken from The Unofficial Handbook of Marvel Comics Creators.)

Sadly, this issue of The Fast Gun doesn't have a publication date printed anywhere - even the back cover advertisement (for the Sampson School of Music) doesn't have a date code printed on the reply coupon.

However, my friend (and fellow Aussie comics collector) Graeme Cliffe recently told me that his own copy of The Fast Gun No.14 features an advertisement dated 1/62, which indicates this was published in January 1962. Assuming that The Fast Gun was published on a monthly schedule, then it's likely the title debuted in November 1960.

(However, given Horwitz's seemingly irregular publishing schedule for The Phantom Commando, it's possibly unwise to assume that The Fast Gun was actually published on a monthly basis.)

For whatever reason, both Graeme and I have concluded that the original Horwitz editions of The Fast Gun are inexplicably hard to come by - especially when compared with other Horwitz Western comics from this era, such as Kid Colt - Outlaw, Two-Gun Kid and Buffalo Bill, which surface quite regularly.

Given that the earliest known Page Publication editions of The Fast Gun appear to start with issue # 39, it's impossible to ascertain if the original Horwitz series ever reached those issue numbers - or whether Page Publications arbitrarily began numbering their editions with those issue numbers.

That's not as far-fetched an idea as you might think - Page Publications often assigned different issue numbers to the exact same issue of a comic book, depending on when it was reprinted - their reprints of Catman and The Phantom Commando offer several examples of this practice.

Yet Graeme also puts forward the suggestion that Page Publications may have commenced their reprint series of The Fast Gun beginning with # 39, if it was carrying on the numbering sequence of an earlier Page Publications title (most likely a US reprint comic), which could have been cancelled with issue # 38.

Apparently, the earliest Page Publication series of The Fast Gun reprinted the Bramley sequence of 'Sudden' stories from issues # 39 - # 42. As these issues all bore a 12 cent cover price, this would date them back to at least sometime after February 1966, when Australia converted from the imperial to decimal currency system.

Just to confuse matters further, issue #39 of the Page Publications edition of The Fast Gun apparently features an advertisement for the EP record, With The Beatles, which was first released in Australia in 1963!

Yet it's unlikley that Page Publications would have reprinted the same advertisements which might have appeared in an earlier Horwitz Publications edition of The Fast Gun - so perhaps this advertisement was for a 1966 reissue of this particular Beatles album?

Even more confusingly, Page Publications reissued this same this same sequence of The Fast Gun comic, but commenced the series numbering with issue # 43 (released around 1970) and went through to issue # 52, which would have been released no later than 1972.

But until we can uncover any later issues from the original Horwitz publications' series of The Fast Gun, we have no idea whether Maurice Bramley's 'Sudden' strip made its first appearance there - or, as I suggested in my October 2006 blog entry, that its inclusion in the early 1970s Page Publication editions marked its print debut, and that the series was, in fact, previously unused Horwitz artwork inventory.

If anyone out there reading this entry has any later issues of The Fast Gun from the original Hortwitz Publications series, please email me with details at: buzzproductions@yahoo.com.au

Will the real 'Sudden' please stand up?

Back in October 2006, I wrote an entry about the comic artist, Maurice Bramley, and his work on a little-known Australian comic titled The Fast Gun.

It was in this comic that Bramley produced a recurring series about a Western gunfighter, Jim Sedden, whose lightning-fast draw earned him the nickname 'Sudden'. His deadly skill frequently saw him work as undercover marshall for Governor Phil Harrison, of Houston, Texas.

In my previous blog posting, I speculated as to whether these editions of The Fast Gun comic, which were published by Page Publications during the early 1970s, were reprints of stories originally released by Horwitz Publications during the early 1960s (when Bramley was Horwitz's principal comic book cover artist), or if they were first printings of unused material, purchased from Horwitz after that company ceased publishing Australian comics during 1965-66.

Whatever their origins, I had never seen these 'Sudden' comic strips elsewhere, and had assumed that this was a new, original series from the pen of Maurice Bramley.

So, imagine my surprise when I stumbled across this paperback (see above) in my local secondhand bookstore!

For a split-second, I wondered if Maurice Bramley's 'Sudden' comic strip was, in fact, an adaptation of this fictional hero?

If so, that would make it a rare example of a literary character appearing in an Australian comic book - and even more unusual to see it published at a time when the domestic comics industry had largely expired.

(Actually, Australian comic book publishers in the 1940s and 50s were fairly quick to exploit the popularity of well-known authors with comic book tie-ins. The British crime writer Edgar Wallace had several of his stories adapted into comic book format, as did Capt. W.E. Johns, whose famous adventurers Biggles and Gimlet became stars of their own authorised Australian comic book series.)

However, a quick comparison between the Sudden novel and The Fast Gun reveals that, while it's not an adaptation of the novel, the comic book appears to 'borrow' a few elements from its literary predecessor.

'The Western' is arguably the one unique American literary genre which adapted well to foreign climes, where tales of cowboys and Indians (disparagingly referred to as 'horse operas' by some critics) have been taken up by writers, cartoonists and filmmakers across the globe for much of the 20th century.

During the 1930s and 40s, England, like Australia, played host to a thriving 'popular fiction' publishing industry, which churned out cheap hardbacks (for the private lending library market) and novellette magazines for sale through newsagencies and bookstalls.

'The Western' quickly established itself as one of the most popular genres in the British market, with countless English authors cranking out Western yarns to an audience hungry for escpaist adventures on the wide open plains of the American frontier.

Oliver Strange was one of the early 'stars' of the British Western scene, whose series of novels starring James Green, a lethal gunfighter known as 'Sudden', became bestsellers when they first appeared (as far as I can ascertain) during the early 1930s.

Strange wrote 10 'Sudden' novels during his lifetime. The book shown here, The Law o' The Lariat, was originally published by George Newnes in 1931, but this Corgi Books edition was first published in 1962 - and was reprinted a further five times throughout the 1960s (This copy is a 1967 reprint, which attests to the character's enduring popularity.)

The Law o' the Lariat sees 'Sudden' (so named because of his lightning-fast gun draw) receive a message from Judge Embley, who presides over the town of Desert Edge, asking him to work undercover as the new foreman at the Lazy M ranch.

Introducing himself as Jim Severn, 'Sudden' helps the ranch's owner, Philip Masters, thwart the schemes of a nefarious rival rancher, Black Bart, who wants to take over the Lazy M 'spread', while doing battle with a group of bandits known as 'The White Masks'.

The Sudden books were not only sufficiently popular to remain in print for decades, but new adventures featuring the character were written by Frederick Nolan (who was a manuscript reader & editor with Corgi Books), who produced a further five Sudden novels under the pen name 'Frederick H. Christian' during the 1960s.

And it's this belated 1960s 'revival' of the Sudden novels which invites comparisons with Maurice Bramley's comic strip, 'Sudden', as it appears in the Australian comic book, The Fast Gun.

Nowhere in the comic strip is there any reference to Oliver Strange's 'Sudden' character, nor any acknowledgement that the strip is an adaptation of the original book series. Yet there are more than a few similarities between these two versions of 'Sudden'.

Bramley's character's real name is Jim Sedden, which sounds a lot like the alias 'Jim Severn' used by Sudden in The Law o' the Lariat. And, like Oliver Strange's hero, Bramley's gunfighter earned the nickname 'Sudden' because he's unbelievably fast on the gun-draw.

And, like his paperback namesake, Bramley's cowboy also works as an undercover agent - but in the employ of Governor Phil Harrison, of Houston, Texas.

So, what are we to make of these similarities, decades later? Are they a string of extraordinary coincidences, or a case of 'imitation being the greatest form of flattery'?

It's not unreasonable to suggest that Maurice Bramley could have been aware of Oliver Strange's 'Sudden' paperback novels, as these were readily available in Australia during the 1960s. (My copy of The Law o' the Lariat bears an Australian retail price of 60 cents)

Admittedly, the editions of The Fast Gun that I'm referring to here were actually published by Page Publications and date from the early 1970s - but it's quite posible that these editions were, in fact, reprints of a Horwitz Publciations title dating from the 1960s, when the Corgi Books editions of the Sudden novels would have been sold locally.

(For further details on the links Horwitz Publications/Page Publications comics' line, read my article on Daniel Best's blog about The Phantom Commando, along with my earlier entry about the convolouted transition between the Horwitz Publications & Page Publications' series of The Fast Gun comic.)

Aside from doing one-off, self-contained comic strips for Horwitz's war and Western comics during the early 1960s, Bramley (to my knowledge, anyway) has never instigated an original comic book series of his own.

His first major, ongoing comic title, The Phantom Commando, was originally created by John Dixon, and 'inherited' by Bramley after Dixon left comic books to focus on his syndicated newspaper strip, Air Hawk and the Flying Doctor.

It's quite possible that, if he were asked to come up with a new Western strip for Horwitz Publications, Bramley liberally 'borrowed' aspects of the 'Sudden' book series and used them to come up with the 'Sudden' comic strip which appeared in The Fast Gun magazine.

If that was the case, then this would by no means be the first time that Bramley made use of others' material.

Sometime back in 2000-2001, Australian comics enthusiast and historian Daniel McKeown wrote a fascinating, insightful study on the work of Maurice Bramley for the (sadly) now defunct Comicsaustralia.com website. This extensively illustrated essay showed numerous examples of how Bramley 'swiped' storylines, dialogue and panel sequences from other comics for use in his own work.

Amazingly, many of the stories that Bramley 'swiped' from were reprints of American comics featured in other comic book titles released by Horwitz Publications - who was Bramley's own publisher!

We can only speculate whether the plagirism of their own product went unnoticed at the time by Horwitz's editors - or, if they did notice it, chose to ignore it. Perhaps Bramely was even "encouraged" to freely "borrow" material from other sources for use in his own comic strip?

Again, the answers to these questions will most likely go unanswered.

In Bramley's defence, however, it must be said that he never deliberately copied another artist's style. Although he may have appropriated other cartoonists' work as the source for his own material, Bramley always drew comics in his unmistakably gritty style.

Insofar as the controversial subject of 'swiping' goes, I daresay that Bramley was in good company. Over the years I've read numerous anecdotes of how even the biggest name American newspaper cartoonists always kept a 'swipe file', featuring examples of well-drawn figures, heads or objects, which they would use as reference material for their own work.

Despite the overwhelming evidence which suggests that Bramley was a prolific 'swiper', such allegations in no way diminish my appreciation and enjoyment of Bramley's comic book work.

While his style clearly marks him as belonging to the earlier school of pre-war commercial artists (as opposed to being a comic book artist, per se), by bringing this 'outsider's perspective' to comic book illustration, Bramley's work stands out from other Australian comic books of the postwar period.

Nor should these comments lessen anyone's enjoyment of Bramley's efforts on 'Sudden' in The Fast Gun, which remains amongst his best work.