Batman beyond the Ocean at the End of the Lane – by Ian Baker

South Parade Pier, Southsea, Hants. Sept 1967. © Public Domain

“I wonder what it is about that area. I'd go down the South Parade Pier and return home to my grandparents' bookless house* with comics... 

 

*They had Readers Digests, and a set of Dickens on the bookshelves in the grandfather clock.”

 

Neil Gaiman, Twitter, July 7 2018  

 

For those of you unfamiliar with the geography of Portsmouth & Southsea, the South Parade Pier juts out into the Solent, at the southernmost tip of Portsea Island, not so many yards from the short road at the end of the Canoe Lake that in recent years was formally named "The Ocean At The End Of The Lane" in honour of famed writer with local connections, Neil Gaiman.

 

Many of you will already be familiar with South Parade Pier from the role it played in Ken Russell’s film of The Who’s rock opera “Tommy”, when it was significantly damaged by fire on 6^th June 1974 during filming of said film. Never one to waste an opportunity, director Ken Russell incorporated footage of the conflagration into the completed film.

 

However, this was only one of many times during its illustrious lifetime that the pier had burned down, and so despite the glamourous presence in the film of such luminaries as Elton John, Jack Nicholson, Ann Margaret, Roger Daltry and Oliver Reed, "Tommy" is not the subject of today’s blog.

 

Today we go further back to the summer of 1967 and examine the role that South Parade Pier played in shaping our comic collecting lives.

 

As readers may know from experience, seaside towns hold special place in the hearts of UK comic collectors, due to the abundance of back-issues that used to be found in gift shops that only opened during the summer season, when unsold stock from previous years once again saw the light of day, which in many cases included DCs and Marvels from spinner racks of yore.

 

In late 1966 Manchester-based World Distributors (publishers of countless children’s annuals, and sometime distributor of American Marvel comics in Britain) were looking to capitalize further on the Batman TV series craze. They saw a gap in the market that could utilize the skills of their reliable writer Douglas Enefer and talented house artist Walt Howarth, to take advantage of the approaching period when fellow Mancunians, other Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen of all ridings would be heading south with their families for a week or fortnight's break in a guest-house by the seaside. For local hoteliers, the mid-sixties was that watershed moment before the attractions of a cheap week in Benidorm had impinged fully on the British holiday-going consciousness, a time when Wallace-Arnold coaches (or “Wally Trolleys” as they were affectionately known) blocked the main arteries of the British landscape on Saturday afternoons as they bore northerners down congested A-Roads in search of the summer sun of south coast resorts.

 

The photo at the top of this blog, taken on a rather damp 1967 summer’s day, shows two small shops under the front awning of the pier entrance.  In the foreground you’ll see the Lyons Maid Ice Cream concession where many of us bought Zoom’s, Sea Jets and FAB ice creams in the hope of getting a full set of collectors’ cards, while in the background on the opposite side of the pier entrance stands the newsagents/tobacconists which usually stocked American comics.

Better shot of newsagents. © JJ Marshallsay, from Memories of Bygone Portsmouth FB group

But in 1967, the newsagents was also to stock a new bi-weekly series of Batman text novellas (a bit of a stretch to call them pulps, more digests, with covers a little larger than paperback size) which rode the coattails of the Batman ’66 TV craze, published by World Distributors under the World Adventure Library umbrella series title.

Batman Storybook Annual 1967 plus all 11 issues of BATMAN! digest

Aimed at individuals with a short attention span (be it a parent dozing in a deckchair or a child experiencing a candy-floss sugar high), each digest had 64 action-packed pages based on the characters as they were depicted in the Batman TV Series, interspersed with black and white line illustrations. Although records indicate that these digest novellas were published from November 1966 through May 1967, the first of these books that I acquired from South Parade Pier was #9 – “No Quack for the Penguin” – probably at Easter 1967 - and I then went on to track down the previous eight issues plus the two subsequent titles.  

 

I was an avid 7-year old reader. I had already exhausted the extant “Five Find-Outers” books by Enid Blyton, so I was on the lookout for tougher fare. The writer Douglas Enefer delivered the goods. 

 

Take a read of the opening page of #3 – “Batman meets Dr. No-Face” (below). 

If Douglas Enefer was not an ardent disciple of Lester Dent’s “Doc Savage” Master Plot formula, he certainly knew his way around placing the reader immediately into the middle of the action, setting up a scene of suspense and introducing the mystery on page one.  Of course, Douglas Enefer had a strong set of bona fides from the years he spent writing mystery novels and short stories under a variety of pen names (Dale Bogard, John Powers, etc) and well as under his own monicker. His last magnum opus in the 1970s would be to write a series of novels about TV Private Eye Frank Cannon, under the pseudonym Paul Denver. 

Douglas Enefer (1906-1987) had worked in the 1960s as a journalist in the regional British press, then national. In 1967, he joined the Daily Telegraph in Manchester, where he remained until his retirement in 1981. In addition to his journalistic activities, he wrote a few adventure novels and westerns, but above all more than forty detective novels. The adventures of his two heroes almost equally share his police production: Dale Shand, an American private detective residing in London, whose accounts are akin to the noir novel , and Sam Bawtry, an inspector from Liverpool who leads less violent investigations under orders from Chief Superintendent Braxted.

In addition, Enefer wrote novel tie-ins for British and American television series , and also made a few forays into television screenwriting, notably writing in 1966 an episode of The Saint  : The Man Who Liked Lions , season 5, episode 8.

Whether Batman World Adventure Library novella #1 “Batman….And the Ringer!” was Enefer’s first foray into writing Batman stories is open to conjecture. I suspect that he was also the man who wrote all the short stories in the first Batman Storybook Annual 1967, which hit the shelves around September 1966, a couple of months before the digests premiered. The 1967 Batman Storybook annual also introduced the UK Batman Fan Club, where for the princely sum of 5/6d sent to Batman, Heanor, Derbyshire (yup, the real address), a young fan could be inducted into the club and receive instructions on decoding secret messages from the Dynamic Duo.  The World Adventure Library digests then continued to promote the fan club in each and every issue – a shrewd move from World Distributors to keep the Post Office postal orders rolling in. 

Partnering Enefer on the digests was cover artist Walt Howarth (1928-2008), a longtime illustrator for World Distributors Ltd. As the more fully detailed biography in Bear Alley Books blog  details, Howarth's ability to capture a likeness in paint meant that he became WDL's leading artist, producing covers for most of their annuals. He was used to working from photographs of actors and would usually have his covers painted almost a year in advance of publication.

 

However, with the short lead time for the World Adventure Library covers due to the surge in the Batman craze, Walt took the route of painting covers that were “inspired” (ahem) by covers of previously published DC comics, Topps/A&BC trading cards, and promotional artwork developed for the Batman TV show.  Whether permission was sought or given, we may never know, but the works of Joe Kubert, Carmine Infantino, Sheldon Moldoff, Norman Saunders, Bob Powell and others were certainly plundered to provide bright covers that would jump out from the spinner rack.

Joe Kubert's Cover for Detective #349 repurposed for Batman...and the Ringer #1

 

Swipes from Carmine Infantino, Norm Saunders, Bob Powell and Sheldon Moldoff.

The line artwork inside each issue was fairly rudimentary, and does not appear to have been drawn by Howarth. However, it was certainly drawn by the same artist who contributed the illustrations to the 1967 Batman Storybook Annual.

Co-inciding with the summer holiday crowds returning home and the South Parade Pier shops closing up for the year, Batman stopped transmission on ITV Southern Television with the end of the second season of episodes. It would not be until 1976 that the third season was to be transmitted. World Distributors would not revive the Batman World Adventure series the following summer, although they still published Batman Storybook annuals for the Christmas market for the next three years. Whether Douglas Enefer wrote the stories appearing therein, I do not know.

 

Questions for our readers:

n  Do any of our readers know if Douglas Enefer wrote the Batman Storybook annuals?

n  Who drew the interior artwork of those annuals and the World Adventure Batman digests?

 

More information and references:

 

n  Kid Robson’s blog at https://kidr77.blogspot.com/2016/11/batman-fully-paid-up-member-of-world.html for information on other books in the series.

n  AtomicAvenue.com for covers and US values

n  Artist info from mycomicshop.com

n  UK issue values at https://www.comicpriceguide.co.uk/uk_comic.php?tc=batmanwor

n  Walt Howarth bio at https://bearalley.blogspot.com/2008/03/walt-howarth-1928-2008.html