A Question of Character: The Difference between the early Golden Age Superman and Batman Villains - by Nigel Brown

 The poet John Donne said “No man is an island”. This is true even of comic book superheroes. Superman, for example, has help from Lois Lane (in dramatic terms) in maintaining his secret identity as a weakling, when she subjects Clark Kent to frequent bouts of public humiliation.

Seen in this light, a comparison between villains confronted by the Golden Age Superman and the Golden Age Batman throws up some interesting differences between their core values as superheroes.

A key principle of drama is to have a fair match in abilities between one side and the other. If too unbalanced, there’s no drama because the more powerful side will quickly overwhelm the other and it’s game over before readers can engage with the story.

A good example of how a worthy opponent for our hero can put rocket fuel into a story can be found when Sherlock Holmes encounters Professor Moriarty: the consulting detective versus the “Napoleon of Crime” (‘The Adventure of the Final Problem’ 1893). The reader enjoys seeing Holmes stretched further than ever before to defeat this enemy. At the Reichenbach Falls the stakes cannot be higher, and the unsatisfactory result had the public clamouring for more.

Moving into the 20^th century, past the horrors of the first World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic, a hundred years ago we were about to enter what became known as the Roaring Twenties. Western society, especially in the United States, took a huge gasp of relief and it became party time.

Carnivals and fairs became increasingly popular in America after World War One (as stated by Hanif Abdurraqib in his book A Little Devil in America). Stuart Jeffries has written of this in The Spectator magazine (27 March 2021), in reference to the dance marathons of the time. There was also an American obsession for testing bodily limits; weightlifting was met with acclaim.

In these circumstances it’s easier to understand, as well, how the teenager Jerry Siegel come up with a carnival-dressed strongman who was capable of physically going beyond human limits: Superman.

Superman’s origin story, on the first page of Action Comics No. 1 (June 1938) explains that Superman’s core value is to be ‘champion of the oppressed’ and to help those in need. 

 

The Superman Mission

 

Given Superman’s ability to do whatever he wants, this can be seen, for someone with ultimate personal power, to demonstrate ultimate personal selflessness. The antithesis of this would therefore be the characteristic of ultimate selfishness, to be expressed as putting oneself ahead of everyone else (in ‘pulp’ comic book terms as desiring ‘total world domination’).

So how do Superman’s opponents measure up to this antithetic motivation? We can test this by examining the first published stories of Superman.

The generic ‘villain’ of each story is named first, with the stories listed in order of appearance:

 

• Mobsters and political corruption (Action Comics No. 1 June 1938)
• Corrupt munitions magnate (Action Comics No. 2 July 1938)
• Corrupt mine owner (Action Comics No. 3 August 1938)
• Corrupt football coach (Action Comics No. 4 September 1938)
• Collapsed dam (Action Comics No. 5 October 1938)
• Criminal brand licensers (Action Comics No. 6 November 1938)
• Loan-shark preying on circus (Action Comics No. 7 December 1938)
• Fence encouraging boy thieves (Action Comics No. 8 January 1939)
• Police Captain hunting Superman (Action Comics No. 9 February 1939)
• Corrupt chain-gang boss (Action Comics No. 10 March 1939)
• Corrupt oil stock investors (Action Comics No. 11 April 1939)
• Corrupt automobile manufacturer and reckless drivers (Action Comics No. 12 May 1939)
• Jewel thieves New York World’s Fair No. 1 June 1939)
• The Ultra-Humanite, a scientist (Action Comics No. 13 June 1939)
• The Ultra-Humanite, a scientist (Action Comics No. 14 July 1939)
• Gangsters seeking sunken treasure (Action Comics No. 15 August 1939)
• Gambling racketeers (Action Comics No. 16 September 1939)
• Boxing racketeers (Reprint from daily newspaper strip Superman No. 2 Fall 1939)
• Scientist (Reprint from daily newspaper strip Superman No. 2 Fall 1939)
• Businessman (Reprint from daily newspaper strip Superman No. 2 Fall 1939)
• The Ultra-Humanite (Action Comics No. 17 October 1939)
• Blackmailing newspaper owner (Action Comics No. 18 November 1939)
• The Ultra-Humanite (Action Comics No. 19 December 1939)
• State orphanage manager (Reprint from daily newspaper strip Superman No. 3 Winter 1939)
• Jewel smugglers (Reprint from daily newspaper strip Superman No. 3 Winter 1939)
• The Ultra-Humanite (Action Comics No. 20 January 1940)
• The Ultra-Humanite (Action Comics No. 21 February 1940)
• Aggressive warring nation of Toran (Action Comics No. 22 March 1940)
• Luthor, scientist (Action Comics No. 23 April 1940)
• Luthor, scientist (Superman No.4 Spring 1940)
• Luthor, scientist (Superman No.4 Spring 1940)
• Foreign agent (Superman No.4 Spring 1940)

 

At a superficial level, there’s no doubt that Superman fulfils his remit to be a champion of the oppressed as he battles corruption in all levels of society (ranging from criminal fences corrupting children to corrupt senators in Washington DC), but it’s not until a year later, in Action Comics No. 13 (June 1939), that he’s up against the Ultra-Humanite (defined by his name as ‘beyond human’) and who could be termed a true ‘supervillain’. The Ultra-Humanite is a character that possesses the antithesis of Superman’s core value: he wants to rule the world. Superman has three more encounters with this supervillain, and then – essentially – the Ultra-Humanite is replaced by a red-headed Luthor (who lacks the super-human powers of the Ultra-Humanite but, nevertheless, is a brilliant scientist with a world-ruling ambition).

 

Aim of the Ultra-Humanite

Luthor's Aim

 

Compare this record with Batman:

From Batman’s origin story (not in the first comic featuring Batman, but in a two-page vignette in Detective Comics No.33 November 1939), we learn that Batman’s raison d’etre is to be ‘warring on all criminals’.

 

Batman's Mission

 

So looking at Batman’s opponents in those first stories, matching the Superman tally:

 

Batman (pre-Robin) – 

• A businessman (Detective Comics No. 27 May 1939)
• Jewel thieves (Detective Comics No. 28 June 1939)
• Doctor Death, a scientist (Detective Comics No. 29 July 1939)
• Doctor Death, a scientist (Detective Comics No. 30 August 1939)
• The Monk, a supernatural being and vampire (Detective Comics No. 31 September 1939)
• The Monk, a supernatural being and vampire (Detective Comics No. 32 October 1939)
• A group of scientists (Detective Comics No. 33 November 1939)
• A scientist (Detective Comics No. 34 December 1939)
• An explorer (Detective Comics No. 35 January 1940)
• Hugo Strange, a scientist (Detective Comics No. 36 February 1940)
• A foreign agent (Detective Comics No. 37 March 1940)
• Hugo Strange, a scientist (Batman No. 1 Spring 1940)

 

Batman and Robin –

• Protection racket gangsters (Detective Comics No. 38 April 1940)
• The Joker (1^st story Batman No. 1 Spring 1940)
• The Cat, un-costumed Catwoman (Batman No. 1 Spring 1940)
• The Joker (2^nd story Batman No. 1 Spring 1940)
• Chinese opium ring (Detective Comics No. 39 May 1940)
• Clayface, an actor (Detective Comics No. 40 June 1940)
• Counterfeiting ring (Detective Comics No. 41 July 1940)
• The Joker (1^st story Batman No. 2 Summer 1940)
• The Crime Master, a brain damaged meek museum curator (Batman No. 2 Summer 1940)
• Clubfoot, who murders to own a goldmine (Batman No. 2 Summer 1940)
• Circus owners (Batman No. 2 Summer 1940)
• A scientist (New York World’s Fair Comics No. 2 1940)
• An indebted art patron (Detective Comics No. 42 August 1940)
• Corrupt city officials and racketeers (Detective Comics No. 43 September 1940)
• Giants, in Robin’s dream (Detective Comics No. 44 October 1940)
• The Puppet Master, a super hypnotist (Batman No. 3 Fall 1940)
• Men afflicted with myxedema (Batman No. 3 1940)
• Mobsters running a crime-school for boys (Batman No. 3 1940)
• The Cat-Woman, in costume (Batman No. 3 1940)
• The Joker (Detective Comics No. 45 November 1940)

 

Immediately it’s clear that Batman (and later, with Robin) faces threats much more personified by ‘supervillains’ than Superman.

Taking a ‘supervillain’ as being an opponent with a colourful name, and perhaps additional fighting skills beyond the average (not necessarily ‘Super’ in the kryptonian sense), then Superman – in his first 32 stories – fights just two of these (the Ultra-Humanite and Luthor) in 28%, or just over a fifth, of the tales.

Batman, in contrast, battles a much higher rate of nine supervillains, in 46%, or nearly half, of the stories.

Why this difference?

Part of the explanation may be that it was enough of a novelty that Superman, as the pioneer superhero, was shown to be fighting ‘ordinary injustice’ in the form of mobsters, corrupt officials in different fields, and even natural disasters (the collapsed dam). But after a year of this, Superman needed greater challenges and so the Ultra-Humanite, the first of Superman’s many supervillains, turned up in the June 1939 Action Comics.

Note that Batman’s first ‘supervillain’, Dr Death, also debuts in July 1939, within a month of Superman’s first supervillain. So perhaps it’s only a consequence of Batman’s later debut that Batman faces his supervillains at an earlier stage in his career.

 

Dr Death's Plan

We can test this theory by looking at both the Superman and the Batman stories to see if the supervillain ratio changed after the debut of the ‘supervillain’ in June/July 1939 in their respective comics.

Over the next nineteen stories, for both of them:

• The number and proportion of ‘supervillain’ stories are nine for Superman, which is 47%
• For Batman stories, the number is twelve, which is still a higher percentage than in the Superman stories, at 63%.

So something more significant is still going on.

I think that is rooted in the difference of core values between Superman and Batman.

Batman has a much more focused mission in his war on all criminals compared to Superman, with Superman’s more general mission of championing the oppressed. 

As a requirement in the ‘dramatic’ testing of Batman, therefore, it’s no surprise that Batman’s more likely to be encountering specific individuals (‘anti-Batmans’, if you like to call them) to test him (in a dramatic sense: ‘Moriarty’s to test ‘Holmes’s).

Incidentally, this explains why the Joker is such an apt and enduring opponent for Batman. Crime, at its most basic form, is disorder in society. Batman has sworn to war on all criminals, essentially a particular type of social disorder, and the Joker represents – in his purest form – absolute social disorder. To quote Heath Ledger as the Joker in the movie The Dark Knight (2008): “Do I really look like a guy with a plan?... I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.”

I think that the existence of the Joker, and thereby the duality of Batman/Joker, has elevated the Batman character to a higher level of literary creation (and Alan Moore demonstrated this magnificently in Batman:The Killing Joke, his 1988 graphic novel). The Joker has been going strong for over eighty years now (almost as long as Batman), and is still popular, even to the point of meriting his own movie without Batman (Joker 2019, with Joaquin Phoenix in the title role). 

 

The Recurring Joker

 

But this does raise the question, does Superman have an obvious equivalent to Batman’s Joker? I don’t think so, and this is to Superman’s detriment as a well-rounded literary character.

Lex Luthor has always been posited as Superman’s greatest foe.

Let’s put him to the test. Is he the ‘ultimate selfish villain’?

Perhaps not. A classic Silver Age Superman story proves that he’s not totally consumed by his selfish demeanour. His altruistic actions and attitude to the people of the planet Lexor are demonstrated in the Edmond Hamilton story ‘The Showdown between Luthor and Superman’ (Superman No. 164 October 1963).

 

Lex Luthor Self-Sacrifice

 

So, given his altruism, Lex Luthor cannot be the absolute antithesis of Superman. So who is?

I’ve suggested another name elsewhere (What’s in a Name? Superman’s greatest enemy we don’t hear about. superstuff73 July 25 2020) but I have another suspect, perhaps frivolous. Not an enemy, but certainly an adversary. There’s one constant character in the Superman mythos who’s been there from the beginning, has always been a professional rival to Clark Kent, has always been totally selfish in seeking their own happiness, and, in many ‘imaginary’ stories, when this has been achieved, Superman has lost his powers (in effect, his existence as Superman has been negated), and, again, I note that Alan Moore had a nod to this in his terrific two-part story “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” (Superman No. 423 and Action Comics No. 583 both September 1986). So, perhaps not so much tongue-in-cheek after all, Superman’s greatest adversary is, and has always been… Lois Lane.

 

 

copyright. © Nigel Brown

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

Announcing the publication of Alan Austin’s book ‘Comics Unlimited: My life as a Comic Collector and Dealer’

Alan Austin - "The Guv'nor"

 Alan Austin (1955-2017) was one of the most respected figures in UK comic book fandom (writes Nigel Brown). He published many fanzines about American comic books throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, including Fantasy Unlimited (later Comics Unlimited), the first Comic Book Price Guide for Great Britain, the Golden Age fanzine and the DC and Marvel Comics Indexes.

 

Key Publications by Alan Austin

 

He also wrote two books. One about his life in comics: ‘Comics Unlimited: My life as a Comic Collector and Dealer’, the other about his experiences as a bookdealer (in fiction form, as a series of short stories), ‘The Adventures of Bernie Burrows, Bookseller’. 

Both are now available worldwide on Amazon as ebooks and paperbacks, at affordable prices. The images below will link to the UK Amazon site:

 

Link to Amazon.co.uk

Link to Amazon.co.uk

Ian Baker and I first met Alan Austin on the early afternoon of Saturday, May 25^th 1974. I can be that precise because it was at the Emsworth Comic Mart in Hampshire.

 

  

A number of London comic book dealers had come down to the Portsmouth area; amongst their number was Alan. I knew of him as I was already familiar with his impressive comic fanzine Fantasy Unlimited, the first one I’d ever seen. (an encounter described in SuperStuff73 ‘The Mad DC Comic Hunt, or Tales of the Fabulous Bronze Age’). I was 14 years old, and Alan seemed quite senior to me at 19. I remember he had an Amazing Fantasy #15 (the first Spider-Man comic) for sale for £15. Still way beyond my pocket-money budget. The mart did not attract the number of comic fans as hoped for, being too far out of London to attract enough collectors to make it worth their while. But although I remember I didn’t say much to Alan that day, the connection was made. Soon both Ian and myself were writing into Fantasy Unlimited with questions for his popular item We Want Information. In time, I wrote a couple of articles myself for his fanzine.

I knew Alan for forty-three years and our common interests in comics, then books, then writing in general forged a growing bond of friendship. We even found common ground and were each other’s sounding-boards concerning our mutual problems with our businesses: him as a comic and book dealer; myself as the owner of an optician’s practice. It was surprising how often our common complaints matched, whether it was dealing with landlords, leases, or the Great British Public. Alan was always a ready and sympathetic ear at the end of the telephone – for others as well as myself – and is much missed.

It’s a comfort that he left a body of work, including this book about comics, for us to again hear his voice through his words and we can all enjoy another conversation with Alan, if one-sided, about our mutual enthusiasm: the American comic book.

 

Alan Austin’s life as a comic collector encompassed much more than just collecting American comics. He said that he was born with the "merchant gene", and trading in them was a significant factor in his enjoyment of comics. It enabled him to turn a hobby into an occupation. Indeed, Alan became the UK’s first full-time comic dealer.

His sales lists evolved into the fanzine Fantasy Unlimited (later renamed Comics Unlimited). This was decades before the internet, and so Alan’s efforts enabled comic book fans to link up all over the country, and beyond, giving a boost to the comic collecting community (in much the same way that Hugo Gernsback did when he began to publish the full addresses of letter writers in the first science fiction pulps, thus founding science fiction fandom).

Alan demanded the highest standards when it came to both the text and art for his publications, and so he gave a showcase to a number of future professionals in the comic book business, including, amongst others, Kevin O’Neill.

It was certainly a Golden Age for Ian Baker and myself when we both subscribed to Fantasy Unlimited for our regular fixes of fandom beyond the environs of Portsmouth, as well as that enticing, and affordable, sales list of comics at the back of each issue, so essential for filling in the ‘gaps’ in our comic collections.

 

Part of a Marvel Sales list from Fantasy Unlimited

 

And of course, Fantasy Unlimited inspired us, along with fellow fan Geoff Cousins, to produce our own fanzine… SuperStuff! Yes, ultimately Alan Austin was to blame for the blog you are reading now.

Our first issue of SuperStuff was produced around April 1974, and between us we ‘published’ 10 issues, although I confess that reproduction of each issue depended upon carbon paper threaded through a typewriter. This method only allowed three legible copies of each issue to be produced (enough to satisfy the three of us, bizarrely). 

It wasn’t until issue 11 of SuperStuff in August 1984 that I managed to print about thirty copies. And that was using Alan’s own Gestetner 160 in the basement of his Islington shop, Heroes, to which he was generous enough to allow access, along with his encouragement and advice. Things had come full circle!

 

When it came to the prices commanded for back issues of comic books, Alan was always on the side of the comic collector. He published the first UK Price Guide to American Comics in an attempt to stabilise the market and give ammunition to the unwary fan against the odd rogue profiteering comic dealer.

 

 

When Alan’s interests changed after many years of being involved with comics (although he still kept his love of comics throughout his life), he developed a new passion for crime fiction and, naturally, his "merchant gene" kicked in. He transformed his business from comic dealing into book dealing. Later, he took up fiction writing himself and had some success as a short story writer. I mention this to point out that Alan’s interests ranged far and wide (including his coin dealing). In the end, though, it’s as an American comic book enthusiast that Alan made his greatest mark.

Alan planned to write his book about his life in comics for a long while, but the ups and downs of living, and the constant demands of his business all too often got in the way. We’re all glad that he did, in the end, make time to finish this book before he was taken from us much too soon.

This account of his journey from trading comics at school to ploughing his own furrow through life is the story of someone who succeeded in living life on his own terms. But also Alan Austin enriched the lives of many others, as well as making an immense contribution to the UK’s comic collecting community.

 

 

© Nigel Brown

London Comic Shops - Memories of Dark They Were & Golden-Eyed in the Seventies by Ian Baker

Hey folks - baggsey (Ian Baker) here. As Superstuff73 is a shared blog with Nigel Brown, and he’s been doing the heavy lifting of late when it comes to writing articles, here’s some memories from me of the famed Fantasy & Science Fiction shop in London from the seventies - Dark They Were & Golden Eyed.

For a boy living in grey Britain in the early 1970’s, American comics painted an exciting and colourful world of heroes. Of equal impact were the ads for fabulous toys (from huge Hot Wheels sets we could only dream about in the UK, to the mysteries of X-Ray specs and fascination of Sea Monkeys) which all contributed to the mystique of a glamourous American world beyond our horizons. And when you’re twelve or thirteen, and the hormones are kicking in, and an awareness of the adult world is starting to intrude, comics became a reliable constant in a changing world.

In those early days of the seventies, part of the mystique of American comics was the very scarcity of the items. I now know that my hometown was relatively well served by newsagents and second-hand book shops when compared to other regional towns in the UK, but the feeling we had while collecting comics in Portsmouth can be likened to panning for gold. Never sure of what was to be found, but sustained by a faith that fortune lay just beneath the surface.

It was a magical time. Yet once we had been to our first Comic Mart, and then been exposed to the wonders of the nascent comic and science fiction shops in London, we would leave behind that old world of scruffy bookshops and worn comics with Thorpe & Porter stamps , to be replaced by a world of certainty and plenty.

Considering what an impact that London Comic and Fantasy shop Dark They Were & Golden Eyed had on our young lives (and I imagine the lives of many other early 1970s UK comic fans), there is remarkably little information out there on the internet. 

As my good chum Nigel Brown documented in the Days of the Great DC Comic Hunt , our teenage comic collecting days were transformed when we traveled to London on our own for the first time, taking the train from Fratton to Waterloo without parental oversight, and first visited Dark They Were & Golden Eyed (named after a Ray Bradbury story) at their premises at 10 Berwick Street, Soho. There we were confronted by a cornucopia of piles of non-distributed comic books for the first time, piled on the bare wooden floorboards inside the front door, with all manner of fantasy, science-fiction and pulp-reprint paperbacks filling the shelves.

Remember, our previous experience of comic collecting had been scouring the local newsagents and second-hand shops in our native Portsmouth, on the last Thursday each month for DCs and the 2nd Wednesday for the limited set of 16 Marvel titles that World Distributors imported.

In my memory, 1974 in Britain was a rainy place dominated by miners’ strikes, 3-day working weeks and power cuts that shut television down at 10pm. There was no easy access to American pop culture outside the mainstream of music, films and television  - it had to searched out.

Nigel and I both struggle to place the exact date we first visited DTWAGE.  My best guess is probably the last week of July 1974, (the first week of the summer school holidays, plus Nigel and I had both recently turned 15);  certainly prior to the groundbreaking BBC broadcast of the documentary The Dracula Business on 6th August 1974 in which the shop was featured (but not named).  

Nigel’s Uncle was a London taxi driver, and he met us at Waterloo train station and dropped us off at 10 Berwick Street, deep in the heart of Soho, a place surrounded in equal measure by Fruit & Veg stalls,  strip joints and dubious magazine emporiums. This was an area (and era) later to be celebrated in the TV drama Our Friends in the North, or more recently in the BBC documentary series Bent Coppers. 

Berwick St in the 1970's...DTWAGE out of sight on the right

I’m sure that my parents would have been quite concerned that their 15 year old son was moving anywhere near these circles. However, the rubbing shoulders of American comics and saucy magazines always seemed to go with the territory. The spinner racks in Portsmouth newsagents often seemed to have salacious mags at the top and American comics at the bottom, and I always felt obliged to divert my eyes as I assiduously thumbed my way through the unsorted new batch of DCs stuffed into the lower rungs.  Similarly the second hand shops we frequented always stored piles of “mags” and American comics in equal measure, usually in close proximity. I always felt the comics suffered in adults’ eyes through this unsought association. But it was the seedy seventies, folks.

But back to Dark They Were & Golden Eyed: According to Stan Nicholls in his fascinating account of the history of Dark They Were & Golden Eyed and Forbidden Planet in fanzine Prolapse #11 (what a title! It sounds like a medical journal) which can be found here on page 19, efanzines.com/Prolapse/Prolapse11.pdf Stan notes that Derek (“Bram”) Stokes, the owner of Dark They Were first started the business as a mail order operation called Vault of Horror.  

Stokes then set up the first DTWAGE at 28 Bedfordbury (a back street in Covent Garden) where it became very successful. Having outgrown the premises, in December 1972 Stokes then moved the business to a shop rented from the Salvation Army at 10 Berwick St, Soho.

What appears to be Boris Johnson entering DTWAGE in 1973 (from The Dracula Business broadcast by BBC1 6th August 1974)

Nigel Brown and I both became aware of the existence of DTWAGE either as a result of an advert seen in Comic Media News or a similar zine, or perhaps learning about it at our first Comic Mart experience at the Spring Comic Con held at Emsworth, Hampshire on May 25th 1974 . The idea of being able to buy comics in England that were one or even two issues ahead of what we were able to buy in our local newsagents was mind-blowing. It was though we’d be able to reach into the future!

And so we eager supplicants made our first pilgrimage to the cramped premises of DTWAGE. My memory of the place is dominated by the piles of non-distributed comics we first encountered on the unvarnished wood floor inside the front door, and by the narrow bookshelf passage on the right hand side of the shop towards the back. This section held a good selection of Bantam Doc Savage reprints with James Bama covers, and would later also carry reprints of Shadow pulps with Steranko covers. I believe there were also more books and comics in the basement, along with a good selection of Warren magazines and science fiction paperbacks.

A "non-distributed" (ND) issue of House of Mystery 220 from September 1973

I’ve posted some screen grabs taken from film of the inside of the shop featured in The Dracula Business. The issue of House of Mystery 220 on sale places the filming in the period Sept 6th-Oct 9th 1973. The shot of the lads in the narrow passage could easily pass for Nigel and myself, perusing the pulps and American Sci-Fi books.

The Pulp Reprint Shelves (from The Dracula Business broadcast by BBC1 6th August 1974)

Take a look at   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e48aCY8shKc  starting at 27:36 for the full film clip.

This was the time of the DC explosion. There were so many new US DC comics being published - Demon, Kamandi etc. - many of which were “ND” (non-distributed for the uninitiated). Similarly many of the US Marvels were no longer on sale at UK newsagents, deferring to Marvel UK’s desire to prevent cannibalisation of their UK weekly comic book business. I believe that I left DTWAGE with a goodly selection of the latest DCs, issues of Steranko’s Comixscene and a number of Doc Savage paperbacks which included a copy of the Bantam Doc Savage #77 (The South Pole Terror, published Feb 1974). 

The memories of subsequent visits become jumbled. On a later visit, I vaguely remember seeing Justice Inc #2 for sale. (1975-04-17). Funny how certain comics stick in your mind.

But that first visit was a defining moment for us. The thrill of going to London alone, of buying fresh, bright comics from the future, of having access to a store which stocked every Science Fiction and Fantasy book that we could possibly want was intoxicating.  

But it also closed a chapter on our Portsmouth-based comic collecting. Never again would we search for new comics locally with such enthusiasm. We became dismissive of buying a new comic with a Thorpe & Porter stamp. Because once you buy comics from the future, you have to keep running to stay ahead. And so comics that we once shelled out 5p,7p,10p for on a newsagent’s spinner rack we now happily paid 25p for in order to get a pristine copy of the very latest issue imported directly from the States.

Looking back through my diaries and our self-produced Superstuff fanzine in that 1975-1976 period, school holidays were dominated by at least one trip to London, incorporating a visit to DTWAGE, to Alan Austin’s Fantasy Unlimited in Lower Clapton Rd, to record shops like HMV and later Tower Records,  and perhaps a trip to the cinema. 

By early 1976 my collecting interests were moving towards paperback pulp reprints, and the attraction of new comics was starting to wane. In retrospect, the innovation in comics that had captured my imagination in those early bronze age years had started to dissipate, with key creators (with some exceptions) moving out into different fields as the second half of the seventies rolled around.

By 1978 the Berwick Street premises of DTWAGE had became too small and Stokes “decided on another move, to a shop in St Anne’s Court, between Wardour Street and Dean Street, at the heart of Soho. The shop was big, new, shiny and very expensive. These overheads were almost certainly an important factor in the eventual closure of DTWAGE in 1981.” as per Stan Nicholls’ recollection.

But once the move to St Anne’s Court had completed, something had been lost in the transition. The place was too slick, a little out of the way. From memory, the focus on the ground floor seemed to move towards more hard Science Fiction and “alternative lifestyle” paraphernalia , with comics taking second place. There seemed fewer customers and the buzz was no longer there. Comics and pulp reprints were relegated to the basement, I believe, and so on subsequent trips we started to drift towards the new Forbidden Planet on Denmark Street which was to become our new spiritual home-away-from-home for the remainder of the decade.

The last time I can remember visiting DTWAGE was for a Harry Harrison book signing in 1978 for “The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You”.

By the time DTWAGE closed down in 1981, I cannot even remember being aware of its passing.