Smash! (comics)
Smash! was a weekly British comic book, published in London by Odhams Press Ltd from 64 Long Acre and subsequently by IPC Magazines Ltd from 189 High Holborn and Fleetway House in nearby Farringdon Street.
It ran for 257 issues, between 5 February 1966 and 3 April 1971. It then merged into Valiant. But the Smash! Annual, published mainly under the Fleetway imprint, continued to appear every year: the final Annual, cover-dated 1976, was published in the autumn of 1975.
During 1967 and 1968 Smash! was part of Odhams' Power Comics line, absorbing its sister titles Pow! on 14 September 1968 and Fantastic on 2 November 1968. As Pow! and Fantastic had themselves already merged with Wham! and Terrific respectively, Smash! became the last survivor of the Power Comics.
Until March 1969, alongside British humour strips, it included black-and-white reprints of superhero strips originally published in America by Marvel Comics and DC. The last of these, the Fantastic Four, ended in issue 162. Thereafter it featured solely British content: a mixture of humour, sporting and adventure strips.
Smash! was sized 9.75" x 12" and 9.25" x 12", and had a four-colour cover and black-and-white interior.
Publication history
Smash! was owned by IPC, the International Publishing Corporation, a company formed in 1963 – through a series of corporate mergers – by Cecil Harmsworth King, chairman of the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Pictorial. All the comics owned by it were published by one or other of the subsidiary companies brought together to form IPC, including Fleetway Publications Ltd and Odhams Press Ltd.The Power Comics line, including Smash, was published by Odhams under a three-man editorial team known as Alf, Bart and Cos. Alfred Wallace was the managing editor at Odhams, and Albert Cosser was the editor directly responsible for Smash. Major changes of editorial policy occurred in 1969 for financial reasons, and again in 1970 when IPC was taken over by Albert E Reed to form the publishing giant Reed International.
Launched on 5 February 1966, Smash became a Power Comic from December of that year with issue 44. The Power Comics logo, printed on the cover of each issue, was a gimmick dreamed up by Odhams to unify their five titles under a common banner. Smash remained part of that lineup for 100 issues; the logo was quietly dropped after #143 when the last of the other comics forming part of the lineup was cancelled.
The other Power Comics were all ultimately absorbed into Smash, which became the last survivor. On 14 September 1968, with issue 137, it merged with Pow!, becoming Smash and Pow. On 2 November 1968, with issue 144, it merged with Fantastic, becoming Smash and Pow incorporating Fantastic.
On 1 January 1969 Smash ceased to be published by Odhams Press Ltd, and was thereafter published by IPC Magazines Ltd. On 15 March 1969 it was relaunched without its American superhero strips. Further changes followed during the course of 1969, and then a 2nd relaunch at the start of 1970. The final issue was published on 3 April 1971. It was then merged into Valiant, forming Valiant and Smash.
In addition, ten Smash! Annuals were published in hardback, beginning with the 1967 Annual. These appeared every autumn for ten years, the final one being the 1976 Annual. There were also two 96-page Holiday Specials, published in 1969 and 1970, and a Valiant and Smash! Holiday Special in 1971.
Background
In 1966 the initial success of Wham! encouraged Odhams' London management to publish a second title, conceived by Alf Wallace and Albert Cosser. Leo Baxendale, who had created Wham! for Odhams in 1964, was too heavily embroiled with on-going production on it, providing much of the art for each issue, so had little time for anything else. Also, Baxendale was then still working at long range from Dundee.Accordingly, it was Alf Wallace and Albert Cosser who determined the initial format of Smash! They also recruited the artists who would draw the early issues, as it was plain that Baxendale was fully occupied with the art for Wham! Hence Baxendale's initial contribution to Smash was limited to providing a list of titles and situations for the humour strips, together with brief written scenarios, which he gave to Wallace to be farmed-out to other artists. The Swots and The Blots was one of these. Ironically, Baxendale's strips would eventually become a major contribution to Smash, after March 1969, but only because the closure of Wham freed him to work on Smash instead.
Initially, Baxendale was asked only to create the Bad Penny strip, and to give Grimly Feendish a strip of his own. Wallace also had Baxendale draw the covers for the first three issues.
Smash launched with the same format as the early issues of Wham, namely 24 pages per issue, four of which were in colour. But it was printed on lower-quality paper than Wham.
The initial line-up of strips mixed humour and adventure freely, with the comedic Ronnie Rich featuring on the cover of the first issue, inside which were adventure strips including the World War Two based Ghost Patrol – this latter a reprint strip which lasted only until issue 25. Ghost Patrol proved symptomatic of the problem with British adventure strips that plagued Smash during the Odhams years, which tended to be sloppy in presentation and possessed of little real character or emotion.
Part of the problem with Smash was that it went through many changes in its early days – far too many. Particularly in its adventure strips: The Ghost Patrol came and went; The Legend Testers came and went; Moon Madness was particularly short-lived; and there were numerous others, equally forgettable. None proved popular enough to last. Undeniably, none enjoyed the tremendous popularity of the American superhero strips which the comic would shortly feature, which genuinely had sufficient popularity to rival that of television.
Those readers old enough to have become emotionally attached to comics before Odhams introduced American superhero strips to British readers tended to dislike those superhero strips. Whereas, according to the letters pages each week, those same Marvel and DC heroes were enormously popular among the younger age group which had not been reading comics previously. Accordingly, Wham readers tended to resent the changes made in 1966, because British strips were cancelled in Wham and replaced with US superheroes, whereas Smash readers did not resent the superheroes, because in 1966 that comic had only just launched, so there were no real changes – Smash more or less teemed with American strips from the very beginning.
The decision, in 1969, to discontinue the American superhero strips was the real cause of the comic's demise. Other problems would contribute to the difficulties it subsequently faced – including strikes at its Printers – but the root cause of those problems was the falling circulation it suffered, which was a consequence of not having any unique elements to distinguish it from other IPC comics such as Lion and Valiant. The key to understanding the situation is that the superheroes were the only element which genuinely had the necessary popularity to halt the decline in weekly sales caused by the competition from television.
Odhams years
Superheroes
Black-and-white reprints of Marvel Comics strips were introduced into Smash with issue 16, when the Incredible Hulk began. One early issue of Smash even printed an original Hulk story. When Smash caught up with the final issue of Incredible Hulk which Marvel had published in America, Odhams turned to the Hulk's "guest star" appearances in Fantastic Four and The Avengers, these other Marvel heroes proving equally popular. In July 1967 Daredevil replaced the Hulk, from issue 76 onwards – Smash having exhausted all Hulk stories, from all sources, which had been published in the USA up to that time.It's hard to overstate the significance of the introduction of The Hulk, in the issue dated 21 May 1966. It was the first Marvel Comics strip featured by Odhams, the success of which led to the introduction of Fantastic Four into Wham on 6 August of that year, and to the launching of two entire comics entirely dedicated to Marvel superheroes – Fantastic and Terrific – in 1967. The Hulk's initial appearance in Smash took up a massive 6 pages, one-quarter of each 24-page issue, pushing fully five existing strips out of that issue, and causing the permanent cancellation of "Space Jinx" and "Brian's Brain".
Prior to this, DC's Batman had become the second American superhero to debut in Smash, crashing onto the front cover of issue 20 a month after the Hulk's debut, in re-edited reprints from American daily and Sunday newspaper strips: these were credited in-page to Batman creator Bob Kane, but were actually drawn by Al Plastino and ghost-written by Whitney Ellsworth. This was a response to the sudden and enormous popularity of the Batman television series starring Adam West. The impact of this hit TV show led to the Batman strip retaining the front cover of Smash, in colour, for better than a year and a half, entitled Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder.
Initially, this syndicated newspaper strip adopted the camp style of the Adam West television series, with appearances by humorous guest stars such as American funnyman Jack Benny. In the later part of the run Batgirl, too, appeared in the strip, a response to her addition to the TV show in its 3rd season: in the newspaper strip, Batman initially believed her to be a criminal rather than a crime fighter. Superman then co-starred in the strip, which was retitled Superman and Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder, as Batman and Robin attempt to save Superman from the diabolical Professor Zinkk who was secretly poisoning him with kryptonite.
The expansion of the American content, with the arrival of Batman, meant the loss of two more of the initial British strips: the adventure strip The Ghost Patrol, and the cartoon strip The Tellybugs.
In September 1968 the Fantastic Four began a six-month run in Smash, when it absorbed Pow. As one of only a handful of Pow strips to survive the merger, it was used to lure Pow readers to the new comic. The strip was introduced to readers of Smash with the wedding of Reed and Sue from Fantastic Four Annual #3. Their adventures continued with Defeated by the Frightful Four, and ran through to Lo There Shall Be an Ending, which was the final Marvel strip to appear in Smash.
Thor began a short run in November 1968 when Smash absorbed Fantastic. The stories, continued from Fantastic, began with The Ringmaster's Circus of Crime. When the Marvel strips were discontinued the following spring, the final Thor reprint had a new ending substituted, in a rushed attempt to resolve a continuing sub-plot.
The financial crisis which overtook Odhams in 1968, resulting in the closure of all the other Power Comics, also caused them to give up the expensive licence to reprint the Marvel superhero stories. This decision took effect in March 1969, when the licence came up for renewal; the final Marvel strips appeared in issue 162. The expensive Batman newspaper strip had already been discontinued, ending in issue 157.
Odhams Humour Strips
There were typically a dozen British humour strips in each of the first 162 issues.The initial line-up starred The Man From B.U.N.G.L.E., which usually occupied the front cover prior to issue 20, supported by seven other long-running humour strips, and four humour strips which didn't last, namely Danger Mouse, Space Jinx, Queen of the Seas and The Tellybugs.
Lasting only a few weeks, Space Jinx was the first and only character to hold the coveted centre pages in colour. It is unclear why Alf and Cos chose this deeply unfunny strip for what must have been considered the pride of place in the new comic. Space Jinx was primarily another Jonah, except that it could not hold its own against the brilliance of Reid's sea-faring twit. Where Jonah dealt with sinking ships of the sea, Brian Lewis's Space Jinx dealt with similar situations in outer space, but without the necessary degree of humour.
Ken Reid's Queen of the Seas would last only slightly longer, at 43 issues. A masterpiece of comic artistry, telling the story of the Buoyant Queen and its two-man crew, Enoch and Bert, a pair of oafs with a love/hate relationship, it was perhaps too intelligent for its target audience – its disappearance was a great loss to the comic. Many readers failed to understand, amongst many things in the strip that went clear over their heads, that the two main characters were drawn in the likeness of comedians Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and that the strip's humour was based on the movies of Laurel & Hardy.
After only five months – foreshadowing many, many reshuffles to come – Smash! underwent its first major overhaul: from issue 20 the Batman newspaper strip took over the front cover, whilst Grimly Feendish lost the colour back cover to Reid's Queen of the Seas.
Further cover changes would follow. When, after two years, the popularity of the Batman television series eventually faded, from issue 114 onward Batman and Robin were moved to the inside pages, yielding the front cover to the long-running success The Swots and the Blots, at this point still being drawn by Mike Lacey, a humour strip in which two rival gangs vied to outwit each other at Pond Road School, with "Teach" caught in the crossfire. Its origins lay in Baxendale's classroom-based strip The Tiddlers, which had then been running for 2 years in Wham.
The Swots and the Blots was one of the few strips in Smash to survive all the changes of 1969 and 1970, reaching a new standard of excellence when Leo Baxendale began drawing it for the new-look Smash from March 1969, but even during the Odhams years it had wit and a sense of style. In Baxendale's hands it had notable similarities to his earlier classroom-based strip, The Bash Street Kids, in The Beano.
The Man from BUNGLE, spoofing the popular TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., was a spin-off from Baxendale's Eagle-Eye Junior Spy strip in Wham. BUNGLE was a secret spy organisation in Britain, organised along more chaotic lines than UNCLE, featuring a secret agent who employed a wide variety of hugely unlikely gadgets in his fight against his humorous opponents. Baxendale himself drew the first few editions, which appeared as large single illustrations on some of the early covers of Smash, after which Mike Lacey took over.
The second spin-off from Baxendale's Eagle-Eye strip was Grimly Feendish, which Leo Baxendale himself drew. Feendish had been the most popular character in the earlier strip, thanks to his ghoulish appearance, which was based on Uncle Fester in the American television series The Addams Family. The new strip at one point occupied a prestigious position, as the full-colour back cover feature each week, and survived throughout the entire run of 162 issues published by Odhams.
Bad Penny was another memorable Baxendale creation. Its title logo featured a portrait of Penny herself, alongside the 'Bad Penny' caption, and an illustration of a giant pre-decimal One Penny coin.
She had some similarities with Baxendale's earlier Minnie the Minx character in The Beano. When he had been drawing Minnie, he had concentrated on experimenting with facial expressions and character traits. By the time he began working on Bad Penny his drawing style had matured, with an equal concentration on developing a zany but tight storyline, less emphasis on close-ups of facial expressions, but retaining the essentials needed to put over a character's own personality traits.
Bad Penny was so popular that she survived the changes of 1969, and continued to appear in the new Smash. When the strip was eventually dropped, in 1970, Bad Penny herself still continued to appear, albeit infrequently, making occasional appearances in Baxendale's The Swots and the Blots as a new member of the Blots.
As had happened in Wham, artists such as Mike Lacey were commissioned from time to time to "ghost" Baxendale's style. Baxendale was allowed to sign his early work on Smash, so there is a way to distinguish which strips he personally drew during his time at Odhams. After he transferred to Fleetway, another IPC subsidiary, he still contributed strips to Smash, but now worked "undercover", i.e. without signing them. He explained this in his autobiography, A Very Funny Business : "I was in a delightful situation. Working under my own name, a lot was expected of me. Publishers expected me to cram my drawings with funny detail. A double standard operated. Working undercover, I was able to reduce the layouts to the simplest terms. Backgrounds were minimal or non-existent – just a horizon line. And there was no ancillary comic detail – just the characters acting out the story line against an empty backdrop."
The most bizarre of the Odhams humour strips was The Nervs, depicting a group of little characters inhabiting a schoolboy called Fatty: the strip showed them running Fatty like a group of workers running a factory. Allocated two pages, it followed the same formula as the strip Georgie's Germs from Wham!. Fatty was aptly named, with the tiny Nervs battling to save the fat twerp's stomach from its numerous overloads, as a minute never passed which was free from him guzzling!
Drawn for the majority of its run by Graham Allen, in its final months during 1968-69 Ken Reid – previously of Queen of the Seas, and who had earlier contributed the Dare-a-Day Davy strip to Pow – drew this double-page feature.
Reid's career had begun at The Beano in the 1950s, but for Odhams he had already produced the long running success Frankie Stein, in Wham!, before taking on Queen of the Seas in the early issues of Smash! and the Dare-A-Day Davy strip in Pow!. He turned The Nervs into an extremely surreal, even visceral, strip; achieving a rare level of hilarity and bawdiness, in a subversive presentation of comical horror – and in the process alarming IPC's management !
He already had some degree of notoriety, as being the only Odhams artist whose work so disturbed the management that it was actually banned. At the suggestion of Vance Gledhill of Blackpool, Davy was dared to dig up Frankenstein's monster and bring him back to life – for which Reid decided to employ the "kiss of life"! It's difficult to know precisely what the editors of Pow! objected to, there was so much to choose from – the desecration of a grave, the re-assembling of a shattered skeleton, and a young boy kissing a corpse!
Charlie's Choice drawn by Brian Lewis, which began in issue 19, sought to capitalise on the enormous popularity of television, a popularity which was seriously harming comics sales, in a humorous strip about a boy with a magic television set who could bring the characters in the programmes out from the TV screen, into his world. This was a device for featuring, as guest stars in the strip each week, an assortment of popular TV stars. The strip's debut appearance, for instance, featured Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, stars of top-rated secret agent show The Man From UNCLE, maximising their appearance by splashing them across the front cover. It was hoped that by bringing popular television stars into its pages, this would make TV's growing popularity work for the comic – a not very subtle ploy to boost its circulation and sales.
Sammy Shrink was a humour strip about a boy who was only two inches tall. Sammy had the most successful – but also the most chequered – career of all the characters featured in Smash, having originated in Wham, then moved to Pow when they merged, arriving in Smash when it in turn absorbed Pow, and would subsequently be revived in Knockout, finally ending his career in Whizzer and Chips when it absorbed Knockout in June 1973.
Ronnie Rich featured the richest kid in the world, who stands to inherit a fortune if only he can get rid of the money he's got. Drawn by Gordon Hogg, each week Ronnie spent his every last penny, in some reckless or extravagant way, only to have his scheme backfire and make him richer than ever. He never did get his hands on the fortune.
Often a half-page feature, Percy's Pets drawn by Stan McMurtry was popular enough to go on to make sporadic reappearances from time to time in the new Smash after March 1969. Percy was a small plump schoolboy, who filled his family's home with his exotic collection of pets. These included an elephant, a giraffe, a hippopotamus, a snake, an ape – in fact almost every type of animal that might be found in a typical zoo – together with a parrot, a tortoise, a white mouse, and a hedgehog; thereby causing a predictable degree of comical chaos for his long suffering mum and dad.
Some of the best-remembered strips were not included in all of the first 162 issues: a number of them were only acquired in #137, from the merger with Pow!.
One such acquisition from Pow! was The Cloak – like The Man From BUNGLE, another humorous secret agent strip. The Cloak was the top agent for Britain's Special Squad, nominally a part of Scotland Yard; but he usually operated from his personal headquarters, known as the Secret Sanctum. His ingenuity and never-ending supply of gadgets and secret weapons gave him the edge over his somewhat odd enemies.
He had some equally odd colleagues. Assisted initially by Mole and Shortstuff, he then began having adventures in which he found himself also alongside the sexy and flirtatious Lady Shady, the shady lady. The strip benefited from the unusual, idiosyncratic drawing style of Mike Higgs, whose overt inclusion of pop culture imagery made the strip seem extremely modern.
Wiz War, drawn by Mike Brown, had also begun in Pow!, and would be one of a handful of strips to survive the changes of 1969. Brown seems to have been unaware of the house rule banning artists from signing their work, as the strip often bore his name. The "War" in the title referred to a feud between two wizards, Wizard Prang and his enemy Demon Druid. Being a humour strip, the editorial staff allowed the hero the very silly name of Wizard Prang, a piece of RAF slang from the Second World War.
Other than the fact that Prang was robed entirely in white, befitting his status as the good guy, and Demon Druid was always in black, being the villain of the piece, their costumes were quite similar - a flowing wizard's robe with stars on, and a pointed hat. They would fly around on broomsticks, zapping each other with spells: which turned the other into a toad, or something equally amusing. Wizard Prang was alternately helped and hindered by Englebert, his pet bird. The best feature of the strip was the sign above Wizard Prang's front door. This usually read "Wizard Prang is... In" or "Wizard Prang is... Out" ; but if he'd had a bad time in the story, the sign would often make a humorous remark in the final panel, such as "Wizard Prang is... All at Sea".
The secret of Mike Brown, unacknowledged for many years, was that Leo Baxendale needed to earn money from Odhams without disclosing to Fleetway that he was now working for both companies. Accordingly, Baxendale now pencilled the drawings, and Brown, who was a cartoon film animator, inked them in. In this way, they turned out together large numbers of Bad Penny and Grimly Feendish strips, which they sold to Odhams under Brown's name – a situation Baxendale referred to, in his 1978 autobiography, as working undercover.
Lost in the merger with Pow were Charlie's Choice, Ronnie Rich and The Man From BUNGLE. Also lost in this merger, in effect, was Ken Reid's Dare-A-Day Davey strip, one of several established features in Pow which were dropped instead of transferring to Smash.
Odhams Adventure Strips
As Smash was essentially a superhero and humour comic during the Odhams years, there were few traditional adventure strips in it; but a handful do bear special mention.There were various well-remembered adventure strips in the first hundred issues, including some which were quite outstanding, such as Rubberman, Experiment X, The Legend Testers, and The Python.
From issue 144 in November 1968 Smash was the only surviving Power Comic, as this was the issue in which Smash and Pow merged with Fantastic. Five British adventure serials were introduced in this issue, to plug the gap left by the loss of the withdrawn American superhero strips which had been major features of the four closed titles.
At Night Stalks... The Spectre is an adventure strip in which a crime reporter on the Daily Globe newspaper is apparently killed while investigating a news story. The world believes newspaperman Jim Jordan is dead, but he still carries on his crusade against crime... calling himself The Spectre.
He is now fighting crime, rather than merely reporting it, using an array of gadgets which make it seem he is the ghost of the missing reporter. Hence his opponents are terrified to find that if they shoot him he doesn't die. And he has a secret underground hideout beneath the statue erected in his memory, from which he would covertly and unexpectedly emerge, or disappear into, under cover of an artificial fog, to give the impression he was coming and going from the spirit world. His first case began in issue 144, in which he tracks down Black Murdo, the racketeer who the world believes had murdered him.
Destination Danger, a motor racing serial, also began in issue 144. This strip was about a feud between a young English racing driver, Jeff Jackson, who was working for Puma Motors in the US, and his enemy Vic Stafford, the Puma team's chief driver, who has taken a bribe to throw a forthcoming race.
Although new to Smash, the old-fashioned artwork in the strips At Night Stalks... The Spectre and Destination Danger marked them out as reprints. The use of reprints was a cost-cutting measure, indicating the straightened financial circumstances of Smash at this point – if any evidence were needed beyond the closure of all four of the other Power Comics.
Laird of the Apes was a science fiction strip, milking the popularity of the big budget Charlton Heston motion picture Planet of the Apes which was released earlier that year. In the strip, set in the 18th century, a young Scottish laird returns to the Highlands to aid his outlaw clansmen in their struggle with the English Redcoats, bringing with him a band of highly trained Apes.
An adventure strip with a sporting theme was the wrestling serial King of the Ring, featuring Ken King, who was a champion of the grunt-'n'-grapple game. As was not exactly uncommon in the Odhams years, there was a tendency to give the characters very silly names. The most outrageous example in this strip was King's manager, who was called Blarney Stone!
Blarney's real name was originally Tim Stone, and Blarney was only a nickname; but this was soon forgotten. In order to fulfil Ken's ambition to travel, Blarney agrees to manage him on a world tour, if he'll agree to fight his way round the world!
The fifth adventure strip added was Brian's Brain, drawn by Bert Vandeput, a serial with science fiction elements, continued from Pow. This featured two schoolboys: the eponymous Brian and his friend Duffy Rolls. Brian Kingsley possessed an electronic Brain resembling a human skull, which he carried about in a box. It could communicate with him telepathically, glowing when active; and it could control the actions of animals if they were within a few yards, which was the limit of its brain-wave transmissions.
All five strips commenced in issue 144; and all were serials, with cliff-hanger endings each week.
The Closure of the ''Power Comics''
What must always be born in mind is that, in the comics industry, the 1960s were not the 1930s. With the advent in Britain of commercial television, in 1955 – displacing the staid, old-fashioned children's television offered by the BBC up to that point – the ever-increasing competition from the boob-tube began a continuous decline in comics circulation. Throughout the 1960s, in consequence, the circulation wars fought in the comics publishing industry were fought out against a backdrop of ever-declining circulation figures.Following the initial success of Wham in 1964, Odhams had launched four more Power Comics during 1966 and '67, including Smash, only to close them in quick succession: merging each in turn into the survivors until by 1969 only Smash remained. Whereas 1968 began with all five Power Comics apparently flourishing, by the year's end only Smash was still being published. Even the sleepiest of readers began to notice that something was seriously wrong, as the increasingly frantic series of mergers resulted in ever more ludicrous titles, culminating in the astonishing Smash and Pow incorporating Fantastic.
The question is why, in a limited market such as the UK, they took such a big risk as to launch five titles, if it was so quickly obvious that the market could only support one? It has been suggested that it was common practice for a publisher to quickly clone a successful title, in order to forestall its competitors from doing so. That does not seem to be the case here. The comic's only distinctive feature was its American superhero strips, so Fantastic and Terrific might loosely be described as clones of Smash, even though they lacked any humour strips; but IPC had an exclusive licence from Marvel Comics to reprint Marvel's strips in the UK, which precluded anyone else from doing so.
The actual answer lies in the unexpected nature of the economic crisis of 1968 that hit the British economy, resulting in the devaluation of the Pound. The economic chaos began with a Sterling crisis in Britain in 1967, leading to devaluation in the November. There then followed a crisis for the U.S. dollar in March 1968 which had a cascade effect on the international economic system, sending first the French franc and then the West German deutschmark into devaluation, and culminating in a new Sterling crisis in Britain in November 1968.
These repeated falls in the value of the Pound against the U.S. dollar significantly increased the cost of publishing the American strips, which had to be paid for in dollars, and raised the daunting spectre of further increases if the Pound fell in value yet again. Increasing the cover price of the Power Comics to compensate was impossible because of stiff competition ; so the fall in the value of Sterling made the American strips unaffordable.
The toughness of the competition is apparent from examining other contemporary titles. The first issue of its stablemate Fantastic, published in February 1967, cost 9d for 40 pages, a cover price which forced Fantastic to close within 18 months. Terrific, having the same high content of American material, also had a high cover price of 9d, and closed even quicker.
In contrast, the comics Dandy and Beano published by the rival DC Thomson organisation sold at a cover price of 3d. Fantastic and Terrific cost three times as much, which proved unsustainable. This is not surprising, given that Wham and Pow each peaked at a cover price of 7d, and even that proved unsustainable.
Smash had launched in February 1966 with a cover price of 7d for 24 pages. By March 1969, although its cover price had not changed, circumstances had conspired to increase its page count, such that each issue now contained 36 pages. In fact the page count jumped overnight from 24 to 36 pages, with a consequent sharp rise in production costs, and so a marked decline in profit-per-copy.
The tipping point was issue 144, in which Smash, Pow and Fantastic were merged into a single title. The recently created Smash and Pow lost its Daredevil and Spider-Man strips, which together had comprised a full third of each 24-page issue, but now had to accommodate both Thor and Fantastic Four from the discontinued titles, plus a whole slew of new British adventure strips.
All this could not be achieved within the standard Smash format of 24 pages. So IPC now "bit the bullet" and increased the page count, at a single bound, by fifty percent – a necessity if they were to achieve their intention of reproducing with Smash the successful formula which was buoying-up sales of their most popular titles, Lion and Valiant, both of which were 36-pagers.
One fundamental difficulty for the Power Comics, however, was always the stark economic truth that a kid could buy both The Dandy and The Beano, at 3d each, and still have change left over, for what it cost to buy Smash!, Wham! or Pow! at 7d each. However, the DC Thomson titles only had 16 pages, and this more than anything drove up the page count in Smash!, from its original 24 to 36 pages, and eventually to 40 pages in 1970. The difficulty was that the much lower price of The Dandy and The Beano gave those titles a significant advantage, since a kid could choose to buy only one of them, at 3d – a winning competitive advantage which, as of 1966, would keep both of the DC Thomson titles afloat for more than 30 years to come.
The highly competitive nature of the UK's publishing industry meant margins were thin: a minimum number of sales each week were needed to reach break-even point, and the lower the cover price, the greater was the number of sales needed to reach that point; but the higher the cover price, the fewer were the number of sales that could actually be achieved.
The juvenile readers might be able to afford two or three comics a week, but by publishing five Power Comics IPC were pricing themselves out of the market. For the situation in Britain was not like that in America, where, with comics published just once a month, a child might afford five titles. In Britain, comics were published weekly.
Under those conditions the Power Comics were effectively competing with each other – a factor IPC were certainly aware of, as the letters pages in Smash, in 1968, actually carried readers' complaints that they couldn't afford all five Power titles. The five together cost an astonishing three shillings and threpence a week, to buy them all, far beyond the reach of the average child's weekly pocket money.
The Power Comics were also competing with IPC's other titles, including Lion, Valiant and Buster, potentially dragging the Group's entire line into bankruptcy. Rationalisation, by closing some of the titles, would produce an overall benefit, as it would dramatically cut IPC's production costs. Although it would mean fewer titles, as IPC's comics were actually competing against each other it ought to result in better sales for the survivors. In theory, there would be no overall loss of sales or revenue, provided readers switched from the closing titles to surviving IPC ones.
Another factor Odhams had not anticipated was the distribution of American comic books within the UK. Although this had always been a consideration, the volume of such comics arriving in Britain had traditionally been small, and their distribution haphazard. In 1968, distribution and quantity suddenly underwent a marked improvement: in America, Marvel Comics' owner, Martin Goodman, pulled off a business coup that overnight freed Marvel from a restrictive distribution agreement, which for a decade had limited it to publishing only 8 titles a month: Marvel was suddenly quadrupeling its monthly output, and dozens of new titles were flooding into Britain. Odhams' black-and-white Marvel reprints in their Power Comics range suddenly faced much more extensive competition from four-colour Marvel originals, and this began to harm sales.
In the turbulent economic conditions, any part of IPC's business which was loss-making had no future. Standard industry practice was to close a comic or magazine if its revenues dipped towards the break-even point; publishers did not wait for a title to actually incur losses. Hence, merely to anticipate losses on the other four titles was enough to doom them. And the closures represented a major cost-cutting exercise, reducing the ongoing production costs on the Power Comics line by four-fifths.
As for actual losses incurred due to the sudden and unexpected nature of the problem, and the inability to quickly terminate the long-term contracts with the Americans, Smash as sole survivor couldn't hope to generate enough income on its own to meet these. In fact it didn't need to. The fortunate circumstance that the Power Comics were all published by Odhams Press Ltd, a subsidiary company with limited liability, meant that it was possible to ring-fence all debts on the Odhams publications within that one company, thus preventing any losses affecting the rest of the IPC Group. Accordingly, with effect from 1 January 1969 Smash was transferred to IPC Magazines Ltd, a new IPC subsidiary formed during 1968, leaving Odhams with no continuing titles, and Smash started again from scratch.
Despite being the longest survivor, and inheriting many popular strips from the other four titles, Smash was only a limited success. It was plainly on shakey ground: for, hard on the heels of the closure of the other titles, in the spring of 1969 IPC quickly made extensive changes to it, dropping the last remaining Marvel superhero strips, to shed the expense of the licensing fee for using them, and ending many other strips too.
In consequence of the decision to discontinue the American reprints, as each Power Comic closed its superhero strips were given up. Only in the case of Fantastic, where the existing contract with Marvel had some months to run, were those strips transferred to its replacement, the merged Smash incorporating Fantastic, until the contract expired in March 1969.
Smash then introduced a new cover feature, new strips, and free gifts. In all but name it was a new comic. Even so, it required yet another major shakeup 12 months later, in the spring of 1970, when further changes of editorial policy were imposed by new owners Reed International, who had bought out IPC that year. This resulted, among other things, in the dropping of the newly introduced Warriors of the World cover feature in favour of a new lead serial: an adventure series entitled The Thirteen Tasks of Simon Test.
Within the British market, boys' comics for the age group which was too old for titles such as Beano, Dandy and Sparky tended to focus around adventure, sport and war, or humour. In abandoning its superheroes, Smash sought to attract readers of both types, by offering traditional adventure as well as humour.
To place these changes in context, the Power Comics were not the only casualties of the turmoil at IPC in 1969. Hulton's long-running adventure comic Eagle was also cancelled, merging with Fleetway's Lion from 2 May 1969. The merged comic was known briefly as Lion and Eagle, but quickly reverted simply to Lion. The humour comic, Giggle, aimed at the slightly younger market dominated by Fleetway's Buster, was also dropped, being merged into Buster in the spring of 1969 to form Buster and Giggle. As ever, the name change lasted only long enough to absorb the discontinued comic's readership: the reference to Giggle failed to see out the year, and by December the title had reverted to simply Buster once more. And Buster, like Smash, also now became a publication of the Group's newest subsidiary, IPC Magazines Ltd.
The surviving titles at both Odhams and at Fleetway were now transferred to a merged operation, at New Year 1969, as merely a part of IPC's newest division, IPC Magazines Ltd, and were placed under the responsibility of Jack Legrand, formerly the Managing Editor of Fleetway's juvenile publications.
A notable feature of the Odhams years was how few advertisements the comic carried. There were occasional quarter-page inserts, mainly advertising foreign Postage Stamps for stamp collectors, or Subbuteo table-football; but they were few and far between, and their combined total didn't usually exceed one page per issue. Reflecting its financial problems, the relaunched comic under IPC Magazines carried a significantly greater amount of advertising. One obvious change was the back cover, which gradually began to carry colourful full-page advertisements. On the inside pages, too, there was a much more noticeable quantity of adverts: each issue typically carried 4 full-page ads, plus two half-page ads. It was a noticeable feature of the relaunch that the comic now expanded to 40 pages, in order to cope with the need to carry an extra 4 pages of advertising in each issue.
This was a potentially significant new strategy, and a major change of policy. No longer did the profitability of the comic rest exclusively with the income derived from its sales figures. That sales income was now supplemented by advertising revenue, and without even having to sacrifice any significant amount of page space, nor cancel any strips, thanks to adding the additional pages.
Turmoil in 1967
The events of 1968 were not even the first threat to the survival of the Power Comics. Odhams had faced their first serious crisis in May 1967.The editorial page warned readers in issue 68 that Smash, initially printed by St Clements Press Ltd of London, had to find new printers within one month, or face closure. In the event, Odhams were able to sign a contract with Southernprint Ltd of Poole in Dorset in time to maintain publication.
''SMASH'' after Odhams
In January 1969 Odhams ceased to exist as a publishing imprint, and Smash now became an IPC Magazines publication. Most of the consequences of the change didn't become apparent until the issue cover-dated 15 March, in which the comic changed dramatically. IPC had waited three months to relaunch Smash, because, on the one hand, it needed some lead-time in which to ready new strips, and, on the other, in the publishing industry Spring was traditionally considered a good time to launch a new comic.With the re-launch, Smash became the last ever British comic to feature a variety mix of adventure, humour and sports themed stories. Subsequent boys' comics featured exclusively sports, or war, or humour; such as Scorcher and Score and Shoot, and Action and Battle. A hallmark of this policy was to be the even-handedness with which the editorial staff drew the multitude of reprint strips featured in the new Smash from both Lion and Buster, in seeking to appeal to readers of both.
The symbol of the change was the new cover feature, Warriors of the World. This now replaced The Swots and Blots, who, drawn by Mike Lacey, had occupied the cover during the final part of the Odhams years. Happily, The Swots and the Blots survived on the inside pages, now drawn by Leo Baxendale.
With the first relaunch issue bearing a cover feature entitled Warriors of the World No.1, the former numbering was discontinued. To have maintained the original sequential numbering alongside the Warriors of the World series could only have caused confusion.
The revamped Smash, now comprising 40 pages, featured all-British strips – adventure serials, humour strips, and sporting strips – many of which were reprints from Lion, such as Eric the Viking, The Battle of Britain, and Nutt and Bolt, the Men from W.H.E.E.Z.E.; and others which were reprints from Buster, such as Wacker, Monty Muddle - The Man from Mars, and Consternation Street; but strictly no American superheroes. The number of reprint strips was another significant indicator of its troubled financial situation, reprints being significantly cheaper than commissioning new strips.
Of the former Odhams strips, only a handful survived. Humour strips which continued were The Swots and the Blots, Wiz War and Bad Penny. Additionally, Percy's Pets made occasional appearances. Much mourned were the loss of The Cloak and The Man from BUNGLE, dropped due to the waning popularity of spy spoofs ; and especially mourned was the loss of Ken Reid and The Nervs.
The serious offerings fared even worse. For although the survivors appeared to include Sergeant Rock - Paratrooper and Bunsen's Burner, in reality neither of these were genuinely from the Odhams era. Both had begun only a few weeks earlier, in issues 156 and 158 respectively. They were really a part of the relaunch, but were introduced slightly ahead of time to disguise that fact. The only genuine survivor from the adventure strips of the Odhams years was King of the Ring, and even that had only begun with issue 144, in November 1968.
After a few months, superheroes appeared to be making a comeback. The Editorial column admitted receiving complaints from readers about the loss of the Marvel strips; and, in the autumn of 1969, six months after the Fantastic Four and Thor had been dropped, an all-British superhero called Tri-Man appeared, debuting in the issue of 13 September, and the character also featured in the Smash Annual that Christmas. Some indication of the effort put into this character is the fact that he was given sole possession of the front cover of the Annual! The adventures of Johnny Meek featured a hero who had triple-superpowers, hence the name Tri-Man. He leaped about rooftops, and got his powers from a ray device once every 24 hours. But the strip did not prove popular, and quietly vanished in the reshuffles of 1970.
In the light of how few strips of any sort survived from the Odhams era, and given that none of the superhero strips survived at all, it would be stretching the truth to say that Smash inherited the best of the Odhams strips. Stylistically, The Swots and the Blots was the most creative and sophisticated Odhams strip, and it did survive. But it was only one strip. And The Nervs, which was objectively a more sophisticated strip in 1968, did not.
Moreover, the publisher was taking a significant risk by re-launching the former Power Comic as, in effect, a clone of IPC's most popular titles, Lion and Valiant. The publisher hoped it could repeat the success of Valiant and Lion by copying their successful formula. Nevertheless, without its discontinued superheroes Smash had nothing unique about it that might attract new readers, compared to its stablemates – featuring as it did a mix of strips reprinted from Lion and Buster.
One other aspect of the change: under the umbrella of IPC Magazines Ltd, the editorial team of Alf and Cos was replaced by a single editor, identified only as 'Mike'.
IPC Humour Strips
As under Odhams, humour continued to play a large part in the relaunched comic : not to the extent it did in Buster, but at least as much as in Valiant or Lion.With the relaunch, The Swots and the Blots moved from the prestigious front cover to the centre pages. Nevertheless, now drawn by Leo Baxendale it became a standard bearer for sophisticated artwork. Baxendale began a five-year run on the strip, by adopting a new style, one which influenced many others in the comics field, just as his earlier Beano work had done; and in the process attaining a new, deliriously daft, high standard, one rarely approached by other strips.
New humour strips featured in the relaunch included a half-page cartoon strip drawn by Angel Nadal, entitled Big 'Ead, detailing the humorous misadventures of a Mr Knowall character, summed up by the strip's catchphrase, continually bellowed at the lead character by his irate victims: "Have a care there, Big 'Ead!" Reprinted from Buster, where it had initially run – under the same title – from 28 May 1960 to 18 February 1961.
Wacker was a single page cartoon strip, subtitled He's All at Sea. Drawn at different times by Rafart and by Roy Wilson, it concerned the crazy antics in the Royal Navy of Mis-leading Seaman Wacker, who was forever driving the Captain of HMS Impossible toward a nervous breakdown. Despite the Liverpudlian overtones of his surname, Wacker seemed not to be a Scouser – which may have been because it was not his real name! The strip, although new to Smash, had run in Buster from 29 October 1960 to 17 October 1964 under its real title, Elmer.
Another humour strip new to Smash was the World War Two spoof, Nutt and Bolt the Men From W.H.E.E.Z.E. Set in 1940, this featured an English scientist named Professor Nutt, who was a boffin inventing eccentric secret weapons for a department of the War Office known as W.H.E.E.Z.E., who was kept out of trouble by his Army "minder", Sgt 'Lightning' Bolt. Nutt and Bolt were perpetually clashing with a cunning Nazi scientist named Doktor Skull. This was another reprint strip, perhaps from Lion. As its title implies, it was born out of the earlier popularity of the Man From U.N.C.L.E. television series. However, the strip had only a short run in Smash, being replaced after just 22 issues.
Yet it was not only in the plainly cartoon-style strips that humour flourished in the new Smash. Many of the ostensibly more serious offerings were, in reality, humour strips: in particular, His Sporting Lordship and The World Wide Wanderers; but there was also a strong humorous undercurrent in the new lead serial, Master of the Marsh.
IPC Sporting Strips
Sporting strips were now the order of the day. Reflecting this, the new lead, on page 3, was Master of the Marsh, drawn by Solano Lopez, a sports serial about Patchman, a strange hermit who lived in the East Anglian fens. He was appointed as the new sports master at Marshside Secondary School, nicknamed 'The Marsh', because he was the only person who could control the kids – a group of hooligans known as 'the Monsters of the Marsh'. There was an association of ideas between fens and marsh, reinforced by the fact that Patchman camped in the inaccessible heart of the marshes. He was a burly woodsman who had always lived in the Fens, and could communicate after a fashion with the local wildlife, for whom he acted as protector.The strip initially featured humorous stories about the attempts of Knocker Reeves – the worst of the 'monsters' – to get the better of the new teacher. But eventually it transpired that Patchman was secretly the guardian of a collection of relics left behind by Hereward the Wake, a warlord who had fought the Norman invaders in the Fens during the 11th Century. In this respect, the strip had an occasional tendency to embrace science fiction overtones.
Of the sports-based stories, the only survivor from the Odhams years was King of the Ring, which continued to prosper. Possibly feeling the strip was suffering in the credibility stakes, the new editorial team made a decision to change the name of King's manager, who bore the remarkable name of Blarney Stone! They threw Blarney out of the series and substituted a new manager with a less silly name. Ballyhoo Barnes wasn't all that much less silly, but it's the thought that counts! Even so, Blarney reappeared after a few weeks, by popular demand.
The most successful of the new sports-based strips was His Sporting Lordship, drawn by Douglas Maxted. This humorous hit proved so popular that it ultimately became one of the few to outlast Smash itself. Henry Nobbins had been a labourer on a building site until he inherited the title of Earl of Ranworth and five million pounds. Before he could touch the money, however, he had to become champion at a number of sports. He also had to evade the nefarious attentions of Mr Parkinson, who was a rival claimant to the fortune, and Parkinson's villainous henchman, Fred Bloggs.
Lord Henry, as he had now become, was more than ably assisted by his Butler, Jarvis, who he had inherited from the previous Earl. And Jarvis proved indispensable. Henry was never portrayed as anything other than an able athlete and a good natured bloke, leaving Jarvis to supply the cunning which was needed to defeat the dastardly Mr Parkinson, and prevent Henry's ancestral home, Castle Plonkton, from being turned into a glue factory.
The relaunch included a short-lived football strip with humorous overtones, entitled The World-Wide Wanderers, about a League football team composed of eleven players from eleven different countries – not such a funny joke today! Football manager Harry Kraft found himself a passenger on a ship passing through the Suez Canal; ships from all over the world called there, and the crews conducted impromptu soccer matches to while away the time in port. Some of the crews had been stranded there, and constant soccer practice had caused them to develop fantastic footballing skills. Kraft shipped eleven of them, from as many different countries, back to England; and they used their highly unorthodox individual skills to play as a team in the old Fourth Division.
IPC Adventure Strips
The other staple of the new Smash was adventure serials, and far and away the most successful of these was The Incredible Adventures of Janus Stark written by Tom Tully, featuring an escapologist in Victorian London who appeared to be simply an unusual act on the music-hall stage, but who privately used his extraordinary abilities to battle against injustice. Stark had an unusually flexible bone structure, enabling him to get out of an astonishing variety of tight situations, thanks to training received in childhood from his mentor, Blind Largo. Drawn by Solano Lopez, there was more than a touch of Reed Richards, from the departed Fantastic Four strip, in Stark's uncanny abilities. Lopez's dark, moody artwork also gave the strip a perfect 19th Century setting. The strip was one of the few to survive the merger of Smash into Valiant in 1971, and is still well remembered today. As a mark of its popularity, from week 30 it replaced Master of the Marsh as the lead serial on page 3.This brings up the matter of economics once more. Solano Lopez was a foreign illustrator, born in the Argentine, who worked at a studio in Spain. For reasons of cost, IPC had taken a policy decision to source artwork from cheaper sources outside the UK. Along with the presence in the new Smash of reprint strips, which were much cheaper than commissioning new strips, this is yet another indicator of the financial pressure the comic was still under, and the absolute necessity of cutting production costs to the bone in order to make it financially viable.
Another long-running adventure strip was The Battle of Britain, in which secret agent Simon Kane fought against Baron Rudolph, a usurper who had seized control of Britain using a secret weapon. The weapon emitted a sound wave which paralysed anyone who wasn't protected against it. Rudolph set up a police state, similar in emblems and uniforms to medieval England at the time of King John, and Kane led the resistance against him.
In spite of the title, the strip had no connection with the Second World War! Drawn for the initial 40 issues by Geoff Campion, and thereafter by John Stokes, it was in fact a reprint; hence it, too, was an indication of the comic's troubled financial status. It originally ran in Lion from 29 February 1964 to 28 May 1966 under various titles including Britain in Chains and The Battle for Britain, where the hero was called Vic Gunn. The editorial staff of Smash took a decision to change the names of the leading characters from Gunn and Barrel, to slightly less absurd ones; and so were born secret agent Simon Kane and his assistant Tubby. This had been a very long-running strip in Lion, so much so that Smash actually ceased publication – in April 1971 – before it had reprinted the entire run from Lion, and in the final issue created an new ending for the serial.
Rebbels on the Run was another adventure serial, featuring three young brothers whose surname was Rebbel, who run away from an orphanage to avoid being split up. After a few months on the run, the strip took an amazing turn and – renamed The Rebbel Robot – became a science fiction serial, when the boys discovered that their late father's mind was preserved within the brain of a robot, which became their unofficial guardian. With it they embarked on a quest to track down a criminal known as The Genie, who had murdered their real father – who, in a further improbable turn of events, turned out to be a secret agent!
Eric the Viking, a continuing serial featuring its eponymous Viking hero, and set in the Dark Ages, was another reprint from Lion, where it had run under the title Karl the Viking, as a set of 13 stories, from 29 October 1960 until 29 September 1964, written by Ken Bulmer. The change of name to Eric probably reflects on the continuing fame of a real-life Viking leader in Dark Age Britain, Eric Bloodaxe, who history records was King in Viking York in the 10th Century. The strip is well remembered under its original title, as it was drawn by a famous comics artist, Don Lawrence. Eric fought a weird but impressive collection of legendary and fantasy monsters, in sword-and-sorcery epics which had some reflections in Lawrence's art for his contemporary work on the highly regarded all-colour science fiction strip The Trigan Empire then running in Look and Learn. This was not even the first reprint: retitled Swords of the Sea Wolves it had initially been reprinted in Lion, in part, between 1 October 1966 and 7 October 1967, with the lead character renamed Rolf the Viking. And it would later be reprinted again, in the European version of Vulcan: on that occasion translated into German and retitled 'Kobra'.
Two of the new IPC adventure strips – Sergeant Rock Paratrooper and Bunsen's Burner – were introduced five or six weeks early, in an attempt to conceal how few Odhams strips had actually survived, by making these appear to be existing strips although they were not. World War Two was the setting for the former, which, with occasional stories drawn by John Vernon, recounted the adventures of the 'Red Devils' of the Parachute Regiment. Initially, Sgt Rock was merely a narrator, introducing stories featuring other characters, so that it was actually tales-of-the-parachute-regiment, rather than tales of Sgt Rock himself. This was a device for reprinting old war stories from other comics: the strip had originally appeared in Fleetway's Hurricane, from 4 July 1964 to 8 May 1965, entitled Paratrooper, and continued in Tiger when that title absorbed Hurricane in the issue dated 15 May 1965. The reprints in Smash were reasonably successful, running for a year; and Sergeant Rock eventually featured as more than just narrator, with later editions sending him into action with the SAS, and marking the change by altering the title to Sergeant Rock - Special Air Service. This change was noticeable, also, by a change of artist; seemingly – from the similarity of style – to the artist on the discontinued wartime strip, Nutt and Bolt the Men from W.H.E.E.Z.E..
Bunsen's Burner was a short-lived strip, lasting just a few weeks. This was an adventure yarn with humorous overtones – its humorous content being trailed in its title: a reference to an item familiar to most schoolboys from their Chemistry classes. Ben Bunsen was the owner of a vintage car, which was known as "the Burner" because it was so old it was steam-driven! Like an old-fashioned steam train it had a boiler which had to be stoked, as it ran on coal instead of petrol. Ben and his pal had to drive the Burner around the world, as a condition of Ben inheriting his uncle's fortune; but a rival claimant was secretly out to stop them.
Another adventure strip which had a sadly brief run, lasting only 47 weeks, but which is very well-remembered today, was Cursitor Doom. In this spooky and atmospheric series, Cursitor Doom, master investigator of the strange and mystic, who openly practiced sorcery in the strip, battled against the dark forces of evil, ably assisted by the pounding fists of his assistant, Angus McCraggan. Doom battled against genuine spirits and sorcerers, in tales including The Case of Kalak the Dwarf, The Sorcerer's Talisman and The Dark Legion of Mardarax, in the latter encountering a haunted Roman Legion brought back to "life" by the evil Mardarax. Doom's pet Raven, Scarab, who could write messages in the dust for Angus McCraggan, by scratching with his claw, was often of more help to Doom in these serials than was the perpetually baffled McCraggan.
The Cursitor Doom strip was drawn by Geoff Campion, and – more effectively – by Eric Bradbury.
Changes in August 1969
After 22 weeks, in August 1969, Nutt and Bolt the Men from W.H.E.E.Z.E. was dropped, and replaced from the 23rd issue by a more serious World War Two strip entitled Send For... Q-Squad, which dealt with the adventures of a hand picked group of six specialists, who were assigned to unusual missions that required special expertise both in the air and on the ground. This, too, in keeping with the need to cut costs, was a reprint, originally published in Buster from 28 May 1960 to 7 March 1964 under the title Phantom Force 5.This was another of those drawn, initially, by one of IPC's best British artists, Eric Bradbury, at other times by the Spanish-based artist Luis Bermejo Rojo, and in its final months mainly by Fred Holmes. Because the strip had a regrettably short run in Smash, most of the run features art by Eric Bradbury.
It was marked out as a reprint by its unique style – which was both different from, and grimmer than, all the other strips. Whereas Sgt Rock emulated Lord Henry, by maintaining a huge and confident smile, regardless of how much trouble he was in, no one in Q-Squad ever stopped looking worried. Its reprint status was also signalled by the fact that Q-Squad was plainly not the original name of the team. Some panels showed evidence of the name having been inserted over a previous one: a change in the lettering style for the name 'Q-Squad' and any adjacent words – which used a different handwriting in a cruder style wherever the name appeared, but nowhere else.
In the same issue, a serious footballing serial entitled The Handcuff Hotspurs began, replacing the departed – and rather more humorous – World Wide Wanderers. Hard-as-nails former prison sports instructor 'Toff' Morgan took over the management of ailing First Division side Haversham Hotspurs. Morgan began to rebuild the team by 'framing' ex-criminals who he'd known while working in various prisons, forcing them to sign on with the club in order to make use of their dishonest skills as footballing talents. These convicts became the 'handcuff hotspurs' of the title. The club's former manager, Reg Jessup, tried constantly to sabotage Morgan's efforts, in order to persuade the Directors to re-appoint him instead.
Six months earlier, various humour strips had been introduced as replacements for the humour of Ken Reid, whose strip The Nervs had so disturbed IPC's management. Now another was forthcoming, and one which reflected the pervasive sporting theme of the relaunched comic. The Touchline Tearaways was another new football-themed strip, featuring three mad-keen supporters of Grimshot United: a totally useless Football League team, perpetually in danger of being relegated as it was made up entirely of ailing and decrepit players. Each week the Tearaways – Hairy, Lug'oles and Clever Dick – would execute some scheme from the touchline to help Grimshot win that week's fixture, usually involving a battle of wits with officials from the Ministry of Football, who, not unnaturally, tried to put a stop to the Tearaways well-intentioned cheating.
The name of the club, Grimshot United, was a humorous indication that the team was not very good. Each strip featured a single match, with a plot based around helping the team overcome that week's opponent. Clever Dick masterminded all the ploys used in helping Grimshot, and apart from occasional words of congratulation or encouragement he was generally the only "Tearaway" who had dialogue in the strip. Hairy and Lug'oles tended to be merely a pair of walking visual gags: Hairy's features were perpetually invisible behind a vast mass of long black hair that covered his entire face and head, and Lug'oles had a pair of enormous ears.
These three new strips represented a minor change of emphasis, replacing two of the more whimsical offerings with two entirely serious strips – even though the third new entry was simply one outright cartoon strip replacing another.
Thus, within six months, a number of the strips introduced in the relaunch had already bitten the dust. And more changes were looming.
The 2nd Relaunch : 1970
The most obvious problem faced by the new-look Smash was the constant "churn": the incessant turnover of strips. Without its solidly popular superhero strips to rely on, the editorial staff seemed pathologically incapable of settling on a fixed line-up.In the aftermath of the changes made in August 1969, further changes made at the start of 1970 left Smash looking very different from its appearance in the wake of the relaunch just 12 months earlier. A vast number of new strips were added, in a second re-launch, such that only half of those introduced in March 1969 now survived, although those which continued included Master of the Marsh, Janus Stark, His Sporting Lordship, Battle of Britain, Eric the Viking, Wacker, The Handcuff Hotspurs, The Swots and the Blots, and Percy's Pets – the latter two now being the only remaining Odhams strips.
Discontinued were King of the Ring, Sergeant Rock – Special Air Service, and Cursitor Doom. Three of the strips only recently introduced were also dropped, namely the wartime Q-Squad, British superhero Tri-Man, and the humour strip The Touchline Tearaways.
The first changes in 1970 occurred in the issue dated 24 January, when three new strips appeared, all reprints from Buster: The Kid Commandos, Consternation Street, and Monty Muddle – The Man from Mars. These were introduced as part of a relaunch of the comic: by once again bringing in some of the changes a few weeks ahead of the relaunch, as had been done in the Spring of 1969, the publisher hoped to disguise the true extent of the changes.
The Kid Commandos was a war story about three cockney children stranded in occupied France in World War Two. Drawn by Tom Kerr, the Sparrow children – Tommy, Jan and Podge – were on the run from the Germans each week, in a single page strip set in 1940. This was another reprint from Buster, in which it appeared from 9 January to 24 July 1965, under the imaginative title The Sparrows Go To War.
In the humour strip Consternation Street drawn by Reg Parlett, which was usually a one-page strip, a collection of unlikely neighbours rubbed shoulders in a very small street. Watched over by the dim-witted Constable Clott were the Snobbs and the Ardupps, Colonel Curry & Caesar, Miss Primm and her pets, Cutprice the Grocer, and Roger the Lodger. This was another reprint from Buster, in which it had originally run – under the same title – between 9 January and 23 October 1965. Parlett was also known from his other humour strips in Buster including Rent-A-Ghost Ltd, The Happy Family and Bonehead.
The half-page humour strip Monty Muddle – The Man from Mars recounted the misadventures of spaceman Monty Muddle. It originally ran in Buster from 28 May 1960 to 10 March 1962, with art credited to Nadal/Rafart. He flew about in his small bubble-domed spacecraft trying to make friends with the Earth people. However, due to his misunderstanding of Earth customs, his every attempt at contact ended in disaster; and each strip would typically end with the catchphrase I'll try again next week!
The 7 February issue then saw a full re-launch: with more free gifts, another new cover feature, and no less than eight new strips.
The Warriors of the World covers had run into a problem, in that war stories were no longer a strong element of Smash, which had dropped the humour strip Nutt and Bolt the Men from W.H.E.E.Z.E. some time earlier. When it was decided to also drop Sergeant Rock – Paratrooper, and Q Squad, the cover feature had to go too. It was not practical to advertise war stories on the cover if there were no war stories inside!
The newly added Kid Commandos did not count as a war story in this context, since the three fugitive children did not do any conventional fighting. The strip was more like a souped-up version of the discontinued Rebbels on the Run.
Accordingly, after forty seven weeks the Warriors of the World series was ended. Instead, the issue dated 7 February 1970 began The Thirteen Tasks of Simon Test, written by Angus Allan and drawn by the ever-popular Eric Bradbury. Henceforth each week's cover featured a full-page splash advertising the task which adventurer Simon Test would undertake in a new strip on the inside pages. This strip proved so successful that when the original thirteen-week series was completed, Simon Test was given a new series of adventures, extending his hold on the cover indefinitely. He would prove particularly enduring, being one of the few strips to ultimately survive the merger with Valiant in 1971.
The Thirteen Tasks of Simon Test saw him undertake a quest for immortality by attempting the thirteen tasks of the Pharaoh Thot, believing this to be the only way to save his life, having been deceived into believing he has only a few months to live. The sinister Jabez Coppenger secretly desired Test's death as a means of restoring his own youth. This serial introduced the mute servant Karka, who would ultimately become Test's friend and assistant.
Test then went on to the more lengthy series of adventures entitled Simon Test and the Curse of the Conqueror, where he battled the twenty servants of the evil Ezekiel Spar, the self-styled Conqueror. This pitted him against twenty athletes and champions, each of whom was under the hypnotic control of Spar, who implanted in them an in-built impulse to kill Simon Test.
New supporting strips introduced in the 7 February issue included Threat of the Toymaker, The Pillater Peril, Birdman of Baratoga, Nick and Nat – The Beat Boys, and three humour strips with a common supernatural element: Sam's Spook, The Haunts of Headless Harry, and Ghost Ship.
In Threat of the Toymaker, drawn by Solano Lopez, a criminal scientist named Doctor Droll escaped from Garstone Prison with the aid of an army of remote controlled mechanical toys he had constructed, along the way taking the Prison Governor's children, Pam and Peter Keen, as hostages. Hampered by the children at every turn, Droll finds himself on the run, pursued by the Police wherever he goes. The idea of using radio controlled toys in the strip was scarcely original, since it was a straight lift from the House of Dolmann, which was then running in Valiant, as well as from the General Jumbo strip in The Beano. The strip was scarcely original either: having been first published in Buster, under the title The Toys of Doom, between 27 February 1965 and 13 January 1968, it was also reprinted in Eagle, under its original title The Toys of Doom.
The Pillater Peril saw David Pillater return to Pillater House, his ancestral home on the Cornish coast, which he is to inherit on his 21st birthday. Along with his four cousins and his Uncle Bernard, David is imperilled by Francis Pillater, an ancestor who has seemingly returned from the dead. Francis had an evil reputation for his misdeeds in the 16th century, but was thought to have perished in a shipwreck during a storm at sea. Blaming the family for his troubles, he sets out for revenge by kidnapping them one by one. The strip had only a short run, but when discontinued it did, unusually, seemingly come to a natural conclusion.
Birdman from Baratoga was an adventure strip about a boy who grew up on a Pacific island with only the company of birds, and learned from them the secret of flight. By the use of a feather cape, he was able to glide through the air like an albatros. When an English sailor is castaway on the island, called Baratoga, they escape together on a raft and set out on a series of adventures in the Pacific, beginning by hunting down the desperado who has stolen the man's pearl-fishing yacht, Enterprise. Birdman from Baratoga was perhaps loosely based on a humour strip which had run in Buster during 1968: Captain Swoop – He's Half Man, Half Bird, Half Wit.
In a very atypical move, prompted by IPC's on-going financial problems, the editorial team now resurrected one of the old strips which had run in Wham under Odhams, drawn by Gordon Hogg. Nick and Nat – The Beat Boys featured two young lads from Liverpool who fancied themselves as musicians, spoke in Liverpudlian slang, sported Beatles-style haircuts, and always carried guitars. This was a reprint of The Wacks, which had run in Wham during 1964, reprinted here with only the title and the names changed. Spoofing the pop group The Beatles, it was an odd choice to run it a year after that group's demise. It was, though, a popular item: this 1964 strip had already been reprinted, under the title Birk 'n' 'Ed, the Mersey Dead-Beats, from 30 January 1965 in Fleetway's Hurricane.
A common supernatural theme linked the three new humour strips. In Sam's Spook, drawn by the ubiquitous Leo Baxendale, Sam was a schoolboy with a ghostly pal called Spooky, who used his powers to humorous effect on Sam's behalf. The strip mostly consisted of Sam's school friends catching Spooky doing a bit of ghostly cheating in order to help Sam win at sports or football, and Sam doing a lot of running away to avoid a bashing.
The Haunts of Headless Harry featured the amiable ghost of a 16th-century soldier who had been beheaded. Harry's head and body led separate but related ghostly existences, with the body carrying the head around everywhere, and both of them were able to talk. Harry's humorous adventures invariably involved misplacing his head; such as going to the cinema and, on leaving, calling at the cloakroom to collect it, and being asked by the attendant to identify it among all the other ghostly heads left there during the film.
The other new humour strip was Ghost Ship, in which the spirit of an ancient galleon, and the ghosts of its pirate crew, sailed the Seven Seas making mischief, but usually coming off worst.
Further changes followed: such that fully thirteen strips had been introduced since the start of 1970. In the issue dated 27 June 1970, a new humour strip began entitled Moonie's Magic Mate, about a schoolboy, Barry Moon, who finds a Genie in a dusty old bottle. In the issue dated 29 August, a humour strip titled The Fighting Three began, featuring the misadventures of three men: globe-trotters McGinty, Hambone and Weasel are travelling the world, trying to raise enough money to start their own construction company, but get into fights – and jail! – wherever they go. Drawn by Carlos Cruz, this was another reprint from Buster, where, under its original title Mighty McGinty, the strip had run in 1964. And finally, in the last addition before the comic's closure, a strip entitled Tyler the Tamer was launched in early 1971, about the adventures of the greatest film stuntman in the world. Dropped to make room for these were Kid Commandos, Threat of the Toymaker and The Pillater Peril.
Merger with ''Valiant''
In mid-November 1970, production on Smash came to a halt due to a printers' strike, and no editions were published for the next three months. By the time the strike was settled, in February of the following year, irreparable damage had been done to the comic's circulation, as its young readers had turned elsewhere in the intervening 11 weeks. Similar harm had been suffered by Valiant. In consequence of this latest financial disaster, after eight issues, in April 1971 the two titles were merged in an attempt to combine their surviving circulation. For a brief time the merged comic was entitled Valiant and Smash, before reverting to simply Valiant.Some strips from Smash survived in the new comic, including His Sporting Lordship, Janus Stark and The Swots and the Blots, but most were lost, although the Smash Annual continued to appear for many years afterwards. A lot of the strips thereby continued to appear each year, including many which had not even survived into Valiant, long after Smash had ceased publication as a comic.
The sports themed His Sporting Lordship had enjoyed perhaps the greatest popularity, surviving the shake-ups of 1969 and 1970, and then surviving even the merger with Valiant, though it was to last only a few months in its new home, finally ending in December 1971. However, it was revived in the 1972 Smash Annual, published at Christmas 1971, and returned year after year: becoming the regular cover feature of the Annuals.
The merged title was dominated by Valiant, which contributed nine strips consisting of twenty pages; whereas Smash! was represented by only four strips, totalling a meager nine pages: Janus Stark, The Swots & The Blots, Simon Test, and His Sporting Lordship.
Despite all of the changes, the new Smash had lasted only two years. Maybe it was only marginally profitable, but no title could have survived such a lengthy loss of production. Its demise was directly attributable to the strike.
Smash was the last attempt in the UK market to publish a general boys comic, mixing adventure, sports and humour strips. Subsequent comics would survive only by ruthlessly focusing on narrow, sectional interests: such as all-sports, all-war, or all-humour; just as the American market had already specialised into all-funnies, all-horror, and all-superhero titles. The writing was on the wall for non-niche comics in the UK, for, in the face of the competition from television, even IPC's flagship, Valiant, ultimately could not survive.