Fans of classic pulp, classic comics and - lets face it - classic everything - has a champion in the UK that deserves a hell of a lot of praise for his never ending work in bringing out re-prints, facts and general history about all of the above. His name is Steve Holland and if you donīt know his name as yet itīs high time to change all that and to get out there and buy a few of his books. Fans of classic UK war comics will have taken note last year with the triple assault of two 700 page Fleetway War Picture Libraries/Battle Picture Libraries collections, plus the amazing book "The War Libraries" - co-written by Steve and his friend David Roach - the first in a series about the small sized comics published by Fleetway back in their heyday. But that is just the tip of the iceberg - more stuff is out for the Old Boys Club to discover, and plenty more is on the way. Gentlemen, I give you Steve Holland, in his own words.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
- I'm a freelance writer and editor and, like most freelancers, my career has had its ups and downs. I've written a lot for collecting magazines, film magazines and newspapers; until recently I was working full time for Look and Learn writing material for their website.
Can you recall how you discovered comics and can you mention the titles that you thought were good as a lad?
- I was probably aware of comics from the age of six or so, but the first comic I remember clearly - and I can still picture it - is an issue of Valiant that I saw when I was visiting the house of a friend from school. Roy's brother was a couple of years older and had a small stack of these comics and I picked one up and started reading one of the stories: The Steel Claw. In the story, Louis Crandell's young companion, Blackie, had been tied to a goalpost and Crandell (aka The Steel Claw) had been forced to play football against a team of robots. There's a bomb attached to the goal so if the robots score, Blackie will be blown to pieces. I wasn't aware of all this when I opened the comic but I remember the image of Crandell kneeling down on the pitch and firing a bullet from one of the steel fingers of his hand so that the deflated ball lands limply in the goal and doesn't set off the bomb. The story was from a February 1968 issue and wasn't new; I was 7 and I was so taken with this story that I started buying Valiant myself. I was completely hooked. I also started buying Joe 90: Top Secret when it was launched, so that was September 1969, and I was picking up issues of Smash! and Lion and the war picture libraries around that time when I had some spare pocket money.
Most of us tossed out a chunk of the old collection as we grew older, and itīs not uncommon that guys our age are now trying to get some of these issues again now on sites like eBay, do you recognise that in yourself?
- I was lucky in one sense. I managed to keep hold of most of my Valiants because me and my younger sister both read them. The Joe 90s and various other comics I'd amasssed - including a stack of earlier TV Century 21s that I'd gotten a hold of - were given away by my mum. And I never really stopped buying. I remember buying Top Secret Library when it came out in 1974, and Speed & Power, which was a magazine about cars, planes, trains and every other form of transport you can imagine - although I bought it mostly for the Arthur C. Clark science fiction stories. I started buying that in April 1974 when my pocket money went up (which it did every birthday). I gave up Valiant in 1975 but started buying Vulcan, which reprinted quite a few Valiant strips (Mytek the Mighty, Steel Claw, Kelly's Eye). In February 1976 I started buying Action when that first came out and found myself buying Valiant again that same year when Vulcan merged into it. I started buying Starblazer when that was launched in April 1979. And, because I'd thrown such a fit when my mum gave away all my earlier comics, I managed to keep hold of most of these later ones and still have complete, or near complete, runs of some of them. So a lot of the comics I grew up on, I still have. I'd given my Valiants to my sister when I moved out of the family home and it was when she bought her first flat that they came back to me, although they nearly didn't. She asked me whether I still wanted them and I'd said "Not really" as I was living in a very small flat. But I had a change of heart and said that, next time I was visiting, I'd like to have a look through them before they were disposed of. Once I'd seen them, I couldn't let them go and loaded them all into carrier bags and lugged them all the way back to my flat. When I started re-reading the stories, some of them started half-way through and others ended mid-story; I was talking to a friend of mine called Phil Harbottle, and asked: "Does anyone actually buy and sell old comics?" He said the person to contact was Denis Gifford and eventually joined Denis's Association of Comics Enthusiasts (A.C.E.). They had a monthly newsletter which is where I first started writing about comics.
How is the UK market for comics doing?
- There are still dozens of comics coming out every month but only a few of the type I remember growing up. Only 2000AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine have survived from the days of the boys' adventure comic. There aren't any comics for girls any more. Of the old humour titles, only Beano and Dandy have survived and the Dandy is now more a magazine than a comic. And, of course, we still have one surviving war library, Commando. But the market is now dominated by TV tie-ins aimed at the very young and most of those are really activity magazines for five to eight-year-olds - very different to the 1970s when there were thirty plus weekly comics to choose from.
What exactly is the Book Palace, and how did you get involved with them?
- The Book Palace sells books, magazines and comics, both new and secondhand, and lots of original artwork. They have a website where you can find vast amounts of goodies... http://www.bookpalace.com/ ... Iīve known the guys at the Book Palace for many years because they were involved in comic marts and various shows. It was through my work for Look and Learn that Geoff West and I began talking about the possibility of reprinting some of the artwork and comic strips owned by the company in book form. I also mentioned that I wanted to put out some more comics indexes and Geoff offered to publish them. It took about eighteen months to get to where we are now, with the first two books (The War Libraries and Frank Bellamy's Robin Hood) now out and a lot of other titles planned.
I actually missed the initial release of your first book that covers the Fleetway Picture Libraries, "The War Libraries" - written by yourself and David Roach and published by Book Palace Books - in august 2007, but I was later told about it and could mention it here on Where Eagles Dare. Can you tell us how this project came about and how you guys approached such a mammoth undertaking?
- In the late 1980s, I was corresponding with another member of A.C.E. called Gary Armitage who sent me a list of stories featuring a character he liked. I responded with a list of Steel Claw stories and, before long, we were compiling lists of various characters from the comics we had. My interest had grown in older comics from the 1950s; it would be true to say that most of the fans collecting comics that I met at comic marts were a bit older than myself so they remembered the comics from a decade or two earlier. Because of this growing interest, I tried to compile some listings for comics like Thriller Picture Library and Super Detective Library. These were originally just typed lists that I would send out to people to see if they could add any information about titles and artists. Life got a lot easier when I got my first computer and a printer. I mentioned these lists to Bryon Whitworth, who was publishing a fanzine called The Illustrated Comic Journal, and he offered to publish them. Bryon had a photocopier and produced them to order, which is why they were always so expensive. I produced eleven of these indexes between 1991 and 1997. Ten years on they still turn up, mostly on eBay, and people were still buying them, so I thought it was time to update and reissue them. I'd compiled a very partial listing for the War Picture Library for A.C.E. in 1990 and listings for War, Battle and Air Ace had appeared in The Fleetway Companion in 1992. But I'd hooked up with David Roach in the intervening 15 years and we'd continued to piece together information from wherever we could find it. David is an artist (a very good one, too) and has an artist's eye for spotting styles; it's fair to say that David revolutionised the list. He's as fanatical as I am about trying to identify the artists and writers who helped entertain millions of children every week but who never received any credit whatsoever. We had the full support of IPC Media, who own the rights to those old war titles and I negotiated a deal with DC Comics, who own IPC, which meant that we could do a fully illustrated book. Geoff's offer to publish it and include two sections in colour meant that we could finally do one of these indexes justice. It's still a very expensive project because the deal we have means we can only do a limited print run but we did everything we could - including dozens of examples of original artwork in colour, for instance - to make sure that the book was value for money.
Fleetway stopped publishing war comics in 1984. Can you tell us about what has happened to Fleetway and what has happened to all the original art?
- The war comics came to an end in 1984 because a lot of changes had happened in publishing; soaring inflation had caused the prices of comics to rise dramatically in the 1970s and unemployment in the UK peaked in 1982 at over 3 million. Everyone was tightening their belts and luxuries like comics, which parents often bought for their children, were often the first to go. If you were buying your own comics, as I was, the price increases every year meant that you couldn't afford as many comics a week. I mentioned earlier that I'd given up Valiant in 1975... well, that was because the price had gone up from 3p in 1971 to 6p in 1975 and my pocket money hadn't kept pace with inflation. In the early 1980s, Fleetway was looking at their comics and began to close down unprofitable titles, including the war libaries. They also split the comics from the profitable teenage girls' magazines so the comics department was, on paper, making even less money. Eventually IPC sold their comics' titles to Robert Maxwell in 1987. The artwork used to be bundled together in brown sheets and stored. But by the 1970s, Fleetway had amassed hundreds of thousands of pages. A lot of artwork had been stored in the basement below Fleetway House and when IPC moved to Kings Reach Towers in the mid-1970s, they just didn't have that storage space any more, so most of the artwork was destroyed. Some artwork was saved, including the covers to many of the war libraries, although these have subsequently been sold off to a private collector. IPC still retain all the publishing rights to the artwork, which is why we've been able to put together collections in recent years.
You have also been involved in the War/Battle Picture Libraries 700 page nostalgia specials from Prion. These seems to have been inspired by the success of the Commando books that started this trend in november 2005. What happened?
- Commando is such a strong brand name that many people talk about Commando libraries when they mean War Picture Library or Battle Picture Library. It's astonishing to think that Commando has been running for nearly fifty years and over 4,000 issues. Carlton Books decided to produce some collections in 2005 - they did "The Best of Jackie" and the Commando collection "The Dirty Dozen" and both books did astonishingly well. I got involved when they asked me to write an introduction to "The Best of Girl" and I also did the promotion for the book when it came out in September 2006. Orders for the titles they released in 2006 were still very good and I was asked if I'd be interested in doing collections for War Picture Library and Battle Picture Library to compliment the Commando titles they were doing. The books are published under the Prion Books imprint of Carlton and, as far as I'm aware, the titles published for 2007 have also done very well.
More titles are coming up, can we expect stalwarts like Battler Britton and Spy 13 to re-appear as well? How about Dick Daring?
- I've been lucky enough to have been involved in quite a few of the titles that are coming up in 2008. They range from a collection of hospital romance stories to Rick Random - Space Detective. Plus two new War and Battle volumes and a western volume reprinting from Cowboy Picture Library. Future plans will depend on how well these books do and I ought to stress that I work on them as a freelancer so I've no control over titles they choose to publish. I'd love to do collections for Battler Britton, Spy 13 and another war-time spy character called John Steel. The John Steel stories are amongst my favourites, especially when he switched from war-time spy to private eye. The Rick Random collection was great to work on: I made sure that all 12 stories were drawn by Ron Turner and there are enough stories left over for a second volume. I also deliberately chose certain artists for the cowboy volume, "High Noon", so it mostly features stories drawn by Alberto Breccia, Gerry Embleton and Jesus Blasco; if I get to do a second volume I'll concentrate on other artists - Arturo Del Castillo and a couple of others.
I can see an ad in the book about the Fleetway Libraries that there is second title called "The Thriller Libraries", written by yourself and David Ashford - has this title been published or is it on the way?
- The Thriller Libraries indexes Thriller Comics, Cowboy Comics and Super Detective Library and it will come out later this year - hopefully by September. This one has been compiled in collaboration with David Ashford, as David was my co-compiler when we published these lists back in the early 1990s, although David Roach has been an enormous help in identifying the later (mostly European) artists. Again, we're putting in a lot of extra material: we've indexed a series of Australian comics that pre-dated the Cowboy Comics series for the first time; we've photographed around 50 pieces of original cover artwork and I'm just finishing up the introduction which runs to over 20,000 words. Again, we're making sure that the book is value for money.
Will there be a third title or any similar project about the small sized comics?
- The third and final volume of the series (The Fleetway Libraries) will be called "The Adventure and Romance Libraries" and will cover every other library that Fleetway published, from Action Picture Library to Wild West Picture Library and will include, for the first time, substantial lists for the romance and schoolgirls' picture libraries that Fleetway published. I'm hoping that everyone who bought the first two volumes will want to pick up the third even though many of the titles are not as widely collected. David and I have been making some astonishing discoveries and I think the artwork we'll be able to reproduce will amaze people. It's some of the best artwork that appeared in the UK.
You have just edited a book about Robin Hood, tell us about that title.
- In 2005 I began working for a company called Look and Learn Magazine Ltd. which had bought the rights to Look and Learn and various other titles from IPC. It was through Look and Learn that I got talking to Geoff about reprinting material that a publisher like Carlton might not be interested in as it had more of a specialised appeal. Top of the list was Frank Bellamy's stories from Swift, which Look and Learn owned. They're incredibly good and we thought they deserved to be reprinted. Thanks to the publisher of Look and Learn, Geoff was able to put together a collection and I wrote the introduction and a second feature. The book collects together the two stories Frank Bellamy drew featuring Robin Hood in full for the first time since they were originally published fifty years ago. We're expecting copies back from the printers any day now and we're already talking about a follow-up to feature Bellamy's King Arthur and Swiss Family Robinson stories which would fit into a single volume.
I have also seen that you are involved in a series called The Trigan Empire. I live in Sweden so to me this is a new title, but it looks awfully interesting. Can you tell us about this comic?
- "The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire" was the full title of a strip that began in 1965, originally in Ranger and later in the educational weekly Look and Learn. It ran until Look and Learn folded in 1982, so it had a run of 17 years, two pages in colour every week. The story is set on a planet in a galaxy far, far away and is the tale of how an empire came to be founded amongst nomadic tribesmen in the face of a more advanced enemy. Imagine Romans or ancient Greeks at war with an enemy equipped with aircraft and tanks and you'll get a rough idea of how the story begins. For the first 11 years or so it was drawn almost exclusively by an artist called Don Lawrence who was one of the finest artists to appear in British comics. When Don left the strip, he began working for a comic appearing in Holland which had been reprinting the Trigan Empire very successfully for some years. Don launched a new character called Storm and those stories appeared throughout Europe. It's ironic, but the series never had much success here in the UK so Don became more famous outside his home country than he was here. In Holland there was a thriving fan club run by Rob van Bavel and Rob was inspired to put together a series of books called Don Lawrence Collection (DLC) which reprinted many of Don's earlier, pre-Trigan Empire, black & white strips alongside some colour work he had done for various magazines over the years. When this series came to an end, he negotiated a deal with IPC to reprint The Trigan Empire as a set of 12 deluxe hardbacks. I had known Rob since the 1980s and, in 2003, he asked if I would be interested in getting involved in the series; he also wanted to publish a similar series of deluxe hardbacks translating the Storm series into English. The first books came out in 2004, since when DLC have published 9 of the Trigan Empire volumes (we've just completed the tenth) and 7 volumes of Storm, with another 2 due out in 2008. The Storm series is about an astronaut who finds himself flung into the far distant future on Earth; at a later stage he is transported across the universe to a place called Pandarve. These latter stories are superbly written by a Dutch author called Martin Lodewijk and it's great to be involved in getting them into English for the first time.
What other projects have you been working on in the comics field?
- Until recently I was working full-time for Look and Learn, writing material mostly for the Look and Learn website (www.lookandlearn.com) and building up their picture gallery of artwork. Unfortunately, a vast amount of original artwork for the magazine had gone by the time Look and Learn bought the rights, so once the work was done on the surviving art, I went back to freelancing. One of the projects I'd been thinking about for some time was a new edition of a little booklet I had put together in 1990 called The Mike Western Story. Mike was one of my favourite artists and the book was made up from correspondence I'd had with him. It was just a 32-page, A5 booklet produced on a photocopier but, years later, people were still asking whether I had copies. So I've been working on that, on and off, for the past couple of months. For the past 18 months I've run a blog called Bear Alley (www.bearalley.blogspot.com/) which is where I publish a lot of information about old British comics so when I finish The Mike Western Story I'm planning to publish it under the Bear Alley imprint. I've also been working on a number of other titles that I'm thinking of publishing myself; for instance, not all the indexes we produced in the past merit reprinting in the same flexiback - a flexible hardback - format that we used for The War Libraries because they're not nearly as collectable. So some I'll be producing myself as softbacks in limited numbers. I'm still experimenting with short-run printers at the moment so I've no firm date for when all these ideas will be turned into real books, but I'm getting close to putting out the first title.
Is there still something that you would really love to get involved with on the nostalgia market?
- I'm also interested in old crime fiction, boys' story papers (which contained text stories and were hugely popular before the Second World War in the UK), penny dreadfuls (early story papers published in the 19th century) and various other things, so I'm hoping to bring out a variety of books through Bear Alley. I'm under no illusion that any of them will be best-sellers but I'm working on the principal that I'd like a copy of certain books on my shelf and if anyone else wants a copy, it will be available. I've the same attitude to comics... I think one of the advantages Europe had over the UK was that they reprinted so much in album form. Even if you came to a series late, you could always pick up the albums and read a story from the beginning. The albums also fed new readers into the weekly comics when they discovered that the latest episodes of a story they liked were being serialised. In Britain, once a series was complete, that was it. You never saw it again unless parts of it were reprinted in a summer special or annual many years later. So what I would love to get involved in would be the reprinting of a lot of strips in album form to make them available again. I've been able to do that partly through the books I've worked on for DLC, Book Palace, Titan and Carlton but there are dozens of strips that I would love to be able to walk over to my book shelf and pick up to read.
I read your book "The Trials of Hank Janson" a couple of years ago, and thought it was a very interesting subject, especially since I used to collect the Swedish Janson books. Tell us about that project and what sort of response you have had for it since the publication.
- If you can find one thread running through all my interests it's an interest in what has been called "pulp culture". I've always had a fascination for the books, magazines and comics that entertained millions but seem to be dismissed by critics as not worthy of study, whether that's comic strips of old paperback novels. Hank Janson is a prime example: Hank Janson was both the character in a series of paperback novels and the pen-name of the author. The books were written by Stephen D. Frances, a London-born writer and publisher who, shortly after the Second World War, created Hank. Hank Janson was supposedly an English-born journalist who had lived in America and had all these adventures which he was now writing about. Frances had never set foot outside the UK but used travel guides to help him with settings. Now, if you don't know much about a place, the thing to do is keep your book fast-paced and full of action and just slip in the occasional Americanism and a handful of details to make the book feel authentic. Believe it or not, a lot of people did think that Hank was a genuine American author. When I read the Hank Janson novels in the 1980s, I thought they were fascinating and had the good fortune to correspond with Stephen Frances, who had been living in Spain since the 1950s. He was still bitter about a big court case that had been brought against his publishers and his books in 1954 where the court condemned the books as obscene. I was loaned a transcript of the hearings and came to the same conclusion that Frances had that there was a lot of bias shown against the books that shouldn't have been: when you judge a case you have to be impartial and make your decisions based on the evidence presented; you have to summarise the case in a balanced way and give the jury every assistance to reach a reasoned verdict. That isn't what happened in the Hank Janson case and the books were banned and the publishers imprisoned. Stephen Frances died in 1989 and, in 2002, a publisher I met in London said he was thinking about reprinting some of the old Hank Janson paperbacks and would I be interested in writing some introductions. I said yes, and managed to get them interested in publishing a book about Hank, which came out in 2004. The book was very well received and was nominated for the Silver Dagger Award by the Crime Writers Association for Best non-fiction title. I still think it's one of the best books I've written.
Any thoughts about more books about the old days in this field?
- I've a few ideas floating around concerning paperbacks but, like most of my ideas, they're fairly vague and insubstantial. One day I'd like to rewrite The Mushroom Jungle, which was also about paperback publishing of the 1950s. It came out in 1983 and I've done a lot more research since then. Over the years I've approached quite a few people about doing a collection of classic covers from that era but without much success; even when I've found someone interested in doing it there have been various problems and nothing was ever done. Inevitably, I've lists and bibliographies and indexes to all these old publishers... maybe that's something I should be thinking about for Bear Alley. I'm working on a collection of essays on crime fiction at the moment that will include some about old fifties publishing.
Tell us about your online news page. It seems to be called Bear Alley, what does that mean?
- Bear Alley is a real place. It's in London and is a little alleyway off Farringdon Road, which was the old home of Fleetway House. Bear Alley was to one side of the building and you had to go into Bear Alley to reach the old storage rooms where they kept all the records and bound volumes of magazines they'd published. As I've spent years trying to reconstruct all those old records, when I started publishing little bits of research on the web, that seemed like the obvious name - to me, anyway. I like exploring all the little alleyways that you can stumble into when you do research, so it has a certain metaphorical meaning, too. And it's a little obscure, which means that people ask about it and remember it.
It worries me that boys today seem to have little interest in comics, which in turn might lead to a generation of men that doesnīt care too much about reading at all. What is your take on the current situation and is this something that our governments should be thinking about?
- Part of the problem - certainly here in the UK - is that there are so few comics aimed at children over the age of ten. Whether you want to read comics or not, there just aren't any to be found in the newsagents in the way that there used to be. The only comics available are American reprints, like Spiderman and Batman, and 2000AD; if that's not what you want to read, there just aren't any comics widely available. There are quite a few specialist comic shops - and there are some very good ones in the UK - where you can find a wider variety of material, although most of it is American since British shops are supplied in the same way as American comic shops. Some shops source material from Europe as well but the range is usually selective. But I don't mean that to sound as if there is nothing good about the comics market. Some publishers have published some very successful graphic novels. Jonathan Cape published "Alice in Sunderland" by Bryan Talbot and "Tamara Drewe" by Posy Simmonds in 2007 and both have been very successful. Alan Grant & Cam Kennedy produced an adaptation of "Kidnapped" as part of Edinburgh's One Book campaign last year and that was also a huge success. There's also a thriving small press in the UK, so there are comics out there for every taste if you know where to look. Harry Potter has probably done more for literacy in the UK as every government initiative to try and get children to read. I learned to read early because my dad and my gran, who lived just up the road from where I grew up, were always reading and always had books laying around. My parents and grandparents were from that generation before television really became popular, so reading was how they got their entertainment. Nowadays, most young children are being raised by parents whose main form of entertainment was television, so they're not growing up in an environment surrounded by books. As I said earlier, comics in the UK really began to take a beating in the 1970s and 1980s, so it's likely that a lot of young parents didn't read comics when they were growing up. Have comics had their day? No, I don't think so. There has always been a readership for work that combines text and visuals. For instance, every newspaper used to run comic strips - many still do but they're not considered important and are given less prominence nowadays. But that kind of three/four panel strip has become hugely popular online. So many kids are still reading comics - it's where you read them that has changed. I'm not sure that any publisher would risk putting out the kind of anthology comic that Britain was famous for in years past - where you had a dozen or so 2- or 3-page strips each week - but maybe the new Harry Potter generation will embrace the longer, complete narratives offered by graphic novels.
I always thought that the small sized comics was a perfect introduction to reading, cheap, great covers, easy to storage in large numbers. And these days you could add that the size makes them invironmentally friendly as well. Might we still see a return to the format that Commando now battles on with bravely or is this a pipedream?
- I always liked the pocket library format because they were stories with a beginning, middle and end - long enough to have some depth (well, some of them did) and a good plot (ditto) but short enough to read during lunchbreak at school. If you think about it, manga stories that sell so well nowadays are like fat pocket libraries, so it's still a format that sells. I don't know whether manga has taken off in Sweden, but it's very popular amongst teenage girls in the UK. The only problem I can see is the risk factor: the only people who could afford to do this are the publishers who still own the copyrights on the material (IPC, Egmont, D.C. Thomson). I say this because you would need to put out a range of titles, not just war stories, and I don't think a publisher would take the risk of licensing a wide range of material, pay the costs that would be associated with resizing (and possibly partly redrawing and relettering) the strips and put out titles in what they'd consider an untried format.
Did you know about Where Eagles Dare prior to our first contact?
- Yes I did because I did a search for information on the war libraries when we were compiling the book an stumbled across the site on more than one occasion.
Would you like to add something to this interview?
If people are interested in The War Libraries, they can find more about it and links for where they can buy the book here...
http://bearalley.blogspot.com/2007/09/war-libraries.html
Mike Eriksson (2008-04-03).
