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The GA in Australia
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336 posts in this topic

On 1/26/2011 at 2:05 AM, AJD said:

Since 26 January is Australia Day, I thought I'd mark the occasion with some Australian GA comics.

 

Some Aussie comics were reprints of US comics or newspaper strips, although the interiors don't usually match up to the same cover on the US editions. The ones with a 6d (sixpence = 5 c) cover price are cheap in every sense of the word. They have non glossy paper covers and the interiors are mostly b&w, although some of the better sellers like WDC&S had colour pages for a wrap or two. They were also shorter in page length - my Australian WDC&S 31 (below) has 24 pages. The 9d (ninepence = 7.5 c) copies are on slightly better paper and with more colour, and the 1/- (1 shilling = 10c) are often colour throughout, though B&W wasn't unusual in Australian comics right into the 1970s.

 

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of documentation of these, except for an excellent site on Australian Disneys and one on Australian DCs. There's nothing similar for Marvels or any others. Incidentally, I didn't see a Marvel in colour until the late 1970s when import laws changed and it wasn't until the late 80s that I realised that SA Marvels were in colour (or color, as the case may be)! There were reprints of hundreds of US titles. I was at a fair last year and found an Australian reprint of Piracy #3- the first EC reprint that I know of. I have no idea if there are other EC titles. I'd like an Australian Weird Science - but no one I have spoken to knew there were any Aussie ECs, so who knows?

 

There is one book on Australian comics that I can't recommend highly enough for anyone interested in comics outside the US. Called 'Bonzer: Australian comics 1900s - 1990s', about two thirds of the book is GA and it mostly focuses on Australian original characters (Felix the Cat is one) and titles (The Potts, Silver Starr, Supa Dupa Man etc etc). This book has a checklist of original Australian comics (but not reprints) and goes a long way to filling a gap. A lot of long time collectors still get surprised when a collection comes to market and stuff that no one knew about pops up.

 

As for the pre-code covers, I think Australian editions were a bit tamer than some of the more lurid GA ones. These days we're culturally more like the US, but right up to the 70s we were very much an outpost of more conservative Britain. (You can tell by comparing an Australian TV guide from the 60s with one today.) But even with the tamer covers, there were anti-comic drives and laws passed in the states of Victoria (where I grew up) and Queensland. When I get the time, I want to track down some Parliamentary speeches and other anti-comic rants, and I'll add them to this thread.

 

Most of the Australian GA comics aren't common. Comic collecting here has never had the profile it has in America (or maybe even England from what I've seen). There are no comic stores with back issues of that sort, and the most active community of collectors are Disney and Phantom (in production here continuously since 1946 and now up to #1600-odd and commanding big prices for the early issues, $10k+). eBay is the outlet of preference - no CLink, Heritage...

 

As a kid I certainly haunted the local equivalent of Bonnet's, and I never saw most of the comics reproduced in the book, mostly Disney, Phantom, Gold Key and Harvey reprints.

 

I've sometimes thought that it would make a nice retirement project to see what I could find and set up a website. I now wish I'd copied more cover images from Diamond on eBay - Geppi's collection of Australian comics may have been the world's best. You can see the latest ones here. (Some Archies and Tarzans in there that might be of interest to some here.)

 

Anyway, this thread is useless without pictures, as they say in the clasics, so here we go...

I still have all my Aussie FH copies.  One day, I really need to get them to you.

Kaanga1.jpg

Edited by cheetah
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On 6/17/2018 at 9:06 AM, AJD said:

Late 1951 or early 1952, I think. There were three different TV series, with different numbered starts, and the GCD galleries mix them up. The first series ran from #1 to #38 from 1949 to 1952, the second series (of which these are from) started with #10 (!) in 1951, so they overlapped.

That’s odd. Same publisher for both series? ?

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On 6/17/2018 at 11:06 PM, AJD said:

Late 1951 or early 1952, I think. There were three different TV series, with different numbered starts, and the GCD galleries mix them up. The first series ran from #1 to #38 from 1949 to 1952, the second series (of which these are from) started with #10 (!) in 1951, so they overlapped.

32 minutes ago, Sqeggs said:

That’s odd. Same publisher for both series? ?

Yes, for all three the publisher was H. John Edwards.

1949 series

1951 series

1956 series

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14 minutes ago, Sqeggs said:

I wonder what they were thinking in printing overlapping series?  Can't recall another instance of a publisher doing that.

I'm told that sometimes Australian publishers also printed comics for the New Zealand market. That provides a plausible explanation if they were for different markets. That said, if you look at the issues I posted, the issue numbers are "new series 11" and "new series 13" which suggests it was intended to tell the customer that it was a different run. Who knows?

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On 8/4/2018 at 9:20 AM, AJD said:

I'm told that sometimes Australian publishers also printed comics for the New Zealand market. That provides a plausible explanation if they were for different markets. That said, if you look at the issues I posted, the issue numbers are "new series 11" and "new series 13" which suggests it was intended to tell the customer that it was a different run. Who knows?

At first I thought it was weird that a publisher would having competing versions of books with the same hero on the stands at the same time.  But thinking it over, publishers did something at least somewhat similar all the time.  DC with Batman in Detective and in his own book, or DC with Superman in Action and in his own book, and both appearing in World's Finest, among many other instances of GA (and later) heroes showing up in multiple books that were on the stands at more or less the same time.

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15 hours ago, AJD said:

That's a very nice copy Cheetah. Until recently I thought the Jumbos only ran up to #38 or so. Then I found this one:

Jumbo_44.jpg.5693dd8b3eac152dda935dcfe2e52eb1.jpg

I also found a #48 when I went looking online, and updated the GCD listings to reflect that.

Very nice.  I enjoy the covers that were not directly from the Fiction House series.  How many of the Jumbo issues have you found (and the other FH titles, too?  I have the first 10 of Jumbo but nothing after that.

Jumbo1.jpg

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3 minutes ago, cheetah said:

Very nice.  I enjoy the covers that were not directly from the Fiction House series.  How many of the Jumbo issues have you found (and the other FH titles, too?  I have the first 10 of Jumbo but nothing after that.

 

cheetah  ?!?!?!?!?!?!  :whatthe:

(worship)

Are you "back"?

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6 hours ago, cheetah said:

Very nice.  I enjoy the covers that were not directly from the Fiction House series.  How many of the Jumbo issues have you found (and the other FH titles, too?  I have the first 10 of Jumbo but nothing after that.

 

Sounds like an excuse for a group shot! I have precisely none of the first ten Jumbos, but eight higher numbers. here are my Jungles and Jumbos:

1142247329_FHOzjunglegroup.JPG.0a1f22f5b78dcc32976261faf9863482.JPG

And here are the other FH titles. I've bought almost every issue that has come up for sale (at least that I've seen) in the past few years to amass this lot.

837623010_FHOzgroup.thumb.JPG.111ecd3635d1bd1cb6cefbab12230af6.JPG

If you want to see the individual scans, they are all in a gallery I set up:

 

 

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On 8/5/2018 at 9:30 PM, AJD said:

Sounds like an excuse for a group shot! I have precisely none of the first ten Jumbos, but eight higher numbers. here are my Jungles and Jumbos:

1142247329_FHOzjunglegroup.JPG.0a1f22f5b78dcc32976261faf9863482.JPG

And here are the other FH titles. I've bought almost every issue that has come up for sale (at least that I've seen) in the past few years to amass this lot.

837623010_FHOzgroup.thumb.JPG.111ecd3635d1bd1cb6cefbab12230af6.JPG

If you want to see the individual scans, they are all in a gallery I set up:

 

 

How common are these in Australia?  A few years ago, you were just on the cusp of discovering a lot about these.  Do you see multiple copies or are you lucky to just find one?

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12 hours ago, AJD said:

I've been looking pretty hard the past three years. I've seen more than one copy of a few books (Planet 6, Kaanga 25 and Jungle 17 come to mind) but only one copy each of most of them in that time. A few times I've passed on really low grade copies of books I haven't seen again. I know there are a few collections out there - komickazi here on the boards has an amazing set - but they don't surface much.

While I'm here, this Rangers has an Australian-unique cover too.

 

Rangers 5 Australian.jpg

I love that.  I assume these are from Australian artists?  It looks like it should have been a Jumbo cover instead of Firehair.

Jumbo133.jpg

Edited by cheetah
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9 hours ago, cheetah said:

I love that.  I assume these are from Australian artists?  It looks like it should have been a Jumbo cover instead of Firehair.

 

Because the Australian books were typically 28 pages, a single 52 page FH book wouldn't fit, and the local publisher could make up new issues from 'leftovers'. I think there were some locally drawn covers when they did that, but they were also often adapted (and sometimes straight lifts) from interior panels. In this case from the Firehair story that kicks the book off. This is a case where I think the local adaptation improves on the original:

1360329036_Rangers5Australianint2.thumb.jpg.d4f8bd1b5a547b53aac40f7c298bd33e.jpg

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