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The GA in Australia
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336 posts in this topic

This is actually interesting. Lifted from John Ryan's "Panel by Panel"

" The newspaper fraternity had hardly recovered from the loss of Smith’s when, in February 1951, Jimmy Bancks repudiated his contract with Associated Newspapers and took his case to the Equity Court. After 20 years as the major attraction in the Sunday Sun, it seemed unthinkable that Ginge would part company with his birthplace. Bancks contended that his £80 per week contract had been breached when the paper had failed-to run Ginger Meggs on the front page of the comic section, as stipulated. For three issues the comic section was published as part of the rotogravure section and, so Associated Newspapers contended, for technical reasons the front page of the comic section was not printed in colour. Ginger Meggs appeared on the third page of the section, in full colour and below the title block Sunday Sun Comics. Even though the comic was published on the front page after Bancks had made a number of protests, the Equity Court ruled that the contract had been breached. At the time of the repudiation, Bancks had signed a contract with his long-term friend, Frank Packer, for the comic to appear in the Sunday Telegraph. Paradoxically, Ginger Meggs’ appearance in the Telegraph on 3 June 1951 was as a double-page centrespread and not on the front page of the comic section. It was an unusual strip as it had Mr and Mrs Meggs discussing their appearance in the new paper and approaching Bancks (who had drawn himself into the strip) about a new dress for Mrs Meggs. Bancks refused. The final panel showed Ginge having been severely battered by Tiger Kelly to prove that while he may have changed papers nothing else had changed. This legal drama did not affect newspapers in other states where Ginger Meggs continued to be published as usual.

The Sunday Sun’s replacement for Ginge was Snowy McGann, drawn by Hottie Lahm. Hardtmuth Lahm was born at Tallinn, Estonia in 1912. His father was a jeweller who lost a small fortune in a financial crash and decided to migrate to Australia. A family friend noticed Lahm’s flair for drawing and soon after he enrolled at the East Sydney Technical College he sold his first cartoon to the Sydney Mail. The payment of two guineas had to last a long time as he did not sell another cartoon for two years. A fellow student who couldn’t get his tongue around Hardtmuth nicknamed him ‘Hotpoint’. The name stuck and Lahm started to sign his work ‘Hotpoint’ and this was inevitably shortened to ‘Hottie’.

  During the Depression, Lahm took whatever freelance work came his way and in 1934 he created two strips for Fatty Finn’s Weekly - Pam and Popsy Penguin and Basso the Bear. When the comic folded in 1935, Lahm hit on the idea of going to the country and doing caricatures in hotel bars at 2s. a time. As fast as he made a few pounds he would, spend it buying drinks for offended customers. Lahm returned to Sydney and in 1937 he commenced a long career of supplying Associated Newspapers with covers, caricatures and cartoons for their various publications. The following year saw the birth of his best-known creation, Snifter. A dog that relieved himself anywhere and on anyone, Snifter was to be a back page feature in Man Magazine for over 30 years and the subject of many cartoon books, including special editions that were published to raise funds for the war effort.

Snowy McGann was an adventure strip with plenty of comedy relief provided by Pistol Packer (a comment on the opposition?), Herman the Strongman, McGonigle and the rest of the troupe that toured the country with Snowy and Bunce’s Circus. With his wide-eyed characters, Lahm’s natural inclination was towards broad humour and slapstick yet he was capable of producing very realistic drawings for sequences that demanded it. This was the case in many of the episodes that were devoted to boxing and in one such sequence he used the former champion boxer, Vic Patrick. Snowy McGann’s only problem was that it suffered from being asked to fill the shoes of Ginger Meggs - and that task was beyond the capacity of any strip likely to be brought forward. The Sunday Sun promoted the strip with various competitions but it was fighting a losing battle as their former trump card was in the hands of their opponents. Snowy McGann finished in 1954."

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Hello everyone. I am a member of an internet group of collectors whose focus is international editions of American comics. You can find us on facebook. https://www.facebook.com/groups/546995245484226/

I am very impressed with your thread and the wonderful amount of information. Obviously finding information about domestic Australian books is very difficult.

 This is the only book I own about the subject. It's hopelessly outdated. Though the cover claims to have information on New Zealand's books, the only info it offers is about the collectors themselves and merely states "we believe they are young and mostly male." ??

I mostly collect the Horwitz editions of early Marvel, Yaffa, the crazy colored Newton comics and any other Australian editions of key American comics. I have been trying in vain to locate early silver age DC books published in "The Hundred" and other similar titles. I have managed to find a few Australian Golden Age Batman issues that are priceless to me. 

I also have a great interest in all of Australia's domestic books. Please feel free to come visit our group and post some of these rare treasures. Thanks

 

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On 2/10/2016 at 12:46 AM, Sqeggs said:
AJD said:
  Sqeggs said:
Probably should add this here -- particularly since I accidentally broke the links to my other post of it. doh!

 

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6e18cf87-6387-4416-bd69-d86e8afc7978_zpsauvuzmby.jpg

 

Great book, and very hard to find. I wondered who won that one. It sold for a lot for an Australian comic. There's only a handful that go for A$2k.

 

Definitely went for more than I had hoped. A book that I not only had never seen, but that I never knew existed. I figured it was now or maybe never.

This is awesome Sqeggs! Do you know other copies besides yours?
Also, forgive my ignorance AJD, but why «Be British and Australian first»? Sounds odd…

Also, Australians were prompted to be sincerely religious… while Americans were allowed to have a "double standard"? :facepalm:

Edited by vaillant
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On 12/17/2017 at 11:15 PM, AJD said:
On 12/16/2017 at 3:38 PM, Sqeggs said:

Won this one recently.

lf_zps493lmcyh.JPG

Ah, dang, I forgot to bid on that one. At least it went to a good home. According to Heritage that is a pre-release proof copy. Can you show us the COA?

With apologies for the delay, here it is.

IMG_1020.jpg

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On 1/15/2018 at 3:56 AM, Sqeggs said:

Picked this one up on eBay a few months ago.  GCD offers the guess that it was printed in 1950, but that can't be correct because it reprints the Stan Lee-Matt Baker story "A Man with a Gun," which first appeared in Frontier Western 5, published in October 1956.

2018-01-14-0001_zpsh5djmetm.JPG

Nice. I really like the colour saturation on those Horwitz published books. Looking at the entry on Ausreprints, they give a date of 1955, which also can't be right. They also give March 1955 and May 1955 for #s 2 and 4 respectively, which also has to be suspect in light of your observation. I don't suppose the Lee/Baker story in Frontier Western could have been a reprint?

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On 1/5/2018 at 6:18 AM, vaillant said:

This is awesome Sqeggs! Do you know other copies besides yours?
Also, forgive my ignorance AJD, but why «Be British and Australian first»? Sounds odd…

As I said earlier in this thread, 1950s Australia had a strong colonial thread running through it. Britain was 'the home country', royal visits were extraordinary events and popular culture was very British - though American influences began in WW2 and were gradually gaining strength. Of course, Australia still remains tied to the British crown, and we still celebrate Australia Day on the day of the landing of the first British fleet (though not without a little controversy).

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3 hours ago, AJD said:

Nice. I really like the colour saturation on those Horwitz published books. Looking at the entry on Ausreprints, they give a date of 1955, which also can't be right. They also give March 1955 and May 1955 for #s 2 and 4 respectively, which also has to be suspect in light of your observation. I don't suppose the Lee/Baker story in Frontier Western could have been a reprint?

It's possible, but I don't see an earlier entry on GCD for a Lee-Baker western with that title and the entry for Frontier Western 5 doesn't indicate that the story is a reprint.  The time frame fits when Baker was doing some work for Atlas.  I don't think he did anything for Atlas before 1955, so if it was a reprint, it would had to have been a story published the previous year. I don't recall Atlas reprinting stories that quickly.  Baker had done western stories earlier when he worked at St. John, but, of course, Stan Lee wouldn't have been the writer on those.  Possible, I suppose, that Atlas might have had a backlog of stories and sold off some of them for publication overseas before they were published in the U.S., but that also seems unlikely to me.

So, most likely this book was published in 1956 or 1957.

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19 hours ago, AJD said:

As I said earlier in this thread, 1950s Australia had a strong colonial thread running through it. Britain was 'the home country', royal visits were extraordinary events and popular culture was very British - though American influences began in WW2 and were gradually gaining strength. Of course, Australia still remains tied to the British crown, and we still celebrate Australia Day on the day of the landing of the first British fleet (though not without a little controversy).

Thanks for the explanation. Regardless of the conflicts, colonialism generated such a plurality of experiences that you are amazed to see how they differently impacted all countries, both the empires and the "colonized" ones.

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2 hours ago, Montezuma said:

I don't normally collect Australian comics, I've got a few Phantoms and some others laying around, but needed this one for my Dizzy Dames Collection. 5a5e3fe210818_DizzyDames3Australian_zpskbihkrp7.jpg.acd7db99c6daaaadd06815a35a52be60.jpg

That's great. I'll grab one if I ever see a copy. (Can't recall having seen any, and apparently there were five issues.)

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25 minutes ago, AJD said:

That's great. I'll grab one if I ever see a copy. (Can't recall having seen any, and apparently there were five issues.)

I've only seen this one and issue 4, that one was on e-bay and went for too high a price for me.

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5 hours ago, Montezuma said:
5 hours ago, AJD said:

That's great. I'll grab one if I ever see a copy. (Can't recall having seen any, and apparently there were five issues.)

I've only seen this one and issue 4, that one was on e-bay and went for too high a price for me.

Even the U.S. copies are pretty tough. 

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On 1/14/2018 at 11:56 AM, Sqeggs said:

Picked this one up on eBay a few months ago.  GCD offers the guess that it was printed in 1950, but that can't be correct because it reprints the Stan Lee-Matt Baker story "A Man with a Gun," which first appeared in Frontier Western 5, published in October 1956.

2018-01-14-0001_zpsh5djmetm.JPG

Daredevil is only 1' shilling and it was probably printed in 1965. 1950 seems way off for this book. Maybe more like 1966?

e4ca5d8ec1f70dae64a290a3573a95e0.jpg

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