Lost Heroine Found and Comic Bits The Place To Find Them!

Although I do read any old boks and annuals/albums I receive before adding them to my already overweighted shelves

The first reason I check is to make sure no pages are missing and that there is no other damage that needs tending to first. Also...I love reading them!

The second reason is to see whether there are any characters I am unfamiliar with. My Vault of the Lost (that sounds cool...but I'm only referring to a section of my brain so...) has a stack of characters that no one else appears to know or care about (until I find them and then the Copy and Paste crew goes to work). There are a good few instances of my stumbling across a character not mentioned anywhere. Forgotten and as soon as I "show and tell" on the blog it is all grabbed and the purloiners start with their lies on how 'they' discovered this "lost gem". They know who they are as they check into CBO daily.

Comic Bits the Journal of British Diamond, Gold and early Silver ages comics as well as Penny Dreadfuls has featured some discoveries in its first two issues and issues 3 and 4 just need editing to make them presentable if I decide to publish them. In future any new discoveries will either be presented in Comic Bits or through a Black Tower publication as I am no longer in the mood for gving everything away after months of hard work.

Which brings us to the announcement I made..two weeks ago? Finding two more forgotten characters -female characters. Well, one turns out to be a slightly altered U.S. reprint that did make their way into some UK comics. At th time they were published (late 1940s) some new artists were trying to develop a more slick American style while working for Gerald Swan. This creates confusion unless you know what to look for.

It took a day but I found the original American comic strip and was able to dismiss it.

The second one, however, was British and was a superheroine (yeah, I wrote "heroine" -live with it). It seems to be a one off strip as I have almost a full collection of the publisher's annuals and even checked some comic issues -nothing. 

Name? Who drew it? Sample art?

Well, if you are really that interested you will need to wait for either Comic Bits or another publication to see the full strip and info.I have been giving away everything on CBO since 1997 and that is without any support to keep the work going so if you are interested then you pay.

Keep those eyes open!

https://www.lulu.com/en/en/shop/terry-hooper/comic-bits-no-1/paperback/product-kjgvzy.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Another Lost Silver Age Heroine Discovered

 

Oh yes. A new book just arrived today and I was expecting more illustrated text stories but instead it is a mix of text and comic sets (strips).

There are two female characters that I have never heard of before and I am going to be writing a post on these in the next week or so (I hope).

Nothing stays lost forever -not even old British characters!

The Mystery of Madame Foretell

 

Glynn Protheroe created Madame Foretell -"Our Fatheaded Fortune Teller" for Gerald Swan and her page was basically a series of head-to-head gags. Pretty one-dimensional and for a long time I just put her aside and went with the original pages. However, I was building up a back story for the character in my mind.

In The Green Skies, Vol. II part 3 we see Madame Foretell appear out of nowhere to warn two characters of the coming danger before a transportation spell pulls her back home to "The Wizardry" in Sussex. There she is met by an old turban-wearing fellow she refers to as "Gally".

"Gally" is in fact a Second Level sorceror whom Fanshawe the Reality Check-Controller calls by the name of Gagamulasha. In fact earlier Gagamulasha revealed that Madame Foretell's first name is Glynnis. Gagamulasha and Glynnis are married (though don't ask me which church or sect).

We learn that Madame Foretell can use "magic" but to what extent we do not know though she is left behind when Gagamulasha leaves for the final confrontation at Arrana Comare (Plain of Tears) where only powerful members of the mystical community join the Reality Check Controllers. What happens after that.....

At some point later in her life Madame Foretell met the sorceror and that is a story for another comic!

But how did she end up for a period as some 'batty' (not all there) fortune-teller? 

It was a question I was developing when a package arrived from Japan. After a lot of bowing and apologising for being unworthy the postman gave me the package. I opened up the envelope to see that Ben Dilworth had already produced some "Young Madame Foretell" strips and I thought "go with it".

So we now see Foretell when she was younger, possibly in th eerly 1930s -that raises other questions since she has obviously not changed since the Swan era (1940s/1950s) and 2021 and that is another story to tell (yes, there is one). It is this younger period that I hope to expand on in future.

Madame Foretell was literally a throw-away gag page and although I do not believe in "re-booting" characters I do believe in filling in their past and what made them into the people they became.

Keep popping by as you never know when something might appear. Looking into the future I can tell you it will not be tomorrow.

Cast Iron Chris ...Non-stick?

 

This character like many others that appeared in Swan comics never had any sort of origin tale (that I know of).  The Iron Boy is weird enough, but more about him another time.

 These were just strips drawn to fill pages for a few shillings by creators who didn’t have the luxury of expanding beyond one page with sometimes nine panels.

To all intents and purposes, Cast Iron Chris is a British superman but without a costume and more in the mold of other characters such as Desperate Dan –one wonders whether that might have been the intention?  John “Jock” McCail seemed to be a mainstay of Gerald Swan’s line of Swan Comics (Ah Wong, Dene Vernon, etc.) and drew some Cast Iron Chris strips. We have no idea whether Chris was a creation of his or not.

This was all “throw-away” entertainment after all and few creators chose to sign their work from choice.  We do know that in Slick Fun No. 22 (1945), McCail depicts Chris getting into a battleships 20 inch guns and falls asleep –he is fired into a German naval vessels and his impact sinks it.

That’s pretty good invulnerability.

But there is more.  In Black Tower Gold (volume 4) I reprinted another Cast Iron Chris strip from the Slick Fun Album, 1950).  

In the opening panel Chris is having a letter “C” tattooed onto his chest…using a pneumatic drill as opposed to a tattooist needle!  He then loses a book down an open manhole cover where there is a gas leak –striking a match to find the book in the dark, Chris is blown hundreds of feet into the air.  He goes through the cockpit floor of an aircraft and jumps back down to earth carrying the pilot.

Now, if that ain’t super human then I have no idea what is!

There is no doubt that this is John McCail's style as seen in TNT Tom and many other strips. Back in 2010 I thought the work was by someone else but why I thought that I have no idea 12 years on!

One can use one’s imagination to work out an “origin” but, honestly, the reader being a youngster, was supposed to just accept it all –a suspension of disbelief as it were. And that’s how it was supposed to be.

I have used Cast Iron Chris over the years and more recently a cameo in Parallel Motions (not yet published due to lack of art scanning equipment -ie an A3 scanner).

But, once again, Ben Dilworth stepped in with some, as usual, unplanned Jo Long and D. H. Wilberton strips. Some I did not feel worked with Chris but as you will see others work well -and no "re-boot"!

As for an origin well, I have one in mind and it will involve none other than--- oh. Wait. That would be a spoiler. Guess you'll have to wait and see then!

(c)2022 J Long, D H Wilberton and Black Tower Comics and Books