The Eagle

[Pinwig]

It's a big week for Eagle 40 years ago this week, and IPC in general. After a year and a half of publication Eagle switches to full newsprint art and drops the photo stories. This means the page count goes up by 4 and the number of stories each issue from seven to nine. It also comes with a free spud gun! 

Having followed the comic's story weekly since issue 1, I'm more than ready for this now. The photo stories had had their day by this point I think; they're all pretty rubbish and would be much more dynamic with comic art. Photo stories work in girl's romance papers because the backdrops are just present day suburbia; when the Eagle tries to show you Wild West America of the 1880s or a Nazi bunker in WW2 it's much harder to make it believable. The last Manix strip, about an android secret agent, was ridiculous. A mad professor injects unwitting victims with a serum he thinks will make them into super humans, but instead it turns them into deformed monsters. Except this is actually several bit part extras wearing 'horror' masks bought from the local joke shop. For the first few issues I genuinely thought they were wearing rubber masks to disguise their identities, until I realised, no, this is them being super deformed. 

Now it's a proper drawn comic I'm quite excited about what's to come. This week we have:

Dan Dare, still written by Mills and drawn by Ian Kennedy
Manix switches from photo to drawn and looks immensely better for it (jumping location from the back streets of London to central America)
The Fists of Danny Pike, a new boxing themed strip drawn by John Burns
Doomlord starts his fourth story, written by Alan Grant and drawn by Heinzl.
The Hand continues in black and white, having been colour art until now (and probably the worst thing I've ever read by Gerry Finley-Day)
The Amstor Computer is a new strip by Barrie Tomlinson and drawn by Ortiz, a precursor to Scream's Max (13th Floor) in which readers can program the computer weekly to tell a sinister tale by sending in their chosen code number. 
Walk or Die, the story of British schoolchildren lost in the Canadian wilds after a plane crash now looks the part instead of pretending some dodgy bit of scrub outside Watford is actually the Rockies. 
Crowe Street Comp, inexplicably popular rip off of Grange Hill continues.
One-Eyed Jack, by Wagner and John Cooper continues as the filler reprint strip. 

This fortnight is an important point for IPC's comics. There's definitely an air of readership grabbing going on. Eagle's relaunch is looking to get them back up to the readership levels of 2000AD - but tooth wasn't sitting pretty. While Eagle was giving away spud guns, 2000AD gave away a large Ron Smith poster this week and produced it's own jumping on point issue to compete. It's an absolute belter:

Dredd begins The Graveyard Shift (Wagner/Smith)
Slaine gets his first awesome McMahon issue 
Nemesis Book 3 starts with O'Neill drawing the fight between Chira and Magna
Strontium Dog returns after a long break with Grant/Ezquerra on The Moses Incident
Rogue Trooper begins From Hell to Eternity featuring Venus Bluegenes from Finley-Day/Ewins

That is absolute top tier stuff and possibly the best issue of the comic so far. 

In retaliation, in two weeks Battle becomes Battle Action Force and relaunches with its new Action Force strips. 

What a time Autumn '83 was to be a comic reader! 

[Philip Ayres]

Had that 2000ad

While Strontium dog was away Carlos had been doing his first big major Dredd run from the start of Apocalypse War to the end of Requiem for a Heavyweight (with the likes of Ron Smith & Gibson also doing issues) Real, real GOLD in that era. And Graveyard Shift is SUPERB one of the best mid length Dredds ever

[Pinwig]

There's a fascinating graph in the Hibernia Battle book that shows how Battle's readership had dropped from 121k issues a week in the second half of 1979 to just 71k in the first half of 1983. When the Action Force strips kick in, the readership rises back up to 87k by the first half of 1985 and everything looks rosy, but then Hasbro begin to repackage GI Joe figures as Action Force and the comic alters the characters to match. Baron Ironblood et al bow out and boom, the readership sinks again until the comic gets merged with Eagle in 1988.

[Philip Ayres]

The 85 Action Force reboot went wrong but I've never been 100% clear how that happened. Those figures suggest a strong attachment to the 83/4 status quo & characters played a part

[Philip Ayres]

Do the Graphs show what 2000ad's & Eagle's numbers did and the impact Eagle's launch had on both?

[Pinwig]

No, it's just for Battle unfortunately. You'd get an approximation by trawling the web for comic sales figures for the 80s. There are bits here and there.

[Pinwig]

Nothing very conclusive from looking at what Down the Tubes has collated, but Hibernia's Battle book has the full range covered so it must still exist for all IPC's titles somewhere:

[Pinwig]

One of the things I love about reading old early 80s comics is coming across adverts for things I've long since forgotten. Sept 83, Sheddies were doing tie-in Superman III wipe clean game cards. Remember those? As soon as I saw the advert I got a flood of memories of them. Funny how stuff stays in your memory but stays locked until you stumble across a key.

cerealoffers.com/Cereal_Partners/Shreddies/1980s/1980-85/Superman_III_Action_Replay_Gam/superman_iii_action_replay_game.html

[blueshift]

Sept 17, 2023 21:18:31 GMT Pinwig said:

One of the things I love about reading old early 80s comics is coming across adverts for things I've long since forgotten. Sept 83, Sheddies were doing tie-in Superman III wipe clean game cards. Remember those? As soon as I saw the advert I got a flood of memories of them. Funny how stuff stays in your memory but stays locked until you stumble across a key.

cerealoffers.com/Cereal_Partners/Shreddies/1980s/1980-85/Superman_III_Action_Replay_Gam/superman_iii_action_replay_game.html

That Tenpin Striker game is WILD

[The Doctor]

It's very complex!!!

-Ralph

[Pinwig]

What I love about that is that it's a ten pin bowling game in which you're supposed to miss the pins. Genius!

[Pinwig]

40 years ago this week, the first Dan Dare story reached 'The End' after 83 issues, 65 of which were drawn by Ian Kennedy. Oliver Frey takes over art for issue 84, but as the credit box vanishes from the strip, I have no idea if it was still written by Pat Mills.

[The Doctor]

I remain aggrieved that reprint volumes of New Eagle Dare do not exist. Sure, the memory may cheat but I would like to see it again.

Much of New Eagle being lost to time saddens me. Would love Rebellion to get the rights.

-Ralph

[Pinwig]

40 years ago this week the Eagle reached 100 issues, and celebrated by introducing two new stories. NEWS TEAM carries the exciting tagline "They were the roughest, toughest news gathering team ever assembled!" and features the intrepid crew in an all out gun battle with terrorists in a bid to secure an interview with a rebel leader. As if that wasn't enough excitement, THE BROTHERS features Peter Trent and his twin brother Bob, who is hideously disfigured and turned into a Hulk-like primitive after being involved in a car crash with a lorry carrying nuclear waste.

No, really.

[The Doctor]

Could happen to anyone.

-Ralph

[Pinwig]

It's one heck of a series set up in three pages!

I'm surprised to learn that TV news reporters carry hand grenades.

[Pinwig]

Being that Eagle started in the era of strips having creator credits, it's easy to identify most, but it really bugs me that the flagship strip, Dan Dare, seems to deliberately not have a credits box on it. I'd love to know why.

The first thirty or so parts are credited, Pat Mills wrote the first arc and Gerry Embleton drew it, followed by Ian Kennedy. When that story wrapped there was a ten part story that was rubbish, definitely not Mills, uncredited, drawn uncredited but clearly Oliver Frey. That was followed by a much better story in the style of the Mills one but it's anyone's guess who wrote it. It's the art that gets me though. Kennedy started it, the early issues have his usual signature on the splash pages, but then that disappears and the art looks *almost* like Kennedy but isn't quite right, like someone is aping his style. The layouts are very Kennedy, but the detail in facial features is not quite there. It looks to me like Kennedy is doing rough layouts for the pages but someone else is drawing them. I'd love to know what was actually going on there and who was writing it.

There was a Thrillcast recently where an artist was talking about being apprenticed to a more established one in the 80s and learned his style. I wonder if that happened to Kennedy too.

[Pinwig]

40 years ago this week something rather amazing was going on in the pages of Eagle, Battle and Tiger - a free Palitoy Action Force figure. Not a cheap imitation or knock off, an actual figure from the toy line. Possibly the finest free gift ever? Pity my copy doesn't have it...



Slightly optimistic eBay auction for the Battle issue with gift:

www.ebay.co.uk/itm/266802942328

[The Doctor]

Incredible*. 19 different figures!

-Ralph

*in relation to the original freebie and the asking price on Ebay!

[Pinwig]

Imagine if TFUK had given away a free Minibot... or even a decoy!

[The Doctor]

I would have lost my mind.

-Ralph

[Pinwig]

Phil will be able to tell us which part number the long running Eagle strip Crowe Street Comp reached this week, 40 years ago.

[Pinwig]

Having vanished from newsagents at the start of July when issue 15 went off sale, Scream merged with Eagle 40 years ago this week. Monster and Thirteenth Floor made the shift, along with editor Ghastly McNasty who muscled his way onto the editorial page.

This left Eagle in a stronger position storywise, with Dan Dare leading and Doomlord starting his sixth tale as a hook for new Scream readers. The issue also featured the Fists of Danny Pike, The Amstor Computer, Manix and the now somewhat redundant 'The Brothers', which was really a watered down Monster. This meant that last week Eagle wrapped up Bloodfang, an awful dialogue-free tale about a dinosaur that lasted a scant 12 parts, and also Alan Hebden's News Team, which ended shockingly with the death of a major character.

[Pinwig]

It just occurred to me to look and see just how many of the strips in Eagle at this point were being written by the Alan Grant / John Wagner combo under all their pseudonyms. Six out of nine strips this week are theirs, yet John Wagner's own name doesn't appear anywhere in the comic!

Doomlord, Danny Pike, Bloodfang, Thirteenth Floor, One-Eyed Jack and Monster are all from them, while Scott Goodall had just taken over Manix from Wagner, The Amstor Computer was a Future Shock style anthology with different writers every week and Dare was coming to the end of a Barrie Tomlinson run and about to be taken over by Tom Tully. That's a tremendous weekly output given they were also working on 2000AD and others (even accepting One-Eyed Jack is a reprint).

[Andy Turnbull]

Oh yes the T.B. Grover/F.Martin Candor partnership was prolific and surprising in that the vast majority of work they produced was good quality.

[Pinwig]

40 years ago this week the Robo Machines strip debuted in Eagle after a three-week build up of publicity pages heralding their arrival. Notably, there is a full page advert for Transformers on the page before, the colour from which bleeds through giving the first black and white Robo Machines page an orange Cybertronian glow.

Eagle at this point is stronger than it's ever been. Dan Dare tangles with the Mekon, Doomlord is busy defending the Earth from the Populators of Pollux, Danny Pike is off to New Orleans to watch his next opponent fight, Max unwittingly causes the death of a man trying to end his thirteenth floor, Terry gets upset by journalists and attacks them in Monster, Bloodfang menaces the humans trying to set up home in the past, and One-Eyed Jack continues in his mission to find the traitor selling out the MIA to the Army of Revolutionaries.

[The Doctor]

I remember it all being briliant...40 year ago.

*weeps*

So much of this stuff deserves reprints rather than being lost to time.

-Ralph

[Pinwig]

It's really been helped by the two Scream strips; it allowed the chaff to be retired and has upped the target age slightly to something closer to 2000AD. Easily seen in the way Monster replaced The Brothers, which is essentially the same story but The Brothers is much softer round the edges.

[Fortmax2020]

Just wait until the MANTA Force stip starts!