If ever you needed proof that comic books were, and still are, a global medium, then you need only glance at the contents of most Australian comics published during the 1970s to see that comic book publishing was a truly international business, long before the term 'globalisation' entered our everyday speech.
As we've explored in previous installments, comics from both America and Spain travelled a circuitous path before they appeared between the covers of Australian comic magazines published by such local companies as KG Murray Publishers and Gredown Pty Ltd, particularly during the 1970s.
Yet the recent addition of two British comic books to my collection indicates that the export trade in European comics was already well-established in the immediate postwar era, and resulted in some intriguing exchanges between different nations' comic book publishing industries.
When I first saw this copy of Captain Tornado No.54 displayed above, I initially thought it was some obscure British ‘pirate adventure’ comic from the 1950s. After all, the seal in the top left-hand corner proclaims it is 'Approved - A British Publication'. The publisher is listed as Press Books Ltd, while L. Miller & Son Ltd., a company with long ties to the British comics industry, is named as the distributor.
Yet there was something about the style of the interior artwork which suggested that this comic was not the work of a British illustrator. Also, some of the captions and speech balloons looked as if they had been resized, or edited in some way, which suggested that English was not the original language in which this comic was printed.
Then, tucked away in the corner of a single panel, was the artist's name - Claude Henri. Now that certainly doesn't sound like a traditional English name, does it?
As it turns out, the comic book I was reading was originally called Captaine Tornade, and was the work of a prolific French comics artist, Claude-Henri Juillard, whose career appears to have spanned several decades from the postwar era onwards.
Another intriguing feature about this comic was a small symbol in the bottom left-hand corner of the cover, which featured a masked cowboy's head superimposed over the letter 'Z', with the phrase 'Justice & Loyalty' printed alongside it.
Wait a minute! A masked cowboy? The letter 'Z'? Could this, in fact, be a reference to the original pulp magazine hero known as 'El Zorro'?
Yes, as it turns out, it is. But this was not an American comic strip incarnation of the masked swashbuckler nicknamed 'The Fox' by his enemies. No, this particular Zorro was yet another French comic strip, this time drawn by Andre Oulie, and was the star of the self-titled Zorro (Jeudi-Magazine), which debuted in 1946.
Even more intriguingly, this French version of Zorro also crossed the English Channel, where it was translated and published as a black & white comic book, presumably at some point during the early-to-mid 1950s. My copy of Zorro No.61, while sharing a near-identical format with that of Captain Tornado, lists Mundial Press as the publisher - but L. Miller & Sons are still the same distributor.
Yet both of these comics contain in-house advertisements urging readers to buy "the other Grand Comics in this series", which included Sgt. O'Brien, Robin and Pango - all "on sale at newsagents each month - Price 6D".
As we've explored in previous installments, comics from both America and Spain travelled a circuitous path before they appeared between the covers of Australian comic magazines published by such local companies as KG Murray Publishers and Gredown Pty Ltd, particularly during the 1970s.
Yet the recent addition of two British comic books to my collection indicates that the export trade in European comics was already well-established in the immediate postwar era, and resulted in some intriguing exchanges between different nations' comic book publishing industries.
When I first saw this copy of Captain Tornado No.54 displayed above, I initially thought it was some obscure British ‘pirate adventure’ comic from the 1950s. After all, the seal in the top left-hand corner proclaims it is 'Approved - A British Publication'. The publisher is listed as Press Books Ltd, while L. Miller & Son Ltd., a company with long ties to the British comics industry, is named as the distributor.
Yet there was something about the style of the interior artwork which suggested that this comic was not the work of a British illustrator. Also, some of the captions and speech balloons looked as if they had been resized, or edited in some way, which suggested that English was not the original language in which this comic was printed.
Then, tucked away in the corner of a single panel, was the artist's name - Claude Henri. Now that certainly doesn't sound like a traditional English name, does it?
As it turns out, the comic book I was reading was originally called Captaine Tornade, and was the work of a prolific French comics artist, Claude-Henri Juillard, whose career appears to have spanned several decades from the postwar era onwards.
Another intriguing feature about this comic was a small symbol in the bottom left-hand corner of the cover, which featured a masked cowboy's head superimposed over the letter 'Z', with the phrase 'Justice & Loyalty' printed alongside it.
Wait a minute! A masked cowboy? The letter 'Z'? Could this, in fact, be a reference to the original pulp magazine hero known as 'El Zorro'?
Yes, as it turns out, it is. But this was not an American comic strip incarnation of the masked swashbuckler nicknamed 'The Fox' by his enemies. No, this particular Zorro was yet another French comic strip, this time drawn by Andre Oulie, and was the star of the self-titled Zorro (Jeudi-Magazine), which debuted in 1946.
Even more intriguingly, this French version of Zorro also crossed the English Channel, where it was translated and published as a black & white comic book, presumably at some point during the early-to-mid 1950s. My copy of Zorro No.61, while sharing a near-identical format with that of Captain Tornado, lists Mundial Press as the publisher - but L. Miller & Sons are still the same distributor.
Yet both of these comics contain in-house advertisements urging readers to buy "the other Grand Comics in this series", which included Sgt. O'Brien, Robin and Pango - all "on sale at newsagents each month - Price 6D".
While I've come up empty-handed in my search for references to Sgt. O'Brien, the online biography for Andre Oulie lists him as the creator of a 1947 French comic strip, Robin l'Intrépide - which is presumably the source of the English edition Robin comic book?
And as for Pango, a quick search of eBay UK came up with some cover scans to a British comic, this time listing L. Miller & Son as the publisher on the front cover, called Pango, dating from the mid-1950s. This 'jungle boy' adventure comic is, presumably, another translated French comic, reprinted for the UK market - even though its physical format (title masthead, publisher's logo, etc) differs slightly from that of Zorro or Captain Tornado.
We tend to think that the first stage of 'Cross-Channel' exposure between British and French comics (leaving aside the English translations of Asterix and Tintin) occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, partly as a result of the 'new wave' in adult French comics, such as Metal Hurlant (published in the USA as Heavy Metal).
Yet as these 1950s comic book curios show, English schoolkids were already savouring the pleasures of French 'bande dessine', decades before the 'small press sophisticates' of Thatcher's Britain discovered their first issues of Pilote and the like.
(Presumably, Australian kids growing up in the 1950s got to enjoy these translated French comics as well, as it's highly likely that these titles were exported to Australia during that decade.)
How, and why, such French comic strips as Captaine Tornade, Zorro and Robin l'Intrepide came to be translated for the postwar British comics market, may never be fully explained. But these long forgotten sixpence comics amply demonstrate that comic books were already becoming a truly international medium, even as the dust from World War Two had barely settled.
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