W is for Water on Mars!

As well as the story (previous post) and the strip posted on Moonbase the other week (link in previous post), there was another comic strip appearance for Swift Morgan, in The New Spaceways Comic Annual, with a rather grim ending, and while called the Flying Saucers, the iconic vessels don't put in much of an appearance!

The entire military might of Saturn, drowning! Swift's ship at the start is obviously an early X-Plane (Britain did a lot of the early work too), basically an X-1, while a huge 'pulp' rocket is a bit far from the Johillco-Cherilea one. There is also a Jeep to be seen in several panels and a dimestore 'Space bus' (Dillon-Beck or Ideal maybe?) in evidence.

R is for Red Mist

No, not my forthcoming rant against the entire computer industry, but the first of two Swift Morgan stories from The New Spaceways Comic Annual, and some sources (I haven't checked the dates) name him as Britain's first space hero, which is a bit rough on Well's characters . . . and he surely shares the birthday with Zip O'Daly?

 

Condar ('condor'!), Buck, Dare, Flash, Hardy, Swift, Zip  . . . they were all names of daring do, weren't they!

 

(Image courtesy of Brian Berke)

 

(Image courtesy of Brian Berke)

 

I seem to have lost/deleted the scan of pages 32/33, probably in the whole three new PC's in a fortnight shenanigans, back in Jan'/Feb', but Brain came to the rescue with that one, so many thanks to him.

The only notable space vehicle is a sort of Spacex/Marx crossover having elements of the former's Mobile Moon HQ and the later's refuelling 'space tank'. It's a better story than the 'Hard Dick' one too!

M is for Microsoft are Wankers!

Hotmail-call-me-outlook have blocked my account claiming I've overdrawn my data limit (there is nothing about data-limits in my most recent T&C's upgrade - last autumn), clearly pissed off that I deleted all their cloud stuff on the new laptop they have been trying to get me to sign-up to 'upgrade my account' and 'get the latest premium features', neither of which I have any intention of doing!

Anyway, until I sort it out after the bank-holiday, with a rude letter, I will have to use my mirror account, as they have blocked receiving as well as sending? Something some of you will have to look forward to when you upgrade to Windows11!

So, maverickatlarge[at]Gmail[dot]com - which has a 15GB limit against the 5G Hotmail are blubbing about!

 And check your spam if you were expecting an eMail from me!

Z is for Zip O'Daly!

Apart from further appearances by Swift Morgan, who gets two outings, The New Spaceways Comic Annual also introduces another character, Zip O'Daly, which I suspect is meant to rhyme with O'Maly rather than Daily? And do you get it . . . Zip, Swift? Not sure about Dick Hardy though (first of this sequence of posts), that is more than accidental, I fear!

There's not much of interest in the strip beyond the Johillco/Cherilea ship again, looking more off-pat, then the one with the added wings the other day, while the 'prison ship' looks like two of Marx's clamshells glued together and placed on end!

C is for Clipper-ships - Space Clippers!

Back to the 'Spaceways' annual for a second, and you may have noticed down the bottom left-hand corner of the cover (previous post) what we would call a thumbnail image these days, back then it was probably a miniature-insert, insert-miniature or something!

Again he's turned to toys for his inspiration, and this time we're looking at Tudor Rose for the donor, a push-and-go version is out there, but it may be a knock-off?

Never given an X-number, it really should be considered X-500, being a larger, passenger beast than the X-400 Space Explorer, a sort of fighter-bomber to all the smaller fighter-types! leaving X-600 for the 'big bus' the Atomic Space Ship, and you could allocate X1-10, 15-95 etc . . . to all the little flyers, flitters and Premier's darts and wide-bodies; a neat idea spoilt only by Dimestore Dreams swapping a number a few years ago, Doh!

Turning to the Adventure Annual for a quick look at it's treatment in the Swift Morgan strip, and you can see it's pretty accurate, and I like the idea that when these guys got writers block or a stiff hand (pen and ink can be intense) they would have been able to play with their toy space-stuff while enjoying their coffee or watching the world go-by outside!

 

The push-and-go version has a large box for the mechanism, on the underside, and bigger wheels set further-out, while the artist's got the little cheeks on the sides of the wheel-cowlings down just right, so he had something like the photographed example in front of him.

Clearly marked and probably the best for surviving, being quite a robust toy - except those little fin-tips! Sadly and for reasons I won't bore you with this was only mine for about 24-hours, 15-years ago, and the 'mine' is open to question, but I've regretted letting it - and an X-400 - go, ever since!

X-300 is for Space Cruiser

The sister publication for Ed's Adventure Annual, was The New Spaceways Comic Annual Number 1, a slightly pretentious title as I don't believe there was ever a 'number two'! And, it too pulled heavily from existing toys for it's artwork, mostly hollow-cast, but the Pyro et al Spaceships were also referenced. I believe they were published the same year, 1954, but while The Adventure Annual seems to have run for some time (with title tweaks - Okay, for Boys, the Boys & Girls, &etc.), there was only the one 'Spaceways.

This is the cover of the annual, with the big beast it's lifting-from to the right; The X-300 Space Cruiser and probably my favourite of all the ships in the extended family of 'Dime-Store' sculpts.

 

You can see that the cover art has taken a wing and turned it into a powered tail, Tristar-like, while pulling the tail down to make two wings! The nose has also been sharpened and shortened, I wonder if they used the Combex sharpener!

Mine is missing its wheels, and while they do turn-up on evilBay occasionally, even ragged ones with no nose can cost a pretty penny, so for now I ignore the absence, it still sits 'right' on a flat surface! You can just see the Kleeware mark on this one, on the underside of the left wing - on the right here.

 

My tail-fin is also slightly truncated, the tip was lost long before it was mine, and I just cleaned-it up with a file to match the lower one, but I notice it's cut-short in some of the artwork below, so it must have been a common break/fault, present on the artist's bench-model too!

The Covers of The Adventure Annual use the same ship, but with no real changes, grounded on the left with a bunch of distinctly Johillco/Cherilea figures, and flying in formation with an X-100 Space Scout through some bloody dangerous manoeuvres courtesy of an X-200 Space Ranger!. Artist seems to be Denis McLouchlin

 

I should add that all these connections were first made in Plastic Warrior magazine a decade or two ago, and these [above] crops can be seen in context, via Moonbase Central here, thanks to Ed Berg's scans of the 'Swift Morgan' strip.

An older shot of mine, the line between the portholes isn't a crack, but rather the boundary line between two regions of the resin, flowing into the mould from different directions, and meeting, just as they begin to cool-off, producing a kiss rather than fully-melting into each other, the mark is called a weld-line or a knit-line, and it is commonest, or more-commonly found with metallic materials, due to the inclusions in the polymer making moulding harder to get just right.

Couple of hours later - I forgot the image inside the cover! Complete with another Johillco/Cherilea figure and the hollow-cast 'vending machine' robot!

Later Still - In the 1950's, future spaceships were going to be very easy to control!

In the early hours - Brian Berke sent his scan of the bookplate from 'Spaceways, which I had failed to scan (because it had been filled-in I think), which was daft as I could have used it to illustrate a point on the bookplate posts, at Easter - Doh! But there's the converted Cruiser again!

R is for a Return to Premier's Pocket Rockets

Well, it's been four months and I can honestly say Windows 11 is the worst version since Vista, or even Windows 98. I used to enjoy 'computing', now it's become a necessary chore! Anyhoo's I mentioned the other day we’d return to these in a future post, this is the future, or it was until you read it, so let's go!

This is how they arrived, and it was not a pretty sight, thick layer/s of stab-and-hope (with a 'craft' brush) paint, which would have looked quite fetching if done properly! The gloss black and matt red are OK, in that they are quite flat coats, but the yellow is as thick as cheese and cracked like a lakebed in a drought?

While this is mid-way through the thorough cleaning I gave them, at this point they have just been rinsed after washing, after an hour or so in TFR (Traffic Film Remover - concentrated ammonia), after an overnight dip in 50% bleach. The red is clinging to the contact-line with the yellow, while the yellow isn't budging, one iota!

I repeated the process over the next 24-odd hours, and maybe got them a bit cleaner, but that yellow 'aint going nowhere, and while because it's definitely a different type of paint, I was wondering if it might be factory-applied, the fact is I can't find other examples, and the red is still clinging to the contact-line so may go under it, which means, I guess, the painter used some powerful, pre-health & safety era, probably lead-based shit they found in their dad's tractor shed . . . 1950's Claas-yellow Rustoleum anyone?

I do have another hard plastic one somewhere in blue and a couple of polyethylene jobbies, I think, but since Ed Berg went through them all, I know I have a ways to go, so these will stay like this for a while, and at some point I'll have to give them a new coat with an airbrush or aerosol, just to neaten them up a bit! At least the wheels are there on the bigger one.

Ed gave them a nomenclature which makes sense, so I'll adopt it, and he calls the little-one a 3" Wide Body - version 1 while the larger model is a 5" Dart - version 6, I think? And they are all described here with links to the individual posts.

A is for Adventure Story for Boys

Actually, it should be 'L is for Lazy Post'! With Ed sending his scan's to Moonbase I need to clear some of my scans, before they post them and I end-up waiting a few years until the coast is clear, if you know what I mean!

 

So this is a story from Adventure Stories for Boys, nineteen fifty-something. I think it was the one with a helicopter on the cover, but it was in such a state that after I'd scanned the space stuff a year or so ago, it went in the recycling pile.

 

Notable for the use of a rocket which looks like the Hilco/Cherilea cast-lead one, and a ring/wheel space-station from central casting!

Annual's fly-leaf.

I think the artist might be Tony Bradman?

The metal model courtesy of the late Martin Hills, the book illustrator has added four fins and called it a 'Thunderbird', years before anyone had heard of Gerry Anderson; there's nothing new under the sun!

U is for Updates

 

I've added the old Timpo hollow-cast pages from the trade catalogue to the Khaki Infantry page, as an addendum at the bottom of that page, the late Dave Scrivener did send a couple to me at the time the page was being set-up, they will stay where they are.

I also added some bits to the Airfix Astronauts page over Christmas, but never got round to mentioning it, so some of you may have found them already!

Y is for Yucky!

On a couple of levels by the time you've read it, but these things happen! I saw these in The Works the other day and they were cheap . . . 'So you don't have to'! But it's a fun thing which I vaguely remember from my childhood, so not a new design, and commonly known as water-filled snakes.

There were only three left and the other two had four and five Dino's respectively, so I grabbed the one with eight! The first yucky thing is just that they are rather yucky-feeling, the second yucky thing is that Reddit was explaining the other day some men like to place their, ahem . . . 'gentleman' in the inner void and . . . err . . . experiment vigorously.

 

Now I can't imagine quite how the mechanics of all that work, as I managed to drop it about four times before I got it to the till, barely got it into the house, and dropped it on the kitchen floor several more times, before I stabbed it with my steely-knife! It literally leaps out of your hand, and gripping it more tightly only accelerates it away! But, Reddit said . . . !

 

Now I'd presume there's some chemicals in there, to stop rot/algae/discolouring &etc, but it didn't smell of bleach, so presumably something safe (kids, toys); surgical alcohol or home-brew cleaner/finning gel? Lucky for the onanists, I think, as accidents will happen! Ewue!

 

But, to the contents; I suspect these are the same sculpts/tools as those micro-erasers we looked at from several brands, both sides of the pond, with Brian Berke's help, a year or two ago, but in this case they are a shiny silicon-rubber, rather than the crumbly, eraser-rubber of the previous examples, but they are in storage with everything else at the moment, so I can't check fully.

Scaled with my thumb and a 'gape-mouth Chinasaur', you can see they are very small, but as hinted at above, probably the same size as the erasers, and within the eight I had four poses and four colours, there will likely be more, as we found more among the pencil rubbers?

And I bet you weren't expecting any of that on a Friday afternoon!