A3 COMIC CAPERS

Raging comics nerd and part-time George Clooney bottom stand-in Mark Campbell looks at one of the classier comics of yesteryear…

Confession: I was late to the Beezer party. Back in the mid 70s, I was more keen on buying exciting new comics like Monster Fun (featured in #17 of this ‘ere magazine), Krazy Comic (#22) or Cheeky Weekly (#27). Old ones like The Beano, The Dandy or Buster were the sort of things your parents might’ve read when they were young. Back then, newsagents’ shelves groaned with the weight of kids’ humour comics. It was tough to know which one to plump for. But when you saw that the issue number was in the thousands, it didn’t take Magnus Pike to work out they’d been around for a long time. So it wasn’t until the late 1970s that I decided to pick up a copy of The Beezer. There was something of the ‘Elder Statesman’ about this publication. Every issue looked and felt the same. Same cover format, same order of long-running characters, week in, week out. It felt safe. Too safe, perhaps. But on the other hand, it offered an intriguing corollary to the anarchic fly-by-night fare I’d usually buy. And, despite the old saying, size was everything. Like The Topper (a comic I also very much enjoy), The Beezer was A3. Which was huge. Twice the size of all the other comics on the shelves. It was like the Financial Times of the comics world. It would have been folded in half to fit on the newsagent’s shelf, which rather negated the point, but when you opened it up to read it, it sort of felt rather grand. Like you were reading something for adults. But that’s an article for another issue— the history of Razzle, perhaps? (We’d have to put Infinity on the top shelf of Smiths!—Ed)