Achtung Alonso!

As in Matias Alonso. Having just received the latest list of Commando comics from the ever pro-active team, located in their sand bagged bunker in deepest Dundee, I am pleased to report that their inspired decision to reprint their earliest stories is delivering up some real classics, which have up until now been locked away in the vaults of DC Thomson for over fifty years.

Here's the cover of their most recent reprint of these golden age stories and as you can see by the Ken Barr cover, this one promises action and suspense aplenty. The contents really live up to the brooding dynamism of Barr's cover art. In fact if anything, the artwork actually eclipses Barr's painting in terms of sheer over the top, jaw clenching, all out manic in-your-face seismic action drawing. The only artist that was capable of outdoing Barr in this department was Matias Alonso and as mentioned in previous postings Alonso's primary influence was Burne Hogarth and not that of Milton Caniff, which so many of his colleagues appeared to be in thrall to.

Alonso's work has been conspicuous by it's absence from Commando's recent reprint roster save for the relatively anodyne Johnny the Jinx and D Day Plus, which isn't 100% Alonso as it features Luis Bermejo's pencils, which when combined with Alonso's lush and inventive inking made for one of the finest jobs either of these two artists produced for Commando.

However both of these stories lack the sheer visceral fury of Alonso's earlier Commando output, his work made even Hogarth's beetling brow'd, muscle tensed and mascara rimmed Tarzan look fairly supine. Night Raider, then is a pleasant surprise and distinguished not just by the fact that it is Alonso's debut story for the title but also by the fact that there are women in the story, one of whom is a very fetching French resistance fighter, so go over to Commando's website and check out the new releases and if you have an iPad you can start reading it now, if you want to subscribe.

OK that's it for the moment and back to working on issue 2 of Illustrators. More on this shortly...

Here in the meantime is the rest of the current crop of Commandos courtesy of Commando editor Calum Laird, who is doing such an incredible job with this title:

Commando No 4499

Hunting Mussolini

The Convict Commandos — Jelly Jakes, Titch Mooney, Smiler Dawson — and their commander Guy Tenby had been given another job. This time they were to hunt down Mussolini in his hide-out. Easier said than done when they weren’t the only ones doing the same.
   Guy, as usual, had a plan…but it wasn’t supposed to include Jelly hanging from the undercarriage of an airborne Fieseler Storch!

Story: Alan Hebden
Art: Manuel Benet
Cover: Manuel Benet



Commando No 4500

Lightning Strike

The war in the Far East was almost over. Japan’s armed forces had been ground down and the country was on its knees. The Japanese hadn’t given in though, they hoped super-fighters like the Kyushu Shinden — Magnificent Lightning — could stem the flow of US bombers ravaging their country.
   They could never have guessed that the Shinden’s finest moment would come protecting the very enemies it had been designed to destroy.

Story: Alan Hebden
Art: John Ridgway
Cover: John Ridgway



Commando No 4505

Night Raider

Out of the night sky he came – a man with no mercy in his heart and a blazing tommy-gun in his hands, whose one ambition was to wreak destruction on all things Nazi. He became the Scarlet Pimpernel of German-occupied Europe.


Introduction by Calum Laird, Commando Editor

Women in Commando are a rare sighting but, like buses, when they do turn up there’s more than one. I counted at least three in here, and a bit of romance.
   Don’t think that it means that Stainton’s story isn’t an all guns blazing story as it is, running from the beaches of Dunkirk to a full-on Commando raid in France, and with barely time to reload along the way. His touch means that the espionage, beautifully pointed up by Ken Barr’s dramatic night drop cover, manages to be action-packed, not tension-filled.
   Add to that Alonso’s 100mph inside art and you have a solid gold winner. Makes you proud to be part of the Commando Team.

Night Raider originally Commando No35 (April 1962)

Story: Stainton
Art: Alonso
Cover: Ken Barr


Commando No 4502

Battle Flag

The Second Battalion, Daleshire Light Infantry, had something to be proud of — their very own “battle flag”, a standard given to them after their heroic triumph over Napoleon’s finest troops. Carried into action, it would inspire the men to further brave deeds.
   So when one young officer’s courage failed him and the flag was captured, the thought of it in enemy hands made him vow to keep it safe — even after his death!


Introduction by Scott Montgomery, Commando Deputy Editor

Gritty action is undoubtedly what Commando does best. However, over the decades there have also been comedies, capers, historical epics, science-fiction and…ghost stories. Battle Flag is a good example of the latter. After a detailed framing sequence, veteran writer Cyril Walker cleverly weaves a tale with an eerie thread that runs throughout but does not overwhelm the action and adventure. Interestingly, the working title for this story was “The Flintshire Phantom”. That’s a good one and, had it been pitched today, I’m sure that it would have been used! Enjoy.   

Battle Flag, originally Commando No 2063 (February 1987) Commando 4502

Story: Cyril G. Walker
Art: Cecil Rigby
Cover: Jeff Bevan

Once Upon A Time In A Land Faraway...

there lived a  storyteller who brought to life his fantastic tales with the aid of the world's greatest artists, writers and musicians. They all lived together in the storyteller's Magic Kingdom located in Burbank California, where with the aid of devices that projected their fantasies all around the world they devised their entertainments.

However, not all the work that occurred in the Magic Kingdom was free from tribulation and sometimes the dark forces beyond its gilded walls threatened it's very existence. Wars and labor disputes as well as hostile takeovers had created deep divisions that threw a shadow across otherwise sunlit corridors. But despite these troubles the dwellers inside the Magic Kingdom were contented in their work as they continually strove to ensure that their realizations of the storyteller's dreams matched his expectations.

In their constant strive to fulfill this remit, no amount of effort was too much. New and ever more potent means of delivering the storyteller's dreams to audiences far and wide were explored and as a consequence more and more of the storyteller's accumulated gold was gambled in the making of these stories.

And here dear reader (assuming you are still with us) is just such an example of this phenomenon, in 1959 Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty was released having had a huge production budget lavished on it, with extensive use of the Disney Studio's multiplane camera, six channel stereophonic sound and wide angle Technirama pumping up the budget to $6,000,000, making the film the biggest financial gamble the studio had taken since recovering from the near wipe-out that the War had inflicted on their export markets nearly twenty years earlier.

Well if you didn't already know, you have probably guessed, the film's reception at the box office wasn't the ringing endorsement the Studio were hoping for and the Company posted it's first loss for over a decade in it's 1959-60 report to it's shareholders. As a consequence the axe was taken to the animation department and huge layoffs resulted but ironically one of the facilitators of the rise of the Disney studio and accessory to one of the greatest betrayals of King Mouse was left in place to bring his considerable technical expertise to helping the studio work within a hair shirt budget. Ub Iwerks, first name pronounced You - Bee, had worked with Disney when they were both teenagers at a commercial art studio in Kansas City. While Iwerks was a highly talented artist with an inventive and inquiring mind, he was shy and introverted. Disney in contrast, whilst never possessing the artistic talents of Iwerks was a visionary and a natural businessman with the ability to sell himself and his ideas and with Disney's innate ability to spot a good opportunity when he saw one,  it it wasn't long before he and Iwerks still on the cusp of their twenties had formed their own company producing a line of films entitled Laugh-O-Grams. When that company went belly up Iwerks returned to the Kansas City Film Ad Company whilst Disney with typical enterprise took himself off to California to set up a new venture which he was convinced would seal his fortune.

It wasn't long before Disney was writing to Iwerks to offer him a job at the newly formed Disney Brothers Studio (Walt's brother Roy, who had a good head for figures and was a tempering influence on some of Walt's more extravagant schemes had also moved to California to work as the studio's accountant). The somewhat ironically titled Oswald the Luck Rabbit was the first hit that the studio had, but the joy was short lived when the character and most of Disney's animators were stolen from them by their distributor. Disney took the distributor to court but lost. Iwerks was one of the few who remained loyal to Disney. It was therefore really devastating when a few years later another unprincipled distributor attempted a similar heist with Disney's even more successful Mickey Mouse. Disney hung onto the character whose copyright ownership was beyond dispute but this time Iwerks left (with most of Disney's key animators) disillusioned with the endless toil and studio tensions and convinced that he could make a better living for himself running his own studio.

Several years and several animated flops later Iwrks returned to work with Disney and this time he devoted himself to pioneering new visual effects including a way of melding film and drawing together in such films as Song of the South and more spectacularly Mary Poppins. But the innovation he created which was to really slash their production costs and enable the studio to continue producing animated feature length films was the xerographic process for cel animation, which was first presented to cinema audiences with the release in 1961 of 101 Dalmations.

By the time that film came out the book that I am sharing with you today had been sitting on the shelf of my local bookshop, come newsagent, come stationer for about three years. Like the film it celebrated the Giant Golden Book of Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty had overblown it's budget and much to the supposed chagrin of King's Stationers, located in St Leonards on Sea, Sussex, it's 25 shilling price tag was just too steep for the average shopper. So there it languished next to it's other over priced for it's locality, neighbor Tales of the Greeks and Trojans. Both handsome books, both quietly pining for a good home.

Well, eventually (albeit several years later) I weakened and fortified with funds from a paper round I treated myself to this book, which I have never seen anywhere else (try Googling for it to see what I mean).

So here's your opportunity to savor one of the most exquisite Disney children's books ever published, in an era when a book like this could appear with one of stylist Eyvind Earle's superb artworks as cover and endpapers with more of his illustrations accompanying stills and character sketches from this commercially flawed but nonetheless beautiful film.

Down in the Dungeons - The Legend of Grimrock Awaits

As I mentioned on my previous posting, some of the work currently occupying my energies is involved with a team of games developers and as a consequence my games antenna is in a much more alert mode than is usually the case.

So imagine my delight when I stumbled over the work of a team of Finnish games developers, who like Dave Morris (author of the graphic epic Mirabilis and soon to be arriving on your iPad Frankenstein Interactive Book) and your blogmeister have happy memories of a ground breaking game which went under the title of Dungeon Master and changed the face of computer gaming when it first appeared in 1986.

The developers working under the title of Almost Human Games, first cooked up what was to become The Legend of Grimrock in April 2011 as a weekend's moment of catharsis, during a particularly hectic period for the four guys who were busily chasing deadlines working on other companies games. They thought about the first person RPG games such as Eye of the Beholder and the aforementioned Dungeon Master they had enjoyed so much as children and just for the fun of it knocked out this little trial piece.



Three months later and with the pressure of commissioned work easing off a bit, they had a look at what they had wrought and thought a bit more seriously about actually making a game imbued with the spirit and atmosphere of Dungeon Master but with the benefits of all the developments and refinements the games industry has achieved in the intervening quarter century.

Like all small concerns, they had to work within a very tight budget, financing themselves meant setting parameters for the way the game would unfold and also for the amount of outside help they could pull in. The first constraint actually suited the format of the game perfectly, so this is no Skyrim affair where you can wander over an endless landscape, the landscape of Grimrock is the dungeons and the feeling of claustrophobia it engenders just adds to the sense of unease in a way that bigger games with bigger budgets fail to achieve. Also and as you will notice from the trailers, the game  as with it's predecessors, is grid based in terms of movement which is a constraint that adds greatly to the fun of devising strategies for defeating the grim cavalcade of fetid monsters that inhabit these dungeons.

The parallels to Dungeon Master are also evident in some of the traps that await the incautious explorers with pressure plates, fireballs and rooms full of pressure sensitive trap doors. The runic magic system which is based on skills acquired on the perilous journey will also be  a nice reminder of times past, pointless Googling to find out how to cast a lightning bolt if your wizard skills are barely up to summoning a light spell.

This is niche games for niche markets and the gamers that The Legend of Grimrock is unerringly directed at will be blown away by what they see when they start to explore the damp and foul smelling crannies of a game that pits four adventurers against some of the most diabolical beasties and fiendish brain teasers ever to be encountered in the dark recesses of a digital dungeon. Just imagine this thing on an iPad!

The work that has been carried out to achieve this level of games artistry is simply inspirational, a lot of the concept painting was done on the basis of what the team would want from a game like this, without constraining themselves to paring down their visions to allow for the endless hours transforming these 2d paintings into 3D actuality. Above is the very first concept painting whilst below is a glimpse of the Dungeon Ogre in the early stages of his animation.

Which brings  me to the important release information, the game has been developed for PCs as it's first incarnation which will be released on the 11th of April - further details here. And then the plan is to release versions for Mac and iOS as soon as is feasible after that.

The rest is down to you dear reader, so help spread the word, visit their Facebook page, check out their YouTube channel, log on to their website and lastly but by no means leastly, buy a copy of this friggin' thing, which has a 20% pre-order  discount up until 11th April when the game is released!

All images © AlmostHumanGames 2012

Cowboy Hamsters, iPads and Commandos

I am drowning in deadlines, too many to list but as is always the way with such affairs, it is sometimes good to momentarily climb off the hamster wheel and engage in an altogether different activity as a kind of catharsis. Hence I am back in blog mode.

In fact talking of wheels and hamsters, one of the deadlines involves working with a team of developers on a new app game and one of the characters that I have generated is this little guy.

.... Dawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!

Little cutie. Anyway the upshot of working with app developers is that I had to arm myself with an iPad and being as financially cautious as ever, I plumped for last year's model which is now just about affordable to someone of my modest means.

I must confess though that although I had not allowed myself to become too obsessed with having an iPad, now that I have one I can just see what an incredible leap forward in computing these things are, it's like looking at the next step in digital technology and in it's potential hints at things well beyond having a portable means of covering most of your computing needs in a phenomenally touch screen responsive format.

However, one of the first downloads I made was to the financial betterment of an auld and venerable establishment located in Dundee home of jam making and home to DC Thomson publisher of a myriad of newspapers and magazines such as the Beano, The Sunday Post, The People's Friend and also Commando. This lastly will be of considerable delight to my dear old chum Simon who with acidic sarcasm, recently berated me for not featuring Commando more prominently in my blog.

Anyway the reason for my shoving more money that I don't  have in their direction, was the delight of taking out a digital subscription to Commando (I have no shame Simon!). The delights of a digital subscription are manyfold but for anyone sharing living space with a woman of practical mind and an eye for minimalist interiors, the stress of having four issues of Commando comics arriving on a fortnightly basis with the unstoppable force of the Wehrmacht's invasion of Western Europe in Spring 1940 is too much to bear.

When you have an iPad all this is taken care of, there is absolutely no need to worry dear boy, the comics are ready for download as soon as you see them on the Commando website. They reside on your iPad awaiting your digital summons to be perused in razor sharp resolution and you are not having to squirrel them away underneath the sofa. OK so you don't get the tactile joy of flicking through the pages and the smell of the paper is gone, but the heady aroma of old newsprint is precisely that... OLD newsprint. It takes decades of careful storage to achieve, new Commandos are virtually a non event in terms of paper aromatics.

So imagine my delight when I discovered that yesterday there was yet another new batch of Commandos showcased on the Commando website, including yet another golden oldie which has never been reprinted before. Within what seemed nano seconds the reprint of Commando No 19, last seen on active service in March 1962, was on my iPad! The Death Dealers comes complete with another of Ken Barr's in your face covers, clenched teeth, buggin' eyes and Nazi dagger to the fore as the team of Tom, Dick and Harry take on the Fallschirmjager  descending on Crete. The script by retired Major Eric Hebden (who was a truly prolific writer of these 64 page comics for both Fleetway and DC Thomson) throws the trio up against the fiendish Leutnant Wolf Altmann who worries that if he fails in his quest he will doubtless find himself on zer Russian Front (a front which erm... actually didn't exist in May 1941. Zoon, zoon mein kamerad but not yet). Anyway that aside and the fact that the fall of Crete is somewhat marginalized by the derring do of Tom, Dick and Harry, the whole thing has a weird topicality as to a certain extent the Hellenic peoples are once again feeling more than a little aggrieved by the demands of their German neighbours.


However and returning to the iPad the most amazing aspect of Commando on the iPad is the quality of the art work, in this case you can see every line of artist Cecil Rigby's manic hatching and contra hatching creating the most diabolical symphony of pen work ever seen within the pages of a war comic. Rigby's work even at the time looked as if it came from another era and truth to tell it did. Like the much younger Gordon Livingstone, Rigby's work was devoid of any overt influence of the "Latin" school of war comics artistry. Rigby's work in contrast looked like that of a man who had followed a correspondence course in illustration. I well recall seeing one that my mother had followed and it was full of exercises of penmanship with the sort of cross hatchery that so distinguished the work of C.T. Rigby. Much of his formative work had been in the 1930's where he specialized in creating caricatures of sporting personalities and you could see the signs of it in the pages of this story particularly with the delightful portrait of Harry looking not unlike Joe Louis on page 59. That's where Rigby excelled but as regards placing his figures in a convincing environment, you can see that head and shoulders portraiture was really his comfort zone and straying beyond that was something he evidently found a chore.

Nevertheless a really fun experience and definitely one to be recommended for anyone wishing to sample the early and very heady years of the UK's longest serving war comic.

All Commando images © DC Thomson 2012

More From The Grahame Johnstones

Here are some more samples of Anne and Janet Grahame Johnstone's delightful work, courtesy of David Slinn, who as well as being a mine of information on this period of UK illustration has a collection to back up his passion some of which he is generously sharing with you here. The work you see is but a mere fraction of the amount of illustrations that they generated over their career. A career which was horribly compromised in 1979, when Janet Grahame Johnstone died as a result of smoke inhalation from a kitchen fire, leaving Anne alone to try and carry on the work and meet the omnipresent deadlines.

The bulk of the work shown here comes from the UK weekly nursery comic Robin and shows how their style developed from looking like an offshoot of Pauline Baynes work to achieving their own distinctive style. Whereas the illustrations for such commissions as Dodie Smith's 101 Dalmations shows a style still in transition, by the time they come to working on The Water Babies, they have really found their own voice.

The Biblical themed color spreads are from Dean and Son's Bible Stories published in 1971.
Ad as a final offering here is a scan courtesy of Phil Rushton from the ultra-rare Jason and the Golden Fleece.

(Why did you have to show me this Phil???...)