British Comic References Online
Being a commiseration of the abysmal quality of material available.
It was to be expected that whatever information I had accumulated for The British Comics Database would be less easily disseminated when that site went offline, but I hadn't realized just how badly people were being served until I happened to look through Wikipedia. I told people, when everything went awry, and the end was approaching, to download copies of the site and spread whatever information lay within.
Not only hasn't anyone done that, they don't even seem to have copied over information to other places - a really quick (non-Wikipedia) example would be all of the sites which have been posting about Robin Hood in print: the ridiculously lengthy Bubbles strip barely gets a mention in most of these lists (and is usually not even given example illustrations), and that was an immensely popular strip, running from the twenties right up to the early 1940s. A two-decade run, easily outstripping most of what is thought of as key appearances of this character.
There was a spattering of Robin Hood titles, from various publishers (World Distributors, L. Miller, Streamline), which appeared sporadically throughout the fifties, which have slightly better luck of making lists mainly (only?) because they are focused primarily on the character. Noting that these are easier to search for is likely hitting slightly below the belt, but, I would wager, an accurate assessment. Many strips found within anthologies are either absent or conflated. The Lincoln Green Mob (from Valiant), Robin Good (from Jackpot), and Robby Hood and his One Man Band (from Cor!!) aren't exactly difficult to track down, so why these should be neglected is a mystery.
The most obvious sign that people are merely transcribing information from other places, rather than doing original research, is their handling of Robina Hood, which is two entirely different strips with the same name - one featuring the daughter of Robin Hood, while the other is a (then-)contemporary tale. If you see someone noting a singular strip, then continued, you know what is happening there…
When I mentioned Sherlock Holmes I did take a quick look at whether many of the parodies had been noted, and that's an equally dismal state of affairs. I had pages for all of this, and it was right there for the taking. Hell, I encouraged people to make copies of pages they found useful to ensure the information wasn't lost. I don’t have the time to search through my files to add in all of the parodies, but there is a vast and storied history of these from throughout most of the twentieth century. Even in cases where people try their best to cover strips, Gerald Swan titles seem to get the short end of the stick.
All of the insane little details that could only be discovered by actually spending time going through hundreds of thousands of documents, page by page, seem to have been completely ignored. None of the main comic sites are really paying attention to their handling of British properties, leaving anyone looking for facts to head to the most obvious location, Wikipedia, where a casual user could assume that at least a bare minimum of fact-checking has been undertaken, but this would be in error. Lets see what it has to say about Playhour:
Originally published under the title Playhour Pictures, it was intended as a companion to Jack and Jill, initially aimed at a slightly older audience. The lead strip in its early days was Prince, the Wonder Dog of the Golden West, drawn by Sep E. Scott.
It would be difficult to make a mess of the opening paragraph, and I applaud whomever out this together for noting the existence of Jack and Jill, but this is missing the rest of the initial line-up: When Knights Were Bold, The Wonderful Adventures of Peter Puppet, The Gay Gordons, The Twins of Twinkle's Circus, The Children of the Queen (which became, with the eighteenth issue, The Children of the Forest), and The Jolly Adventures of Simon Simple all began in that issue. The comic featured - up until the seventh issue - a pull-out poster in the centre-pages of the Seven Dwarfs. A generic, non-Disney, Seven Dwarfs you should note.
With issue #32 (21 May 1955), the title of the publication was shortened to Playhour and it lowered its target age-group, introducing comic strips based on A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, both drawn by Peter Woolcock.
And in the second paragraph we immediately hit a problem.
The title became simply Playhour with the twenty-second issue, not the thirty-second. Although Winnie-the-Pooh did begin it's run with the thirty-second issue, The Wind in the Willows had begun back in the eighth issue, replacing the Seven Dwarfs posters. There is no mention here, at all, of Lawson Wood's covers, bringing Gran'pop - who doesn't have a Wikipedia page, despite having a series of Ub Iweks cartoons, as well as his own publications - back to print.
While I freely admit that not all British comics history within Wikipedia is this bad, most of the coverage is extremely shaky, and anyone wishing to learn about characters, titles, publishers, or creators ought to be extremely cautious when using the site as anything more than a starting place from which to move on to more comprehensive coverage.
There are important pieces of cultural history almost entirely absent from the record.
Although it meant duplication of work, I deliberately put lists of all prose Batman and Superman stories on their own pages, from their 1960s comics, through story collections, right up to their annuals, but most of this hasn't been maintained, let alone added to. The immense undertaking of putting pages together about comic strip adverts, where companies presented their ads as more comic pages, have seen a little preservation, but a great deal of what I put together isn't replicated anywhere. Many places where I would expect to find some coverage don't even note these as being worth seeking out, although the predominant focus of many current sites seems to be on the commercial value of comics rather than inherent artistic merit.
Given that the incredibly poor research for Playhour originated with The Comic Book Price Guide for Great Britain, you should be able to see how this is a problem.
At the very least, given how obsessed his readers continue to be, I expected that the poetry annual I discovered containing a James Joyce piece would have been recorded somewhere, but that, also, seems to have slipped through the cracks. Geddes & Grosset's hardback Comic Capers series doesn't seem to have an index anywhere, nor their paperback Funbooks. Endless auction sites have them listed, but no care is present to ensure that readers know what is available, or who created the material.
Searches for the prolific A&C Black Comix Series, which ran for a few years in the early 2000s, brings up a great deal about AC Comics, and also sites covering A&C Black's history, but nothing of the books. I had over twenty books indexed, yet none of that information has propagated through the internet - for all the talk of preserving information in archive sites (archive.org doesn't even have a mirror of The British Comic Database) it's astonishing how little has been preserved.
It's understandable that nobody really went all-in on documenting comics retelling true events, given that it's an incredibly niche subject, but all of the strips recounting medal winners in various military conflicts were fairly well indexed by the time the Database went offline. I even went to the trouble of finding Times notifications for many of these recipients. Strips such as Stories Behind the Badges, and For Valor - True-Life Stories of Victoria Cross Heroes were never merely filler, or "bare minimum educational content" as some seem to believe, but a vital part of the titles they appeared in.
One of the projects within the Database which drove me to breaking point was the comic strips and pocket cartoons in magazines and newspapers. There is, currently, a paltry page on Wikipedia covering these, although the list is intermingled with strips from comics. It is a truly pitiful offering, absent Angus Og, Billy the Bee, and even Clare in the Community, which has a radio series. Come On Steve - who had cartoons made, and shown in cinemas - is missing.
When I express my frustration, it isn't merely because what is presented before people is half-arsed and (in many cases) filled with irrelevant data, but because I spent so much time and effort putting together all of the information.
More than a decade ago now.
For the sites which have provoked my wrath: do better.
And yes, I really need to figure out a way to get everything back online...