OOYAH! The sheer joy of kids' comics...

HISTORIAN MERVYN EDWARDS RECALLS SOME OF HIS FAVOURITES FROM THE 1960S AND 70S

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The 1960s and 1970s was arguably the best time ever to be a comics fan.

There were more characters that were seen by us as heroes, more characters to identify with. Budding footballers might want to be like Roy of the Rovers, or perhaps they yearned to have the resourcefulness of Roger the Dodger, who kept might see Benny Hill on the television in the 1970s and be struck by how different he was to his late 1950s cartoon character.

The trouble was that perhaps more progressive comic publishers had just launched a few new titles around the end of the decade that made the poor old Dandy and Beano look somewhat tired.

Whizzer and Chips (1969), Cor!! (1970) and Knockout (1971) were truly brilliant kids' comics whose cartoon strips and artwork generally made me doubly determined to nurture my own inchoate skills as a cartoonist.

The thrill of receiving these annuals and the memories attached to those moments stayed with me for years, which is probably the reason why I kept them and reread them. I recall dad walking me down to my grandma's May Bank house for a weekend stopover in the mid 1970s. I had fished out my 1969 Dandy Annual, and putting my nose to the cover, I commented to dad that it 'still smelt Christmassy. He replied, prosaically: “It’s the wrapping.”