Starting up from where I left off last time on my journey through the output of the British publisher DC Thomson, here’s The Topper, another primarily humor weekly which ran from 1953 to 1990 when it merged with The Beezer.

The Topper‘s long-time headliner was Mickey the Monkey, who was essentially a monkey version of The Dandy’s Biffo the Bear who was basically a fun house mirror version of Mickey Mouse.

But amongst all of the theoretical hilarity were a handful of adventure strips, like The Sky Shark, about the heroic pilot of a super vehicle who used it to fight crime.

And Iron Hand, a secret agent with a prosthetic hand who battled baddies such as this evil scientist holed up in a giant robot gorilla inexplicably named Chang (funny, he doesn’t look Chinese). I’m not qualified to present expert evidence on this but Iron Hand sure seems like a blatant rip-off of Fleetway’s The Steel Claw and “Chang” a copy of Mytek the Mighty.

But because I’m only human I’ve got to present a page of Danny’s Tranny. I’ll allow you make up your own jokes, me, I’ll just marvel at a time when a transistor radio was considered a cutting edge, coveted piece of technology.

These kind of “kids with a magical object” strips were pence a pound in the British boys weeklies, but one thing that makes Danny’s Tranny fairly unusual was Danny’s magical transistor radio wasn’t a closely guarded secret. Not only was his magical transistor radio known to the general public, but sometimes his antics backfired for him, as seen here.

The Hornet ran from 1963 to 1976, and for a while it had it’s own sort of superhero with the same name called Captain Hornet. He was yet another pilot of yet another super vehicle who used it fight crime.

But The Hornet also had some fairly unique features, like this profile of John Cleese…

And a comic strip biography of singer Paul Simon.

The Hotspur, which ran from 1959 to 1981, had a couple of superheroes like The Scarlet Hawk, yet another heroic pilot of a super vehicle used to fight evil.

And, far after the superhero boom of the 60′s and a little before the superhero boom of the 80′s, came The Cobra, a pretty much straight up superhero. Snakes are usually the totem animals of villains, not heroes, accept of course for India’s Nagraj (‘Snake-King’) — but that’s a subject for another column.

And then there were the titles that were pretty much wall to wall straight ahead adventure stuff which tended to mean plucky schoolboys, WWII soldiers and men who played proper football. They included The Victor…

…and The Wizard.

And for those who just wanted war stories there was Warlord.

I’ve told this story before but, on one of her Church trips overseas during the late 1960′s my grandmother (God Rest Her Soul) brought me home a British boys comic. It’s became lost over the years, I’ve completely forgotten its title, and couldn’t tell you the names of any of the characters in it but I can still clearly remember two of the serials. One involved a trio of schoolboys who protected their little seaside village against the Nazi’s with their souped up BMX bikes (thirty years before their invention). The other concerned an orphan boy on the run from his evil uncle who coveted his inheritance. Coincidentally in this episode he was currently in America and was rescued from bad guys by a hippy porter who even at the tender age of ten struck me as being remarkably unauthentic. And my only exposure to hippies was from their occasional appearances in episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies and Hawaii Five-0.

So I know almost nothing about that long lost comic from my Grandmother, except I’m now pretty sure it was a DC Thompson.