In the 1930′s and 40′s the British tabloid The Daily Mirror had several very American seeming comic strips, like Belinda Blue-Eyes, a fairly exact Britishization of Little Orphan Annie.

And Garth, who was kind of a British version of Superman with the time travel aspects of Brick Bradford thrown in for good measure. Created by Steve Dowling and Gordon Boshell and drawn by a then fifteen year old artist named John Allard who stayed with it 1971. Rather than being rocketed to earth as a baby Garth (no last name) was washed ashore on the coast of Scotland as a man and was adopted by an elderly couple.

The Daily Mirror itself admitted the character was initially loosely based on Superman but in an interview Dowling said he was more influenced by Terry and the Pirates. And from the first Garth strips posted above you can kind of see that.). If Garth was supposed to a Superman clone he wasn’t a very good one; Garth didn’t have “super powers” as we know them. He was rather more of a bodybuilder/ muscleman type who while fantastically strong and durable was still quite human. And while he fought evil it wasn’t a compulsion and did it the way that you’d expect the lead in a British comic strip would; fully dressed like a regular person.

Soon the fairly conventional adventure storylines were laced with more fantastic elements like trips to other planets and time travel. Garth did all of his time traveling the hard way; by being effectively immortal. Adventures of his past selves were revealed by via hypnosis, provided by mentor Professor Lumiere. Lumiere was his only regular friend and Garth had no fixed base of operations (as they say in Marvel Universe entries). If it was ever explained how he could afford to wander aimlessly looking for cool stuff to do I’ve never seen it.

Here’s the first strips from “Warrior World”, featuring a script by Peter O’Donnell and art by Steven Dowling and John Allard and appeared in The Daily Mirror in 1961

In 1971 the art was taken over by the great Frank Bellany — and it was this incarnation I discovered in the pages of the Menomenee Falls Gazette.

As you can see for yourself Bellamy’s work was incredible; among other things, he always managed to make the main characters seem, not superhuman, but like a really good looking, real world big man.

But I would of course be lying if I didn’t admit that a large part of my initial attraction to the strip during my adolescence was the casual (and leave us face it; gratuitous) partial female nudity found in so many British comic strips that Bellamy did so well. According to former Mirror cartoon editor Ken Layson says that Bellamy’s wife was “the model for most of those half-naked ladies”. To which I can only say, jammy bastard.

Along with strips Garth appeared in comic book stories as well in the yearly publication The Daily Mirror Book For Boys; from 1971′s here is “Double Diamonds”, featuring an appropriately wholesome Garth. Even back before Bellamy got a hold of him Garth was so buff he could make a (presumably) heterosexual guy exclaim “Whew! Holy Mackerel! What a man!”

Garth later appeared in a series of reprints called The Daily Mirror Book of Garth - naturally I’m on the lookout for these.

In 2008 Garth reappeared on the Daily Mirror website, drawn by Huw J. Davies. It was an honest attempt to bring back the character but there was just one thing wrong with it; it wasn’t by Frank Bellamy.

In 2011 they corrected that by reprinting two strips a day. Here’s the latest: