One of my all-time favorite comics would have to be the UK’s Lion, home to one of my all-time favorite characters, Robot Archie. Yet it has occurred to me as much as I’ve written about it, I’ve never presented an entire issue of the publication. Well, almost complete. I have helpfully edited out both the WWII series Treleaway of the Guards and one featuring proper football, Carson’s Cubs (“Can Boy-Star Twiggy Flint Score A Hat-Trick Against Mighty Northcroft?”). Your mileage may vary, but I’ve never been able to develop a taste for either sort of strip, and believe me, I’ve tried. The title of this particular issue is titled Lion and Champion because, in accordance with the laws of British boys comics when a weaker title folded instead of being cancelled it merged with a more popular one and most of it’s popular features were absorbed into the comics mass. While of course sad these sort of shotgun mergers tended to make for a stronger surviving title. So, from April 15, 1967, here’s an issue of Lion and Champion .

If you know The Spider at all it’s probably it’s as ruthless antihero, but unfortunately in this incarnation of the strip he had switched to crime fighter for pretty much the same reason Modesty Blaise did (i.e. they got bored with crime). Even in his villain days The Spider kept his crimes pretty exclusively to grand theft and general menacing; oh, he might have threatened to kill the odd policeman who dared pursue him in a fiendish death trap, he never actually followed through. Oh, he was cold, prideful and contemptuous, but you just got the feeling that he wasn’t a homicidal maniac at heart.

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Robot Archie. *Sigh* Here’s the start of a story set during the period when he was no longer operated by a remote control box, could speak and was actually more or less sentient.

Lesser known than the above features was Code Name Barracuda, a super secret agent feature which definitely had it’s moments.

“Spot the Clue With Zip Nolan Highway Patrol”" was a reliable two pager feature that ran for years which gave the reader the opportunity to solve a Minute Mystery type mystery. As well as the thrill of riding along on Zip’s motorcycle in America; that kind of freedom undoubtedly had a lot of appeal to 60′s British boys.

Thanks for the offer, but, no thanks. And for the record, I never ask for a dinky.

And finally, The Phantom Viking, for all intents and purposes a British version of Marvel’s Mighty Thor, though not a bad one. Though my favorite part of this outing was undoubtedly the size of the hatband the chief gangster is sporting; you had have the balls of Sinatra to pull that look off even then.