Rusty Staples has now been delivering healthy doses of nutritious, comics-flavoured joy into your hearts, minds and lives for six years, chums! That’s 189,388,800 seconds since this blog went on-line… and I’m sure you’ve noticed that in all that time the moon has not crashed into the Earth and wiped out all human life. Not even once. You’re welcome! Here’s a look at some my favourite posts of the past year! 5. Comics on TV: Call the Midwife One More Time! The thirteenth series of the BBC’s 1960s-set Nuns’n’Nurses drama comes to an end, but it gifts us with many glimpses of old British c ..read more

Fifty-five years ago, at the age of nineteen years and a couple of weeks, the mighty Eagle flapped its way into the Lion‘s jaws. Now, while Eagle was arguably the parent of modern comics (see The Parent of Modern Comics?, one of the very first articles on this blog), and certainly its lead character Dan Dare is one of the greatest of all British comic characters, by the time it reached its end it had deviated a lot from its original format, which was twenty-pages packed with a random mixture of fact and fiction, in both comic-strip and text form. But exciting as Eagle had been in the beginnin ..read more

Yes, we are doing this again, but it’s likely the last time for a while, because yesterday’s episode of the BBC’s 1960s Nuns ‘n’ Nurses drama Call the Midwife was the series finale. There’ll be another episode on Christmas day, I’m betting, but that’s over four months away so I’m not worried about it at the moment. In this episode, ostensibly set around Bonfire Night in 1969 (Bonfire Night is an annual festival in the United Kingdom in which they celebrate the classic comic V for Vendetta), everyone’s favourite newsagent Fred Buckle gently reprimands his son Reggie for neglecting the comics. N ..read more

Superman’s official birthday is February 29th, which probably goes some way towards explaining why a character who was an adult in 1938 still looks so young: ageing is caused by birthday cake. As regular readers of this blog will be aware, I’m a huge fan of the Man of Steel, so here’s a look at some of my favourite Superman-related posts that have appeared on this blog… Falling for Superman How many times have Superman saved Lois Lane from death by gravity? I don’t actually know the answer to that, but I do have some fun exploring the concept! Noncomics: Superman – Last Son of Krypton ..read more

In this month’s list, and as we’ve seen several times in recent episodes of HM&D, there’s a small bunch of Marvel UK titles from the 1990s that are marked as “final issue” — and readers might recall that a few months ago John Freeman — former Marvel UK writer/editor and currently the curator of the essential Down the Tubes blog — took the time to remind me that many of those comics were designed to be limited series… They weren’t cancelled, they were completed. Yes, some comics are indeed cancelled prematurely but I believe it’s extremely important to remember that a comic reaching its fi ..read more

As regular readers might have spotted, Rusty Staples isn’t a news blog: it’s an olds blog. Here, we tend to look backwards rather than forwards. That’s mostly because there are literally many comics news websites out there, all promoting the latest releases from the Big Publishers and doing a far better job of it than I would. But what about the independent comics that don’t have a massive multi-media company promoting them? What about the small-press comics that are created on budgets so thin that they’d crack if you attempted to spread jam on them? Or even marmalade? Small-press and indepe ..read more

Regular viewers might recall that the BBC’s top-rated 1960s-set drama Call the Midwife occasionally features period-appropriate comics (see here and here and here), and in last night’s episode — the fifth of series thirteen — we were treated to a brief glimpse of a copy of Tiger gracing the shelves of the Buckles’ newsagents, behind what appears to be a suspended Action Man… Tiger (Amalgamated Press / Fleetway / IPC) ran 1554 issues from 11 Sep 1954 to 30 Mar 1985, absorbing The Champion (1922), Comet (1952), Hurricane, Jag, Scorcher, and Speed along the way, before it was devoured by the 198 ..read more

The future ain’t what it used to be, folks… As you’ll see when you browse through this month’s list, the story-paper Scoops was launched ninety years ago. It was possibly the first British periodical dedicated to science fiction, and it both paved the way and lit the path for many others, including of course the legendary 2000AD, which this month will be celebrating its forty-seventh birthday. A quick tap at the calculator buttons shows that forty-seven is greater than half of ninety… In other words, 2000AD is older now than Scoops was when 2000AD was launched. To be honest, that’s kind of u ..read more

We’ve featured British comics that appeared on the BBC’s poor-people-having-babies-in-mid-1900s-London drama Call the Midwife a couple of times (here and here), but with the show still going, I’m still watching just in case more comics turn up. And guess what? The latest episode (the second of series 13) features four comics lurking in the background under the guise of “set-dressing.” Series 13 is chiefly set in 1969, so I don’t expect it to be too hard to pin down the individual issues… The first three comics appear on the shelves the Buckles’ newsagents, and for a change they’re not all DC T ..read more

Happy new year, folks! So, remember in last year’s round-up of 2022 when I commented that I hadn’t been a fan of that year and I was glad to see the back of it? The lesson I have since learned is that I should not say such things aloud lest the universe consider my comments to be a challenge. In terms of visits to the blog, 2023 was Rusty Staples’ third-best year (very close to being second-best!). Let’s take a gander back at some of the year’s most popular features (not including the monthly Hatch, Match & Dispatch posts) of the year. But please note that these are just the most popular ..read more