EXTRACTS: British War Comics Illustrators Special © 2018 The Book Palace (144 PAGES in Full edition)

2 Pocket-Sized Blitzkrieg! Peter Richardson reveals how the Second World War came to dominate the pages of Britain's pocket library comics. I grew up in a world still coming to terms with the aftermath of the Second World War, in the days when your parents' generation had been through the war, and everywhere you looked there were these odd little reminders of it. A world where children’s imaginations more than made up for the deficit of electronic wonders that today’s children grow up with. Children’s TV, although nominally very anodyne, was, once past the pre-school fare of Muffin the Mule , and Bill, and Ben , full of very obvious references to the ‘Good War’ as ‘Band of Brothers’ author, Stephen Ambrose described it. Around about the age of eight you’d find yourself watching the very avuncular Richard Greene on ITV as Robin Hood , leading his men in a fight against Norman tyranny, and when the novelty of that paled, as it definitely did, you could always watch Roger Moore as Ivanhoe , again fighting the same Norman army of occupation that had turned decidedly vindictive now that nice King Richard was away at the Crusades, and nasty brother John, black of beard and blacker of heart, was in charge., and when that seemed a bit passé, suddenly there was Conrad Phillips as, blow me down, a Swiss resistance leader in ITV’s William Tell, with his deadly crossbow coming on like an amphetamined version of dear old Robin Hood : all moody close ups, beetling brows, and literally, in Phillip’s case, bone