There is something about an obscure or little known character that when you find him -or her- you get a "buzz" from. Not because you have just found a character that no one else appears to have mentioned online or in print but because it is a 'new' character. It might be 40, 50 or, in my case 90-100 years old, but it is bevcause it is new to you.
You start asking questions about the creator ofthe strip -was it the artist or one of the anonymous army of writers from the period? Why did they think "Let uis have this fellow in a black outfit and wearing a cowl or domino mask!" Or even why they decided that a character needed "special abilities" (in some cases this was British for "super powers" a term not used in the olden days)?
In some cases we see a character such as Krakos orRobert Lovett quite literally swiped by creators in the 1960s at Fleetway/IPC -in the case of Lovett and Back From The Dead there was a "rival" at Thomson's -the full story along with art in Comic Bits no. 2. When it came to a character such as Mr Might or Streamline and Tiger Man I was far more than willing to take them on from Denis Gifford. However, at the time I thought he would be around for many more years and so I never asked him about his thought process in the creation of these characters. Gerald Swan had no real interest in the comic creations just his pulp books.
The fact that my own character (dating back to 1972) The Avenger was based on a real life incident/person has never been gone into. The character Maddie Bell from Crime Bustersdates back to around the same time and is based on a girl renowned for the loudest and highest pitched scream (screaming competitions were a thing back then in school!!). The Third Level (recently promoted to Free) sorcerors Kotar and Sabuta were inspired by the Hanna Barbera Arabian Knights cartoon.
Was Varney the Vampire an anti-hero or villain? Have you read both of the voluminous books? I'd say he was anti-hero. There are so many of these characters from Penny Dreadfuls, Boys' Papers and early illustrated papers that you realise the United States came in fairly late (please NO jokes) to the genre. Even Germany had its pulp characters such as Sun-Koh and Captain Mors. If you were at a 1920s elegant dinner put on by the young fellow who had just "inherited" the estate and a titlefrom his late father...you ought not to have been surprised if a horned fellow dressed all in black jumped into the room and onto the dining table (very un-British).
We had tough female characters such as Acro Maid, Cat Girl and so on who were created by Dennis M. Reader who was inspired by American comics and along with Gifford created the first new wave of UK Super heroes -as what we would today term "super heroes" existed before that time it cannot be said, as some claim, that the two men created British superheroes. It is odd that these tough young women who dealt out justice seemed to reflect the war time period when, as in WW 1, women were seen to be getting more liberated because of social changes and when the war was over...women returned to being the support character in mainstream comics. Oddly, in strips such as Halcon Lord of the Crater World. women often had an almost equal role -in one strip Halcon was doomed until his partner Karen saved him (Black Tower Super Heroes no. 8 reprints this strip).
Hey, in the 1940s a young British lad could rescue an alien visitor and receive super powers as a "thank you" (T.N.T. Tom -a name later "purloined" by a British shoe company). There were characters able to breathe underwater for long periods and even communicate with the denizens of the deep -one even exploring and making first contact with underwater cities (Under The Sea and The Boy Fish).
I would still love to see a copy of the Moon Man and Mars Man comics -I've only seen odd pages over the decades. And I would certainly love to see a copy of William A Ward's The Bat. But what else? Well, for one thing I'd like to track down and get information on some of the old creators. We know so ;little about some and others...nothing. I have never been able to track down photos of John or William McCail or Wi;lliam A. Ward and the same applies to Harry Banger and others. They should never be allowed to salip into obscurity.
And so I keep on looking. I keep finding. It's very self fulfilling at times...even if it makes me even poorer!
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