Summer Specials

When I was a kid we never had a holiday overseas. Being a son of a housewife and a draftsman in the 1980's there was not a lot of money about. Don't get me wrong my childhood was not a time of doom and gloom in fact the summers of my childhood was a great times and smack in the middle of these summers was the annual two week holiday to the coast usually to Mablethorpe or Skegness where we would stay at one of my grandparents caravans. Every year during those two weeks I would stop off at the campsite shop and the among the inflatables and beach cricket sets was a rack of comic books. These were the now de-funcked summer specials.

Summer special comics where usually double sized issues of the regular comic with more colour pages and printed on glossy paper. A lot of the funny comics had stories of a seasonal nature taking character away from there usual setting and basing the story in a holiday town or settings. Some of the other comics would have little full stories specially done for these specials a lot of the time by artist and writers that didn't do the stripe in the regular issue's.

These comics were design as a treat for your summer holiday being sometimes double the size of a regular issue it would take longer to read or as something to do if the weather was not the best.

Now everyone has seen many pictures and lots of things writern about the funny books like the Beano and the Dandy but some of my favourite comic books from my youth are the war comics for boys. What can I say I love war stories when I was a kid. Two of my favourite comics were the Battle Picture weekly which sadly I don't have a copy of a summer special (now added to comic book want list) and the Warlord comic.

Below is a picture of the front cover of the 1990 Warlord summer special.

This comic features 8 full stories at the most 5 pages long with a mix of both full colour and black and white stories. I prefer the black and white war stories to the colour maybe something to do with watching all the famous old war films when I was a kid but to me they seem to have more detail in them to the colour ones.This comic also features many factual articles about spotting WWII fighter planes from there silhouettes, the roll of the long range desert group in the North African campaign,info about spitfire and mig fighter planes,the German battleship the Graf Spee and a brief history of the Battle of Brittan. 

This comic has an amazing full colour poster of a spitfire in action shooting down a Heinkel.

My favourite story form this issue is the Kampfgruppe Falken. The story centre on Kampfgruppe Haniz Falken an ex-panzer commander force to lead a rag tag mob of German troop of a penal battalion. Falken was forced in to the penal battalion for not carrying out a war crime during the 1940 Blizkrig.

Kampfgruppe Falkon was a serial story that ran in the regular weekly issues of the Warlord comic.

Sadly the Warlord is now out of print and gone are it's summer specials but not only that gone are all summer special comics the last being a Beano summer special from the early 2000's. It has been said that the time is right for the comic producing companies in the UK to bring them back and I for one would love to see this happen even if there was little or no new story content they would be cheep to produce and it could re-kindle interest in some of the now long gone great British comics.