SCARBACK - The Tiger Of The Deep

 Long before Jaws or Hookjaw there was Scarback, the 'Tiger of the Deep'! Appropriately enough this terrifying giant tiger shark with a distinctively torn dorsal fin made its first appearance in the pages of Tiger in 1962, going on to fight a long-running battle with fisherman Louis Bernard, and though the intrepid French Canadian managed to defeat a number of other deadly sea creatures Scarback always managed to stay one step ahead of him - even saving his life on one occasion, thereby earning the tough seagoer's grudging respect. As can be seen the shark eventually became popular enough to earn a cover spot on the 1969 Tiger Annual. The artwork for the series was provided by veteran British illustrator Sam Fair who was equally at home drawing gripping adventure strips like this, humorous school stories such as Cornelius Dimworthy for Eagle, or cartoon characters like Wig & Wam in the very first issue of Dandy (going on to produce Addie and Hermie, the Nasty Nazis and Musso the Wop for D. C. Thomson during the war).

THE ILIAD

 During the 1960s the Italian Ruggero Giovannini quickly became one of the top artists at Fleetway/IPC where, as well as being the main illustrator of Tiger's Olac the Gladiator he was also entrusted with a number of classic adaptations like Macbeth, The Three Musketeers, Ben-Hur and The Last of the Mohicans for titles such as Ranger, Look & Learn and Tell Me Why. However, few people remember that he preceded those with a masterful adaptation of Homer's Iliad which appeared in the largely-forgotten Children's Newspaper shortly before it merged with Look & Learn in 1965 (interestingly this had previously appeared in full-colour in the Italian magazine Corriere dei Piccoli). Here is the first episode of that series in its British and Italian incarnations.

 Fleetway/IPC seem to have established a productive relationship with Dutch publishers from an early date so that Tiger's Olac the Gladiator became a popular feature in the comic magazine Sjors during the early 1960s. Remarkably this appears to have involved a complicated process whereby the original artwork was shipped overseas so that it could be cut up and resized while translated word balloons and captions were glued over the English text; then the altered pages were photographed before they were returned to London. Subsequently the Dutch version was reprinted in album form some years later with brand new covers drawn by Don Lawrence who had since become increasingly popular through his work on the Trigan Empire. Here is one of those new covers along with an original episode as it appeared in Tiger, followed by the Dutch version that appeared in the album. I'm not sure who supplied the colour but in this case it seems quite effective.