BUSTER COVERS GALLERY - PART 11

By April 1964 Black Axe fantasy tale had evolved from an old-style picture story into a regular strip with speech balloons, which IMHO was an improvement.

In search for a new job, globe-trotters Mighty McGinty and his two pals arrive at a small port on the coast of South America and are attacked by a gang of seamen. The fighting three don’t even bother to ask why they are being attacked and take it as an opportunity to get rid of all that surplus energy that they have in abundance. For the duration of its appearance in BUSTER the strip was given the prime slot on pages two and three.

Ousted by Mighty McGinty, Maxwell Hawke retreated to page four for a while.

The cover of the last issue of the month featured Jeff Craig Detective. The title of that week’s complete mystery thriller was Jeff Craig Detective and the Bogus Bodyguard. 

BUSTER COVERS GALLERY - PART 10

The fearless ghost-hunter Maxwell Hawke returned to the front cover with a splash panel from a new ‘spine-chilling’ story Maxwell Hawke on the Isle of Ghosts. Two bony hands seize hold of a fisherman’s boat to drag it down into the depths near Fortress Island on the French coast where Maxwell Hawke and his pretty girl assistant are enjoying their well-earned holiday.

Next week the readers of BUSTER were treated to another new strip – Jeff Craig Detective. The series of mystery thrillers (one complete case a week) drawn by Ian Kennedy was reprinted from KNOCKOUT.

Captain X – Tiger Shark had already made a few front-cover appearances before.

Thunder Boult the Magician Who Went to War premiered in the last issue of March 1964. The theatre where Thunder Boult does his show is destroyed in a German air raid. Being a genius of escape and other magic tricks, the entertainer is recruited by M.I.5 and sent to Nazi Germany with a mission to get a non-Nazi professor out of the country and save him from the Gestapo investigation. Boult works in tandem with his faithful assistant Props Millar, an Australian.

As I explained in my introduction to this series HERE, I started it hoping perhaps it will attract the attention of BUSTER collectors with spare copies of the title and they’ll help me fill my few remaining gaps. Please, contact me via e-mail if you have copies to sell or swap and don’t mind shipping abroad because I am not in the UK. I have 25 – 30 spare copies from the early 60s and might help fill some of your gaps, so e-mail me for a list and details about condition. See my blogger profile for the address.

MY WANTS FOR BUSTER:

October 29, 1960

December 24, 1960

December 31, 1960

January 21, 1961

February 4, 1961

February 11, 1961

July 15, 1961

September 23, 961

December 30, 1961

June 20, 1964

July 4, 1964

July 11, 1964

BUSTER COVERS GALLERY - PART 9

February is of course the shortest month of the year; in 1964 it had 29 days and enough Mondays for five issues of BUSTER. 

 

All the non-humour strips shown in the splash panels during February 1964 had already featured on BUSTER covers before, except Mighty McGinty, the reason being that the issue of Feb. 29th, 1964 contained the opening instalment of this new ‘punch-packed smash hit’. The scene of the strip is set somewhere in South America. It tells the adventures of a trouble-prone fist-swinging trio consisting of a mighty muscled Irishman and his mates. The adventurers wander from one little town to another taking every job they can find in hope to raise the money to start their own construction company. The strip didn’t last long and ended in October of that same year.

I hear you asking: what, five issues and not one cover featured Maxwell Hawke?! True, Maxwell Hawke was the big BUSTER star at the time and there were only two months when he did not appear on the front cover. Maxwell Hawke and the Knell of Doom ended in the last issue of February and a new story started in March, so he didn’t take long to return to the spotlight, as you will see in the next post.