THE Irish Independent on the odd day during recent weeks has figured out a way of avoiding at least some of the doom and gloom of the political and economic news – it has hit on the idea of re-publishing copies of The Beano, The Dandy and Bunty.

Some might feel that there are days when some modern newspapers read like the The Beano and The Dandy, in any event . . . but one must presume that some genius in the Indo worked out that there might be a market in old ‘comics’ among codgers like myself, who remember the heyday of the comics.

There are still shops which specialise in old comics and some editions have become collectors’ items for their artwork, the storylines, and maybe the characters such as The Joker in the Batman series.

I am a regular visitor to a shop in London not too far from the British Museum which sells the pick of the crop of comics from 50 years ago, where they extol the value of the artwork and charge very fancy prices indeed for particular copies.

Presuming that the The Beano and The Dandy copies published in recent weeks in the Indo are a bid for readership . . . one thing is certain, they are a sure-fire winner with all of us who remember the pre-TV days when ‘comics’ were a must-have for so many youngsters, and on any street corner were as good as the ‘legal tender’ which we simply did not have.

Not alone were comics a weekly buy for families who could afford them, there was also a very healthy market on every street in secondhand comics, old issues not previously seen, or that could be reread.

The business of negotiating ‘swops’ was a booming trade. A rate of exchange was well-established in these. For instance, if you had a
64-pager – which was a smaller format but contained 64 pages – then it was worth maybe three or four copies of The Beano, or The Dandy, though that would depend on the age of the comics being swopped.

The 64-pager, often Commando, dealt mainly in stories of derring-do by Battle of Britain pilots against Jerries over the white cliffs of Dover.
In the case of the 64-pager, there was even a rumour in the bicycle sheds at local schoolyards that there was one lass in the town who would ‘go all the way’ for a 64-pager . . . but we never quite checked that out and preferred to live in surmise at the possible delights.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.