Smash! was a weekly British comic book, published initially by Odhams Press and subsequently by IPC Magazines, from 5 February 1966 to 3 April 1971. After 257 issues it merged into Valiant.
During 1967 and 1968 Smash! was part of Odhams' Power Comics line, notable for its publication of American superhero strips. During this period, alongside British humour strips, Smash! included black-and-white superhero reprints originally published in the US by Marvel Comics and DC Comics. In late 1968, Smash! absorbed its sister titles Pow! and Fantastic, thereby becoming the last surviving Power Comics title. In March 1969 Smash! underwent a major relaunch, and thereafter featured solely British content: a mixture of humour, sporting and adventure strips. A further relaunch in 1970 was almost as extensive, with a number of new strips introduced and an equal number cancelled.
Smash! was sized 9.75" × 12" (#1–162) and 9.25" × 12" (#163–257), and had a four-colour cover and black-and-white interior.
Publication history Odhams Smash! was owned by the International Publishing Corporation (IPC), a company formed in 1963 – through a series of corporate mergers – by Cecil Harmsworth King, chairman of the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Pictorial (now the Sunday Mirror). Company History, IPC Media website. All the comics owned by it were published by one or other of the subsidiary companies brought together to form IPC, including Fleetway Publications and Odhams Press.
Odhams' comics line was produced in London from 64 Long Acre, overseen by managing editor Alfred Wallace. Following the initial success of the anarchic humour comic Wham! in 1964, Smash! was launched (with a cover price of 7d for 24 pages) on 5 February 1966 following a similar model. Early on, Smash! successfully integrated superhero strips — Marvel Comics' the Hulk and DC Comics' Batman — into its lineup, prompting Wham! to do the same (with the Fantastic Four) shortly thereafter.
Odhams branded the two titles, and three more launched in quick succession — all heavily featuring Marvel reprints — as part of the Power Comics line, a gimmick dreamed up by Odhams to unify their five titles under a common banner (Smash! became a Power Comic with issue #44, published 3 December 1966). The Power Comics line was published under a three-man editorial team known as Alf, Bart, and Cos. "Alf" (Alfred Wallace) was the managing editor, and "Cos" (Albert Cosser) was the editor directly responsible for Smash!Maguire, Peter. Fudge the Elf: Ken Reid: The Laura Maguire Collection , Fudge-the-elf.com (2019). Retrieved Feb. 7, 2021.
Odhams comics titles faced their first serious crisis in May 1967. The editorial page warned readers in issue #68 (20 May 1967) that Smash!, initially printed by St. Clements Press Ltd of London, had to find new printers within one month, or face closure. As it turned out, Odhams were able to sign a contract with Southernprint Ltd of Poole in Dorset in time to maintain publication.
On 14 September 1968, with issue 137, the title merged with Pow! (which had previously absorbed Wham), becoming Smash! and Pow!. Later on 2 November, with issue 144, it merged with Fantastic (which had previously absorbed Terrific), becoming Smash and Pow incorporating Fantastic.
As a consequence of absorbing Pow! and then Fantastic, Smash! inherited some of their strips and characters: 14 September 1968: Merger with Pow! — inherited The Cloak, Wiz War, Fantastic Four (which had originated in Wham!), and Spider-Man. Also, Smash! later reprinted The Wacks, which originated in Wham!, as Nick and Nat – The Beat Boys. 2 November 1968: Merger with Fantastic — inherited The Mighty Thor.
Smash! featured the Power Comics logo on its cover for 100 issues, until #143 (26 October 1968); it was quietly dropped the week Smash! absorbed Fantastic to become the last surviving title in the line.
IPC Magazines On 1 January 1969 Odhams Press Ltd ceased operations and Smash! was thereafter published by IPC Magazines Ltd (an IPC subsidiary formed during 1968). The title was now published out of 189 High Holborn; later moving to Fleetway House on nearby Farringdon Road. Major changes of editorial policy occurred in 1969 for financial reasons: on 15 March of that year Smash! was relaunched without its American superhero strips. Further changes followed during the course of 1969, and then a second relaunch at the start of 1970, when IPC was taken over by Albert Edwin Reed to form the publishing giant Reed International.Reed-Elsevier Group history, Reed Elsevier website.
The final issue of Smash! was published on 3 April 1971; soon after on 10 April it was merged with the IPC title Valiant, forming Valiant and Smash!.
Annuals and specials Ten Smash! Annuals were published in hardback, beginning with the 1967 Annual (published in 1966). These appeared every autumn. Even after the magazine's absorption by Valiant, the Smash! annual, published mainly under the Fleetway imprint, continued to appear every year. The final annual, cover-dated 1976, was published in the autumn of 1975.
There were also two 96-page Holiday Specials, published in 1969 and 1970, and a Valiant and Smash! Holiday Special in 1971.
Advertising A notable feature of the Odhams years was how few advertisements Smash! carried. There were occasional quarter-page inserts, mainly advertising foreign postage stamps for stamp collectors, or Subbuteo table-football, but they were few and far between, and their combined total didn't usually exceed one page per issue.
Reflecting its financial problems, the relaunched comic under IPC Magazines carried a significantly greater amount of advertising. One obvious change was the back cover (the only in-colour page apart from the front cover), which gradually began to carry colourful full-page advertisements. On the inside pages, too, there was a much more noticeable quantity of adverts: each issue typically carried four full-page ads, plus two half-page ads. It was a noticeable feature of the relaunch that the comic now expanded to 40 pages, in order to cope with the need to carry an extra four pages of advertising in each issue."Smash!", British Comics website (April 13, 2019). This was a potentially significant new strategy and a major change of policy. No longer did the profitability of the comic rest exclusively with the income derived from its sales figures. That sales income was now supplemented by advertising revenue, and without even having to sacrifice any significant amount of page space, nor cancel any strips, thanks to adding the additional pages.
Background In 1966 the initial success of Wham! (which had launched in 1964 and quickly built up strong circulation figures) encouraged Odhams' London management to publish a second title, conceived by Alf Wallace (Managing Editor of Odhams' juveniles – Eagle, Swift and Boys' World) and Albert Cosser. Leo Baxendale, who had created Wham! for Odhams in 1964, was too heavily embroiled with ongoing production on it, providing much of the art for each issue, so had little time for anything else. Also, Baxendale was then still working at long range from Dundee, Scotland (DC Thomson Ltd, Baxendale's former employers, were based in Dundee).
Accordingly, it was Alf Wallace and Albert Cosser (soon to be known to their young audience as Alf and Cos) who determined the initial format of Smash! They also recruited the artists who would draw the early issues, as it was plain that Baxendale was fully occupied with the art for Wham! Hence Baxendale's initial contribution to Smash! was limited to providing a list of titles and situations for the humour strips, together with brief written scenarios (script ideas for the individual weekly issues), which he gave to Wallace to be farmed-out to other artists. The Swots and The Blots was one of these. Ironically, Baxendale's strips would eventually become a major contribution to Smash!, after March 1969, but only because the closure of Wham! freed him to work on Smash! instead.
Initially, Baxendale was asked only to create the Bad Penny strip, and to give Grimly Feendish (a character from his Eagle Eye, Junior Spy strip then running in Wham!) a strip of his own. Wallace also had Baxendale draw the covers for the first three issues, #1 featuring Ronnie Rich and #2–3 starring the Swots and the Blots.
Smash! launched with the same format as the early issues of Wham!, namely 24 pages per issue, four of which were in colour, but it was printed on lower-quality paper than Wham!
Launch and initial lineup
The initial lineup of strips mixed humour and adventure freely, with the comedic Ronnie Rich featured on the cover of the first issue.
Humour strips There were typically a dozen British humour strips in each of Smash!'s first 162 issues. The initial lineup of humour strips included three originally by Leo Baxendale — The Man From B.U.N.G.L.E., Bad Penny, and Grimly Feendish — as well Percy's Pets by Mac (Stanley McMurtry); The Nervs by Graham Allen; Ronnie Rich by Gordon Hogg; Queen of the Seas by Ken Reid; Space Jinx by Brian Lewis; The Tellybugs by Walter Thorburn and George Parlett, with later contributions by Cyril Price; and The Swots and the Blots, initially by Mike Lacey.
The Man From B.U.N.G.L.E. was a spoof of the popular TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and like Grimly Feendish was a spin-off from Baxendale's Eagle-Eye, Junior Spy strip in Wham!). The strip was featured on the cover of Smash! fourteen times in the first 18 issues. Bad Penny had some similarities with Baxendale's earlier Minnie the Minx character in The Beano. When Baxendale had been drawing Minnie the Minx, he had concentrated on experimenting with facial expressions and character traits. By the time he began working on Bad Penny his drawing style had matured, with an equal concentration on developing a zany but tight storyline, less emphasis on close-ups of facial expressions, but retaining the essentials needed to put over a character's own personality traits. The strip was popular enough that it survived the changes of 1969, and continued to appear in the new Smash!. When the strip was eventually dropped, Bad Penny herself still continued to appear, making occasional appearances in Baxendale's The Swots and the Blots as a new member of the Blots.
As had happened in Wham!, artists such as Mike Lacey were commissioned from time to time to "ghost" Baxendale's style. The Swots and the Blots was one of these. The strip's origins lay in Baxendale's classroom-based strip The Tiddlers,"Wham", British Comics blog. Retrieved Feb. 7, 2021. which had then been running for two years in Wham! (and which continued in Pow! when it merged with Wham in 1968, where it was combined with Ron Spencer's The Dolls of St Dominics to become The Tiddlers and The Dolls). In fact The Swots and the Blots was a direct continuation of The Tiddlers, with only a change of title. The characters (i.e. "Teach" and the Blots), the school buildings, and the situations, all were largely as they had been in The Tiddlers. The only difference was the addition of the Swots, so that Teach now had an ally. The Swots and the Blots reached a new standard of excellence when Baxendale began drawing it for the new-look Smash! from March 1969, but even during the Odhams years, it had wit and a sense of style. In Baxendale's hands, it had notable similarities to his earlier classroom-based strip, The Bash Street Kids, in The Beano.