If there was a superior comic to TV Century 21 in the 1960s then I never saw it. This weekly periodical simply oozed class. With the cream of British illustrators like Ron Embleton, Mike Noble, Richard Jennings, Graham Coton, Don Lawrence, Frank Hampson, Don Harley, Eric Eden, Ron Turner, and Frank Bellamy, there simply wasn't a better drawn comic around. True, not every above named artist appeared at the same time or with the same frequency, but with visual storytellers of that calibre, how could the comic possibly fail? It hit the ground running and for the first few years at least, it was probably Britain's best-selling comics for boys.
Based mainly on the TV puppet shows of Gerry Anderson, the comic also included non-Anderson strips like Burke's Law, Agent 21, My Favourite Martian, Get Smart, and The Munsters, though obviously not all at the same time. The Daleks appeared on the back page for the first 104 issues, which was a wise choice as they were one of the biggest things on television at the time in their battles with Doctor Who. The Doctor never appeared in strip form in the comic itself, but the Peter Cushing incarnation appeared in a few cover photos around the time of the big screen Daleks movies.
Tastes change over time however, and eventually the Anderson shows fell out of fashion, and TV21 along with it. In 1969 it became TV21 and Joe 90 when a short-lived sister paper starring the bespectacled junior agent was merged into it, but the title was eventually revamped as a standard comic and reverted to the name TV21, with no Anderson content remaining at all. A shadow of its former self, it was merged into Valiant in October 1971, becoming Valiant and TV21. Its name lasted on the cover 'til April 1974, but was absent on the issue before Valiant subsumed Lion in May.
Let's take a look at the first 25 covers from when TV21 was the new big hit on newsagents' counters all across the country. We'll see some more in an upcoming post.
