AP, your mention of "serious art" is appropriate, especially in the UK, where comics are still considered by many as kids stuff. Very different in European countries and Japan. Here in Scotland, I and my fellow fans and researchers find it very hard to dig up info. on creators especially the farther back you go. The obvious creators like Moore, Morrison, Millar etc have attained a form of recognition, especially given that Mark Millar is never of the tv, but that's because of their success in America. A few other creators who worked in British comics , e.g. Watkins, Bestall, Baxendale are known to a slightly larger % of the population and that, I think, is due to their work for DCT and Rupert, which is a bit of a national treasure, but for kids. Despite Dundee Uni. having a comics dept., they can shed no light on old publishers like Valentines of Dundee, who, apart from greetings cards, published a few comics. All very frustrating. My colleague, Colin, dug up a lot of info. on Micron and it's branches of other publishers who published pocket libraries and that's one of our very few successes. We keep digging. 
Nice suggestion.
And I've kept digging and digging!
The first big clue I got was when I bought a big pile of Club War Picture Library from circa 76-77. I was looking at the covers and the titles and I was thinking they looked awfully familiar. I had already been putting away some of my smaller run picture libraries and a faint recollection trickled through my mind, so I checked out the GCD database of gallery covers as that saved me digging out my issues and perhaps causing them a little more distress.
Blow me down if I didn't spot that the Sabre War Picture Libraries were twins of the Club War Picture Library. Exactly the same covers and titles. I still need to check if the internals are the same but I doubt they will vary much.
The other big clue I got was from the Club Secret Service Picture Library as one of them featured agents of S.A.T.A.N. Now that was a run in 1966 published by Famepress. So for the stories to be published 10 years later by Med Publishing was a bit strange unless we had some sort of connection between them all.
Now going on things I have learned from other collectors and checking out indicia of many comics, the link comes down to the children's book publisher Wells Gardner, Darton & Co.
Over the years, this company's name began to appear on the indicia and usually towards the end of the run of each comic. I struggled to reconcile this until I got one salient point. In 1966, Micron went bust and owed a ton of money to their creditors. Rather than go bankrupt, they were offered or they offered a deal of their entire back catalogue and their name in exchange for their debts. This deal was done and as a result of this the Micron brand kept going well into the 1980s.
Now this is my theory and I stress it is a theory. From the evidence I have and sticking with the rule of KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid), I believe that Wells Gardner, Darton & Co bought up each picture library publisher as it was struggling to keep their head above water or were about to go bankrupt.
What evidence do I have? Well the fact that the war picture libraries started with their own publisher and ended up being reprinted by a company that had Wells Gardner, Darton & Co in every indicia.
The final piece of the puzzle fell into place last night as I had updated my Pocket War Library titles file to only need 22 titles to have the full run. After I had done that, I browsed Ebay to see if I could find some more and then I spotted this beauty which was previously published circa 72/73 as Pocket War Library 103.
What also helps is that P Mar, the cover artist, is Primo Marcarini who did work for a lot of the independent Picture Library publishers. He also drew the cover for the 1962 GMS Combat Picture Annual but never did any work for Commando, which is a shame.
I hope this has been a pleasant Sunday diversion for all of you.
Author
Topic: information on E.E. Hibbard (Read 2118 times)
