About 25 years ago, a guy named Mark Carlson brought these comics to my attention. The Rural Home, Rewl, Bard, Croydon, all the Baily Shop stuff, Red Band, Blue Circle, etc. I think it might have been through APA-I or perhaps just a personal contact. Whatever. If anyone knows Mark and knows how to contact him, I would love to rekindle the correspondence.
Anyway, I was playing around with computers and dBase at the time. This was about the time of the first Macintosh. I had an HP 150 touchscreen at the time with about 5 megabytes of hard drive space. Big time. So I put together, with the help of Karen (currently recovering from knee-replacement surgery in the other room) a database to handle all of the addresses, characters, publishing company names, etc. The actual data bases are long gone, but I have a set of 25 year old printouts of them, sorted by address, character, artist and publishing company.
A while back there was a thread about Baily Shop comics and in one of the postings I mentioned to Ken Quattro that to go further into the history of those comics was to open a can of worms. THIS is the can of which I was speaking. It's a fascinating and convoluted mishmash of titles and interrelated companies - many fly-by-nighters. Mark has copies of press clippings documenting folks like R.B. Leffingwell getting busted by the paper rationing "police" and other crimes and misdemeanors by guys who published some of these comics.
If we try to sort it out here, we'll all amazed at the connections. I hope we can work through them all. I don't own all the comics, but I have enough to get us started. Archiver - it's all your fault, so I hope you're up to the challenge. It's going to be a crazy ride.
Let's go...
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