Where are the comics of yesteryear? I recently stumbled across a cache of old annuals in a cupboard in my Dad’s spare room. There were all my old Smash! annuals, and my sisters’ Buntys. And it struck me that they represented a kind of comic which no longer exists.

There was once a whole galaxy of them, most published by D. C. Thomson, the rest by IPC. For boys: The Eagle, The Victor, Valiant, Buster, Warlord, Commando, The Rover and Smash! For girls: Bunty, Mandy, Girls’ Crystal, Princess Tina, June and Schoolfriend. (Neither list is exhaustive.) They were aimed at children of 8 to 12; each contained half a dozen or so serialised picture strips, with realistic, properly shaded and modelled drawings, and storylines that were both quirky and dramatic.

Let’s take, as an example of the kind of thing I mean, my 1973 Smash! annual. The cover depicts a strapping young man running along with a rugby ball. Three opposing players are trying to tackle him. The young man is evading them with ease and has a triumphant grin plastered over his face. A surreal note is struck by the ermine-trimmed crown on his head.

It’s His Sporting Lordship — otherwise known as Henry Nobbins, a labourer on a building site until he inherited the title of Earl of Ranworth and £5 million. The catch: to keep the title and the money, he has to prove himself a champion at a succession of sports. A brilliant pair of comedy villains, Mr Parkinson and his henchman Fred Bloggs, try to nobble His Lordship at every opportunity. This utterly preposterous but irresistible idea is typical of boys’ comics of the period. The stories were full of unlikely challenges and heroes with the knack of pulling off the impossible, week after week.

Other picturesque heroes in Smash! included Janus Stark, Victorian escapologist; Master of the Marsh, muscle-bound hermit of the Fens, teacher at Marshside Secondary School and direct descendant of Hereward the Wake; and the Worldwide Wanderers, a football team of players from all over the globe, including a Watusi centre-forward called Hoppi, and a Fijian goalkeeper, Sharkey. They all played in their national costume, naturally; the English representative, Carruthers, sported a bowler hat and monocle (and why was this stereotype of the Englishman so beloved in the Seventies, I wonder?)

Girls’ comics of the period were equally quirky, but their subject matter was very different. They were all about friendships, families and feelings. The stories tended to grab you by the emotions and twist sharply. In The Little Shrimp (Bunty Book for Girls 1973) young Tina Beckett is determined to be a champion swimmer, but is small for her age. But that’s not all. She has an even more serious handicap to contend with. She’s blind.

Her grandmother coaches her (it’s not enough that she’s small and blind — she’s an orphan too) and guides her through the water by means of a remote-controlled electronic device in her bathing cap. Not only does the Little Shrimp win the ladies’ freestyle, she even manages to foil a diamond robber (by tripping him up with her white stick).

Bunty was also the home of The Four Marys — Mary Simpson, Mary Radleigh, Mary Field and Mary Cotter (aka Simpy, Raddy, Fieldy and Cotty) — pupils at St Elmo’s School for Girls. Most of the stories are about a running feud with the two bad girls, Mabel and Veronica, who constantly try to get the Four Marys into trouble with the formidable mortar-board-wearing headmistress Dr Gull. The Four Marys are all very similar; they simply embody being good chums and good sports, just as Mabel and Veronica embody being evil schemers. Of course their evil schemes are thwarted and the Four Marys win out at the end of every story.

It’s striking how utterly different girls’ and boys’ comics were — as though girls and boys inhabited parallel universes. There were, however, three things that comics for both sexes had in common: delightfully far-fetched stories, an unshakeable moral framework (the bad are punished and the good rewarded) and an enthusiasm for learning.

From the 1969 Girls’ Crystal annual you could have learnt about Christmas customs in other lands, what footprints hares and voles make, how to distinguish a Fells pony from a Connemara, the fate of Marie-Antoinette, and how to make Garibaldi biscuits. From the Victor Book for Boys 1972 you could have learnt about the siege of Troy, the battle of Bannockburn, the sinking of the Bismarck, Horatio holding the bridge on the Tiber, Rorke’s Drift, the voyages of Pytheas and of Captain Cook, Amundsen’s expedition to the South Pole, Magellan’s discovery in 1519 of the strait that bears his name, the history of the Fleet Air Arm and how to pole vault.

A browse along the lower shelves of a newsagents’ today reveals nothing remotely comparable. There has been an explosion of pre-school titles, mostly based on TV series: Tweenies, Teletubbies, Bob the Builder etc. There are still the D. C. Thomson titles Beano and Dandy. But after that, one has to jump straight to magazine-style titles for girls — Mizz, Bratz, Shout. Bunty ceased publication in 2000; it was the last of the old-style comics to hang on. For boys there is practically nothing, except maybe a few Marvel imports. Thomson do still publish Commando, a pocket-sized title devoted to war stories, but it’s not easy to find.

According to Callum Laird, of D. C. Thomson, comics with serialised picture stories “have very much had their day”. Rival attractions such as PlayStations and PCs have caused fatal falls in circulation, he says.

Another reason might be that the window of childhood has narrowed. Children reach puberty earlier and there has been a general cultural shift towards children sharing the pastimes of adults. Children surf the net, they watch Big Brother, they keep up with all the soaps. Comics now seem to belong to the same lost world as conkers and peashooters.

I know that children have gained more than they have lost; in many ways kids lead fuller and richer lives than the children of my generation led. But still, I wonder. The old-style comics may no longer be viable, but do our children have to be deprived of the annuals? You can’t turn the clock back, so the saying goes. But you can. We do it every October. Given the current enthusiasm for all things retro, why not re-publish these classic annuals? Nostalgic adults might be the primary market, but it wouldn’t be long before the kids caught on. My seven-year-old daughter is reading her way through the Bunty annuals as if she’s just come off a fast.

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