You have to wonder

As I've mentioned before I've rediscovered the joy of reading comics (I found out recently that Lenny Henry is a fan).

I get 2000AD delivered every week and the Judge Megazine once a month. I buy the odd collection of stuff I read when I was a lad Spider-Man, Thor, Avengers, Fantastic Four as well as working my way through the Complete Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog. And I'm discovering new stuff like Witchblade.

No hang on! You may find this interesting! Then again...

Another comic I subscribe to is Spaceship Away. This started out as a way to get a newly created 1950’s ‘old Eagle’ style Dan Dare strip story (Drawn by Keith Watson and Don Harley) in print, along with how it was done. As time has gone it has published more Dare stuff as well as a 1950's Daily Express comic strip of Charles Chilerns Journey in Space and other stuff.

To be fair most of what they publish is typical 1950's - nowt wrong with that but recently they published to newer stories and both were CGI and look very different.

One of the stories Ex-Astris was hardly controversial, ok the art may have been but the story has been good so far.

The other story Space Girls prompted outrage and was described by one reader as porn I think. Now I know some of the scenes in the link show the two young ladies sans bras but the ones in SSA were not. And I think porn is going it a bit far, even in the 1940's the Daily Mirror published a story called Jane.

The writer of the story has pulled it from the magazine. Hope he'll stick it on the website as I'd like to know what happened.

Anyway on Thursday I received the latest issue. The editor wanted to know given the furor if people objected to him committing to an extension of Ex-Astris (given it was CGI) and announced that from next issue they'd be reprinting a Garth Story.

Now in case you don't remember Garth was comic strip that ran in the Daily Mirror. It ran for 3 panels per day and was an action adventure story. Great stuff it was too.

Now my memories of Garth are vague (but it was the first thing I turned to in the Mirror) but I do remember that his true love was the god like Astra who appeared in the odd episode and she seemed to not wear very much. I did comment to the editor it would be funny to see such an episode in SSA given the furore over Space Girls and he confirmed that the story was one such (hope he has his tin hat).

I then joked they ought to print Axa. For those who don't know Axa was a similar format to Garth and it ran in the Sun. Axa is a woman who, having grown sick of the regimented and stifling society inside a domed city, flees into the untamed wilderness. She tears off her jumpsuit to show her rejection of the domed city's ways and then replaces her attire with a reliably flimsy rag bikini. Which can be relied on upon to fall off occasionally.

Rod tells me that they had considered it (and I have the mock up) but wondered whether some of his readers would approve. Personally I'd love them to do it, it was a fun story.

The Sun and the Mirror were two "papers" we had in our house so both stories would be nice parts of my youth to rediscover.