Wednesday 5 November 2014

I don't know what I want to do with my life and every day I'm being crushed by the weight of each new failure

So, because I wasn't poor enough or a big enough catch for ladies already, I decided I would collect all 505 issues of the 1980s iteration of boys' adventure comic The Eagle, best known for being the home of Dan Dare after 2000ad got shot of him.
You can't just collect Eagle on its own if you want to follow the stories, though.  See, most comics of the 1970s and 1980s, when they finally folded from low sales or because the publishers wanted to spite the unions, were merged with another more successful title, and this happened several times over the span of 2000ad's life, as it merged with things like Starlord and Tornado after those comics came to an end, and Eagle was likewise merged with cancelled comics like Scream!, Battle, and Tiger, the latter of which I now have to collect* if I ever want to read the whole of Star Rider - and just so we are clear, Star Rider is a comic strip about a teenage alien prince who looks like Cthulu that comes to Earth to take part in BMX (it was the mid-80s) championships, SO YES I WANT TO READ THE WHOLE OF STAR RIDER - only while looking through what issues of Tiger I can get my hands on, I have found another strip I now have to track down: Johnny Cougar.
By the standards of 1980s weekly UK comics - many of which seem to have been conceived as some sort of bet among Scotsmen about what kind of nonsense they could pitch before they stopped getting paid - Johnny Cougar is kitchen-sink stuff, being about a perfectly normal human being doing perfectly normal human being things... during his travels as an international professional wrestler who fights lumberjacks and/or grizzly bears on log rafts as they're going over a waterfall.  Basically, it's like someone in 1962 got up in the morning and decided to make a comic strip just for me.  And then I find out he teamed up with Big Daddy:

And yeah, after that, work was pretty much over for the day.

* Well, more like "collect a small fraction of it", as there were over 1500 issues between 1954 and 1985.

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