Sunday, 7 June 2026

The Trigan Empire - July 31/Aug 1 1976


If you're unfamiliar with The Trigan Empire, British comic fans will tell you it's a legendary comic strip drawn by Don Lawrence, which ran in Look and Learn comic through the 1960s and 70s, and was reprinted in Vulcan comic in the 70s. Fans will tell you how much they treasure this fully painted art and how it brings jot every time you find an intact page of it in the wild. What very few will confess to doing is cutting out panels of it and sticking them in their diary, thus ruining the original comics and rendering them worthless. But that's what I did.

The strip was running in Vulcan at the time of this diary entry and that's where I cut it from, to decorate a spread where, as usual, not a lot was happening apart from me reading (and dissecting) comics (and not metaphorically, in case that wasn't clear), and watching the telly. 

I was also busy writing and drawing a book of comedy comic strip called The Amazing 3rd Looney Buke. I'd completed two of these books so far, and they were about as good as you'd expect comics by a 12-to-14 year old to be. Actually they were probably worse than that. Some day I'm sure I'll dig them out, as I happen to know they still exist, they turned up when clearing out the old family home.

The BBC was marking the 40th anniversary of the start of telly with a series of special programmes. I don't remember much about the programmes themselves, but I've subsequently learned that this was the point at which they realised they'd been systematically erasing programmes that they were only now discovering they might want to show again. So the wiping of the vaults stops about here in 1976, a bit late for most of the TV up till this moment.

My Records For The Day were both from the 60s, for whatever reason, and off albums that I owned then and still have, though I've not played them for years.

My Books And Where To Find Them...

Tuesday, 25 November 2025

So much TV - Nov 26 & 27 1975

One of the hardest things when writing these blogs about my diaries of fifty years ago is trying to find something interesting to say about them, when almost every one was written at a time of my life when precious little ever happened. Just like this spread (which you can find in the My 1975 Diary 2025 Calendar, though I'm betting you knew that) where I do lessons at school, try to do my paper round at record speed (it seems to take 21 minutes every time), then watch telly. Compared to the start of the year, I appear to be watching lots of more telly. I believe it;s more likely to be the case that I simply didn't bother to record them in such excruciating detail back then.

My Records For The Day include one of my favourite Christmas songs, whose name I clearly hadn't learned properly yet, and a solid gold classic by 10CC.





Friday, 10 October 2025

How many comics? - October 11 & 12 1975

This spread (to be found in My 1975 Diary 2025 Calendar, on sale still) shows me buying how many comics? By my reckoning I bought thirteen in a day. Buster and Vulcan are the Brit weeklies I'm still getting at this time, a jumble sale turns up a Beezer annual and a Whoopee, then there's my weekly Planet Of The Apes (two issues), Avengers and Superheroes, and I top it off with newsagent purchases of two US Marvels (Ka-Zar and Man-Wolf), two Atlasses (Ironjaw & Planet Of Vampires), and a DC (Superman Family).

Not only am I buying them, I'm producing my own. Quite how "A Star Is Born", "Battle For The Planet Of The Apes", and "In Days Of Old" turned out I have no memory, but to have three comic strips on the go at one time is quite something. Ironically, at time of writing this fifty years later, I find myself in a similar position, with four Shakespeare books all in a half finished state.

My Records For The Day are two stone cold classics which I still love today