What now for Comics?

I haven't done very much this month in this blog - I had intended to but other things kept getting in the way. And anyway, there's not much happening on the comics front - except for the Avengers Assemble movie which I haven't seen yet, though I'm sure some of you have - but which I hear is kind of like a large Marvel comic with popcorn. Mind you I called into Waterstones the other day and the graphics section - or what graphic section thee was - was coming down with Avengers graphic novels. The only comics which seem to be hitting the streets these days have merchansising attached to them - I suppose we just have to live with that fact. I've been approached by some publisher in Bosnia of all places asking about doing some sort of comic. He had linked on to my Father Tibor - Judgement of the Calusari which has appeared in some Polish fanzines and wanted to see if the character could be developed.I replied to him - as I always do with most e-mails - but he hasn't replied. Maybe publication is as hard in Bosnia as it is elsewhere although Eastern Europe, I gather, is the place to be for comics. My own interests are now drifting more and more towards the British comics of the 1960s and 70s. These are the type of comics, all of them black and white and published by comanies like IPC and Fleetway, that I grew up with. I've been trying to track down a strip which appeared in a comic callled Smash and which was called the Legend Testers which was a kind of mix between science fiction and folklore. In it two operatives of the Museum of Myth went back in time to check out the truth about old legends. I remember this strip - it featured Rollo Stones, no prizes for guessing where that name came from, and Danny Charters - in my late teens, yes I was still reading comics then. It was terrific and since then I've only seen a couple of pages of it - so if anybody knows where I can get copies or if any have been reprinted, as I know some have, let me know. It was very straightforward and wouldn't hold up to the modern day Avengers but at least there was a story there which there really doesn't seem to be in modern comics. I looked through all the Avengers issues in Waterstones - some of them very heavily priced - and there wasn't anything there that I desperately wanted to buy. It was the same not so long ago in Forbidden Planet comic shop in Belfast. I went along shelves and saw nothing which really took my interest in the way in which some of the old IPC black and whites did. Maybe it's time for them - or something like them to make a comeback. But I won't hold my breath. Will write more regularly next mont - that's a promise I'll try to keep, though I may not. But I'll be back soon