17th to 23rd February 1979 – Scoop comic

Description

An original vintage Scoop comic for the week dated 17th to 23rd February 1979 in good condition.

Scoop

The rivalry between D.C. Thomson and IPC was quite intense in the 1970s, although the creators and editors themselves often had a mutual respect for their counterparts at the opposing company. Both publishers turned out a lot of different titles in the heyday of “traditional” UK comics, and in 1978 D.C. Thomson published Scoop, clearly intended to rival IPC’s Tiger.

It was the era of “theme” comics, and, like Tiger, Scoop’s theme was sports stories and features. It was a classy looking comic. Scoop had 32 glossy pages printed in the top of the range photogravure method, meaning that photographs and painted artwork would reproduce at their best.

It also had a lot of full colour pages (12 out of 32), but unfortunately some were not used to their best advantage. For example, each three or four page strip would lead with a full colour page, but sometimes the colour was only used in one or two panels, or for the title. It seemed a wasted opportunity.

The design of the strip pages followed the standard that Thomsons had set with Warlord a few years earlier (and which IPC had imitated with their adventure comics); a big splash panel and huge logos for dramatic effect. Quite a robust “in yer face” approach but it gave the pages more impact than the more sedate layouts of comics like Hotspur or Victor. Here’s a selection of pages from issue No.3 (the only one I have)…

The early issues of Scoop had a nice balance of strips and features but as I understand it, later issues gave more room to the features, making Scoop more like a magazine (and perhaps an intended rival to IPC’s Shoot). Some strips remained though, and after 194 issues it merged into Victor.

A run of nearly four years is not to be sniffed at, and Scoop was certainly more successful than some of Thomson’s other boys’ comics of the time such as Spike and Crunch. All the more so when you consider that Scoop’s glossy format made it more expensive to produce and necessitated a higher cover price than most of its contemporaries.

I rarely see Scoop mentioned by collectors or historians but I presume it must have some loyal fans who remember it fondly. It did well in a crumbling market, before licensed comics became the norm, so it deserves to be respected alongside the other long-gone D.C. Thomson comics.

Extract from lewstringer.blogspot.com

More editions of Scoop available at verycollectable.com