By Daniel McGachey and Lauren Knight, Georgia Standen Battle, Brian Lewis, Du Feu and Francisco Cueto, Alan Hebden and Patrick Wright, Kek W. and Jaume Forns, Vicente Alcazar, and various others
Review by Lew Stringer
The Book: Creeping out of the DC Thomson archives after more than 40 years, Spellbound, the classic British supernatural thriller comic of the 1970s, returns to cast its spell in this special collection.
Experience strange and sinister tales as told by the mysterious “Damian Darke”, and get entangled in the enchanting serial “I Don’t Want To Be a Witch!” – collected in its entirety. With a new introduction and a selection of vintage fear-filled features and creepy covers, classic chills and thrills await inside… plus brand-new Spellbound stories to enthral and transfix unwary readers…
The Review: Curiously, there doesn’t appear to have been a big announcement about this, but DC Thomson have published a softback collection of stories from Spellbound comic, the publisher’s fondly-remembered girls “mystery-thriller” comic of the 1970s.
DC Thomson first released a Spellbound digital title back in 2019, a project that surfaced briefly online, only to vanish almost immediately, without explanation.
This softback collection, featuring a montage of cover art by Norman Lee, using elements of three different Spellbound weekly covers, is a Print On Demand publication. That means the quality isn’t as high as Rebellion’s collections, but the price reflects that, as it’s half the price of most of Rebellion’s titles.
With 114 pages on quite thin but decent enough paper, the contents comprise of an introduction that mentions some, but not all, of the title’s artists, a brand new strip that leads into the reprints, and reprints of numerous selected short complete stories, plus the “I Don’t Want To Be A Witch” serial, in its entirety.
The book’s size is a bit smaller than Rebellion’s books, so that means the dialogue in the word balloons is very small. I still found it readable and I’m 66, but it is small.
One slight annoyance, and most people might not even notice it, is that although Spellbound was an A4 size comic, the artwork has been slightly squashed to fit the book’s shorter height. DC Thomson do this a lot with their reprints now and I wish they wouldn’t. It’s only a very slight alteration but, please, if you’re reprinting an A4 comic, use A4 size paper!
The print quality is… strange, and has left some buyers underwhelmed. The new lead strip has solid black inks, but the reprints are not quite as deep black. Not grey by any means, just not pitch black.
So, a few negatives, but you’re not going to get these stories reprinted anywhere else, and for £8.99, it’s worth overlooking the flaws to have a nice cheap book. Plus, the book contains several strips drawn by Brian Lewis. What a great artist he was, and gone far too young.
Spellbound predated IPC’s Misty by two years and it has less horror but has a nice gothic supernatural feel. Well worth a read.
Lew Stringer
• Heritage Comics Presents Spellbound: Damian Darke and I Don’t Want To Be a Witch! is available here from AmazonUK (Affiliate Link) | ISBN: 978-1917436410
Head downthetubes for…
• Win Wiacek’s review of the collection on Now Read This
Comics archivist Julia Round has created a guide to DC Thomson’s fondly-remembered girls “mystery-thriller” comic of the 1970s, Spellbound, complementing her ongoing research into gothic comics, which also includes Misty.
• downthetubes, 6th November 2019: Mystery Artist Quest: A “Spellbound” Artist Identified
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Categories: British Comics, British Comics - Current British Publishers, Comics, downthetubes Comics News, downthetubes News, Features, Reviews
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