Merry Christmas: 4 Days To Go

By John Freeman on 21 December 2009

Our run of Christmas covers continue as we countdown to Christmas Day.

By far the oldest of our Christmas covers for this year, the girl’s comic School Friend wished their readers “A Very Happy Christmas” in December 1962 with this compilation cover.

School Friend began in May 1950 and ran for almost fifteen years until January 1965 when it was amalgamated into June. While the comic’s best remembered strip was The Silent Three it does not feature in this issue. However this issue does have strips such as Sunny – The Girl With The Smiling Eyes, My School Friend Sara and the historical The Sign Of The Fish as well as a text story The Mystery Of Flint House by Jean Theydon. The Christmas issue continues beyond the front cover as most of the strips have a Christmas or winter theme to them.

Included in the text story is this Christmas message from the editor which shows the age of the title as included in the illustration of Santa reading a copy of the comic is a Golliwog toy.

The other interesting thing about this illustration is the message is from “The Editor and his staff” when the letters page in this girl’s comic is run by Sally Brooks of whom there are photographs. I wonder if that caused any confusion amongst the comics readers back then?

More Christmas covers tomorrow.

About the Author
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John Freeman

John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.

He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.