My dad rather cleverly put a condition on me getting a regular delivery of Thunder (home of Adam Eterno, the man who couldn’t die, and quickly gobbled up into Lion and Thunder, and, eventually, Valiant): it was that I also get regular delivery of the distinctly old-fashioned Look and Learn. A clever move: I loved it. You still can’t see much of Thunder on the web, but Look and Learn has it’s own wonderful website now. Incorporating the magnificent Arthur Mee‘s Children’s Newspaper. Hours of fun to be had by all boys and girls (as long as they have firmly entered middle age). (First three months of Adam Eterno, here, by the way).
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Nick 01.25.08 at 9:26 pm
Absolutely splendid – and Treasure too!
One nagging question remains – am I alone in remembering a Look & Learn spread some time in the late 60s about brave young Argentinian medical student Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara & his selfless struggle for justice for the poor of South America? No sign of it among the website images alas . . .
belle le triste 01.25.08 at 11:31 pm
when you say “old-fashioned” henry do you mean old-fashioned now (very true, but so’s lion and thunder) (ah lovely lovely WAR OF THE WHITE EYES) or old-fashioned THEN? bcz i don’t know if it WAS old-fashioned then (depends a bit when you were reading it perhaps, and what you were comparing it to): it was a more-or-less full-colour 60s upgrade of the eagle model (combining adventure strips with illustrated educational stuff)
i didn’t go straight from treasure to L&L, i read world of wonder for a while — which was self-consciously more science-heavy than history-heavy… i remember a picture of a man in a bodysuit holding two little pellets of plutonium and the blazing SF city over his shoulder that this tiny handful of future fuel would power!
also its best adventure strip wasn’t the weird romano-scifi epic the trigan empire but about a world threatened by scary androids
(actually one of the stories i remember really clearly from L&L was also called “the man who couldn’t die” — but this one was the villain not the hero, and the story got a bit boring after a while as he continued to fail to be killed in lame get-out-clause kinds of ways) (if i remember correctly the tale ended with him retiring from angry unkillable evil to live out eternity in the south of france, and sipping cocktails on the sea-front in final panel with his trouser-legs rolled up)
the best story in lion and thunder was janus stark the indiarubber man, victorian escapologist turned crime-fighter, drawn like adam eterno by Francisco Solano Lopez, who later went on to write a ton of european “erotic art” graphic novels
paul 01.26.08 at 12:21 am
Good grief, I haven’t thought of old Adam in ages. My gran used to bundle up Valiant, Hotspur (I think) and maybe another and post them across to me regularly. I’ll have to look into those links.
Kadin 01.28.08 at 2:33 am
Middle age? Why I’m not even near quarter-age and I have a big box full of Look & Learns that I love to read. The unsubtle, Kiplingesque racism of the Trigan Empire was always my favourite part.
Lionel Trilling 01.29.08 at 3:04 pm
“Incorporating the magnificent Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaper.”
Funny, I chucked out eight volumes of Arthur Mee’s Encyclopedia last year, clearing out the house of a loved one who had died. Was hard to throw them away.
Kept a couple of Look and Learn’s though. What a great magazine that was.
And I loved Adam Eterno and Janus Stark of Valiant.
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