More cornflakes airliners, more creative editing

The people at Kellogg's really had a lot of model airliners on their hands in 1985. Hot on the heels of all the ones they gave away with the Transformers comic, as documented in my blog here, they stuck a whole load more the next week to the cover of Secret Wars no. 10.

Secret Wars, from Marvel UK, was the same kind of thing as Transformers - fortnightly, half colour and half monochrome, containing reprints of American comics. But this one was printing Secret Wars, the big epic 12-issue limited series featuring all the coolest Marvel superheroes and supervillains in one big epic storyline! They do one of those practically every week in American comics now, but in 1984 it was a brand new concept and very exciting!

And, like Transformers, the British comic needed a backup strip to pad out the American material. They sensibly chose Alpha Flight - a comic that didn't feature any of the superheroes who were involved in the main story. As luck would have it, in fact, the only significant guest stars in the first twelve issues of Alpha Flight were the Invisible Woman and the Sub-Mariner, neither of whom were in Secret Wars, so it worked out very nicely!

Also like Transformers, Secret Wars was about to move up to weekly publication. This seems to have caused a bit of confusion for the editors and awkward juggling of the available pages. Unlike Transformers (which at the same time as going weekly switched to 24 pages and full colour), Secret Wars remained at 32 pages until no. 19, and so someone decided it needed another backup strip.

This issue, no. 10, was the last to follow the pattern of roughly twelve pages of Secret Wars and roughly twelve pages of Alpha Flight (American comics of the time usually came in at 23-24 pages). For the weekly issues, it changed to eight pages or so from each of Secret Wars, Alpha Flight and Iceman. Trouble is, no. 10 started new American issues of both its stories, so splitting them up was going to be a little complicated...

And so Secret Wars no. 10 proudly boasts a whole fourteen pages of the American Secret Wars issue #6, backed up by the first ten pages of Alpha Flight issue #4 - with just a bit of fiddling from those ingenious British comic editors.

Alpha Flight #4 was cover-dated November 1983, six months before the first issue of the American Secret Wars series. It was written and drawn by John Byrne, who was also doing Fantastic Four at the time, hence the crossover. And it starts by referencing what was happening in the concurrent Fantastic Four comic, naturally enough...

Which is pretty easy for the UK editor to adjust, since Secret Wars was also about Mister Fantastic being mysteriously abducted (it happens to him a lot) - only the last line of Sue's speech bubble needed to be altered, to give British readers the impression this was happening simultaneously with the Secret Wars story in this issue!

The change in handwriting was always so obvious when UK comics made these alterations - the Planet Terry ones were less glaring, weren't they? But that's the only dialogue change that was necessary to reprint this issue of Alpha Flight. There's just the problem of the page count to deal with. Most of the early Alpha Flight comics had a 17-page main story and a backup strip of 6 pages detailing the origin of one of the heroes. This one issue is the exception to that - the main story takes up the whole comic, clocking in at 22 pages. And it does rather look like John Byrne stretched it out to that length with a bit of unnecessary padding, so for the UK comic to trim it down a bit might have been a quality judgement as well as a practical one! These are pages 10 and 11:

Yes, that's what it looked like in the original American printing, with the colours messed up on the second page and a big white border between the two halves of what was supposed to be one big panel at the bottom. The UK reprint, which ended the episode at this point, decided the first half of that big panel was quite enough to establish the scale of the Master's base, and cut out a couple of panels from the top row to give us this cliffhanger ending:

I think that looks rather better than the original! So, just one week later, we get the next UK issue of Secret Wars!

Now weekly! And really crammed with comics! The 32 pages (which, unlike American comics, includes the covers) contain 10 pages of Secret Wars, 10 pages of Alpha Flight and 8 pages of Iceman! There's barely room for a couple of text pages explaining the changes to the readers, and certainly no space for the usual number of ads and other filler!

I don't really see why it was necessary to add the Iceman limited series to the comic - Secret Wars maybe needed to go down to 8 pages to avoid catching up with the American printing, but Alpha Flight was old enough that they could have increased the pagecount of that without a problem. They probably just didn't want it to be two-thirds of a comic that was meant to be about Secret Wars.

Anyway, we've already stripped out one page from the Alpha Flight story. Is there anything else we can cut, to make sure everything fits in this UK reprint? Oh yes, it seems John Byrne's got a bit lazy towards the end...

That's pages 19 and 20 of the original comic. And while you might say it's justified and necessary to show the sheer scale of the explosion, I think filling two pages with it is a bit much. Still, it made it easy to trim another page out for the UK reprint!

And so, once again, the day is saved, thanks to Alpha Flight and some clever editing!

Nice to know that people are still talking about me

Or at least about Ben Pride-more, from Durby in the UK. Starting about four minutes into a video otherwise dedicated to people born with unusual medical conditions, we get a brief feature of a memory man so extraordinary, you won't believe he exists.

 

I wonder that that guy will think when he hears about the many mnemonists nowadays who are much, much better than I am?

The robots have landed!

 What a lovely day! The sun's shining, it's almost warm outside, and I saw on Facebook a couple of days ago that the Golden Orbit comic fair is in Birmingham today, so I went along to see what was on sale...

These things have been going on since I was very young, and the little A5 flyers have always been in exactly the same format - the whole thing is very nostalgic! And what's more, there's always some treasure to be found in the many cardboard boxes full of comics being sold there - but today, I actually found EXACTLY the kind of thing I'd gone there hoping to get! New 'reading copies' of early Transformers comics from a 20p box! Including a copy of no. 2 that's superior to the one I've already got!

That's a great cover, by John Ridgway. I do love the little girl resolutely playing with her doll and paying no attention to the giant robots marching towards her! It's true - Transformers were very emphatically "boys' toys" in those days.

The original owner of these comics (2, 4, 5, 7 and 8) has punched holes in them to keep them in a ring binder, but that's not really a problem, because these comics had very wide white margins around the artwork, so the holes mostly don't affect it. Most importantly, this copy has the centrespread poster still intact! My other copy for some reason has the right hand half of it cut out.

This is another great example of how the British comic adapted the American source material (I assume everyone reading this has already read and enjoyed my excessive posting about Planet Terry in recent weeks). In the American version of Transformers #1, this double-page spread is part of the story - the British comic takes the pages out of sequence to put them in the centrespread, blacks out the two story panels at the top of the first page and (most fascinatingly) rewrites all the speech bubbles! They're replaced with more legible typewriting, and convey the same basic information, but often in slightly different words. Here's the American original for comparison:

The new copy of this comic I bought today isn't entirely complete, though - the original owner has cut out a picture of Ravage's roaring face from page 20!

Lucky I've still got that other copy, so I can assemble a complete story! I wonder what the previous owner did with that picture. Probably stuck it to the front of a school book, or maybe a private diary to scare off intruders!

Well worth 20p of anyone's money!

In another dimension, with voyeuristic intention

Okay, this is a thing - 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel. You can move pieces back in time and create alternate universes in a staggeringly complex way. Do people actually play this and know what's going on? I'm working on it, but I'm still not at the level of comprehension just yet. It does take me back to my schooldays, when we loved to play strange variants of chess games and fairy pieces. I'm sure I'll get the hang of time travel with a bit more practice, and then I'll use my new powers to take over the world!

I am Ben, son of George

 That's the best way to introduce yourself at Pridmore family gatherings, it seems - helps everybody keep track of the family tree. And I'm very glad I went to this one, and had the opportunity for a lot of family talk with Andy (son of Mick), Pete (son of Bill) and Alan (son of Syd).

Did you know that Walter Millership, who played for Sheffield Wednesday in the 1935 cup final, was a relative?

Continuing the theme

Want to get a lot more readers for your blog all of a sudden? Use a Simpsons quote and get shared on the sub-reddit Unexpected Simpsons! That really was an unexpected pleasure! Welcome to everyone who found my blog through that, and I'm sorry that this post isn't at all Simpsons-related.

But continuing the theme of things I'm not good at but occasionally feel I should try to become good at - driving a car. I'm going to a funeral tomorrow, down south, and have hired a car for the occasion. I really don't like driving, but once I've done it for a little while, I get back into the mood. And I only very rarely crash into things, so I'll probably be all right.

Or I could still chicken out and get the train. I'll see how I feel.

Why must I fail in every attempt at masonry?

 Among the things I've been trying to do lately is It, Myself. I'm not what you would call great at DIY, but I'd quite like to be more 'handy', and occasionally make attempts to do ambitious home-improvement projects.

The windows in my bedroom, you see, are skylights in a sloping roof. They've got roller blinds fitted, but the springy thing (I think that's the technical term) in one of them broke, and both of them are pretty useless at keeping light out - almost entirely transparent, in fact, which makes me wonder what the point of them is in the first place - so I decided to be practical and replace them.

It's harder than it sounds, you know. You can't just buy blinds of that unusual size off the shelf. But I got some inexpensive ones from Argos that cover the whole of the window area, and by means of bits of plastic and cardboard I had lying around the house improvised a way that they can be pulled down, stay in place, and block out maybe 90% of the sunlight. And it only took, well, a huge amount of getting things wrong, giving up, tearing it all down and starting again. But they're working now, more or less! And don't look completely ugly!

I'm cheering for Čilić

And not just because of the nice alliteration. He was really impressive against Rublev yesterday, and I always do like to see people who've been written off as past their best make an impressive return to top form against younger opponents. On the other hand, now Čilić is up against Félix Auger-Aliassime, who I also like to cheer for on the grounds that he's young and cool, so it'll be very conflicting.

It's all about date of birth, of course - I've described before how fascinated I am by the continued dominance of tennis players born in the 1980s, to the total exclusion of the younger generation, and it's still continuing now. There's still that total gap with men born in the first half of the 1990s, but there are quite a few top players now born in 1996 and later, so the interestingly small number at the bottom of this chart might yet get rather more boring and relatively large.

But on the other hand, there are also good players born in the early 2000s coming through now - Auger-Aliassime and also Jannik Sinner in the last 16 of the Australian Open. I'm hoping, for the sake of having an interesting piece of trivia, that these 21st-century boys will entirely squeeze out the nineties gang in years to come!

Feeling... unproductive

 This really is something I should know about myself after forty-five years, but whenever I set time aside to do all the cool "this would be a great thing to do if I had some spare time at my disposal" things in my head, I never actually manage to do anything. But never mind! With perseverance and forgetting about the whole concept expressed in the first sentence there, I'm sure I'll eventually get all those things done!

Shocking family secrets exposed

A sequel to the previous post, in which I wondered who the Barbara Pridmore in the 1939 register might be. Well, the answer is simple and obvious enough, as it turns out.

Just to recap, May Foster married my great-uncle George Harry Pridmore in 1917, shortly before he was killed in the war. By June 1921, she was a boarding house keeper in the census. By the following year, it seems she'd had to give that up, because she had a daughter, Barbara, on July 29th, 1922.

I'm thinking the registrar is a little unreasonably judgmental here - in the box for 'Name, surname and maiden surname of mother' he's just put "May Pridmore, of no occupation". Too obsessed with those empty father's name and occupation boxes to put 'nee Foster', or 'noble widow of gallant officer tragically killed in His Majesty's service', I assume.

Anyway, what May did for the next decade I'm not sure - a boarding house might not have been possible - but she married one Leonard Elliott in 1934, and as seen in the previous post was living with him and Barbara and also May's younger brother Harry Foster in the 1939 register. There's another name blacked out there, who'll just have to remain the subject of curiosity for now.

Barbara then married a John Foster in 1943. He must have been a connection of May's, you would think, but doesn't seem to be a close relative; I've tried to follow their family lines back through the old censuses, and I can't see where the two Foster families join up.

Barbara gives her father's name as George Harry Pridmore on the marriage certificate. Which isn't technically correct, what with him having died four years before she was born, but never mind. John is a lance sergeant in the army, and they probably had at least one baby after the war, but it would take more research of a type that I really won't allow myself to spend the time and money on right now to be sure of it. Nor am I going to dive into investigating who the 'May Pridmore' who witnessed the wedding could be! Surely Barbara's mother was still going by the surname Elliott at that time?

Still, Barbara officially joins the ranks of 'honorary Pridmores', like Billy (John William) Pridmore, the son of Albert's widow Margaret! It's an uncommon surname, it's nice to see it get an infusion of new blood here and there!

Detox

 I've said it before, once or twice over the years, but I really need to break my addiction to cherry coke. The amount of it I'm drinking has steadily increased just lately, so I'm going to go sort of luke-warmish-turkey and reduce my intake to much smaller and healthier levels for a while. We'll see how it goes...

Ahhh! A happy ending!

I'm sure you all remember my post from a week and a half ago about the fascinating adaptation of Planet Terry for the British Transformers comic, and have been eagerly awaiting the sequel ever since.

Well, I've finally acquired a copy of Transformers no. 25, and it's intriguing in many ways!

It came with a free gift of a Kellogg's Corn Flakes model airliner. So every copy of this comic you find in the wild, like this one, has a big rip on the cover and a strip of decaying 36-year-old sellotape. All the airliners no doubt fell apart and were thrown away within a few days of getting them, but at least some of the comics still survive!

Apart from all the intrusive cornflakes, this cover uses the cover of the American Transformers #6, the second half of which is reprinted inside. The speech bubble is a UK original addition, though; there isn't one on the American original. Simon Furman, at a guess, enlivening the cover with his characteristic speech patterns and tying in to the cornflakes airliner theme with the call-sign CF-one. It's those little attentions to detail that made the British Transformers comic so special!

Inside the comic, as it winds down towards the big new weekly full-colour relaunch, we find the penultimate two-page Chromobots episode, the final eleven pages of the American Transformers #6, the final five pages of Machine Man #19, the letters page, Robo-Capers, Matt and the Cat, fact files for exciting new toys Warpath and Ramjet, a mega Kellogg's Corn Flakes competition, and of course the final three pages of Planet Terry! The first year of British Transformers comics were mega!

The British Transformers no. 26 printed the entire American Transformers #7, incidentally - a whole 23 pages of Transformers in the Transformers comic! British readers had never seen the like - and never really would again...

But to return to the final appearance of Planet Terry, he's squeezed into the final three inside pages of this issue, all of them in monochrome. Here's how it starts:

We get an extra title at the top, which weirdly calls this story "The Saga of Princess Ugly, part 6". That was the title of the American Planet Terry issue #2, which was spread over the British Transformers nos. 20-23. The way it was spread over them was also interesting, so if your eye has been drawn to the much more interesting part of the pages above, feel free to skip the next couple of paragraphs, but...

"The Saga of Princess Ugly" in the American comic was split into three chapters, as per the old American comic tradition, but those chapters were of very irregular length - the kind of thing that's a real inconvenience for British reprint comics. Part 1 was six pages, part 2 was a whole nine, and part 3 was seven. The way they dealt with it is a great indication of how the British Transformers comic worked - for no. 20, they didn't have any American Transformers material available to them, and were printing the British-original "Raiders of the Last Ark". There were six pages of that in the British comic, backed up by the usual filler material including the last part of Machine Man issue #18, and the first part of Planet Terry issue #2.

With no. 21, they had a mere five pages of Transformers content, concluding "Raiders of the Last Ark", and so ample room to print the full nine-page part 2 of Planet Terry, if they dropped Machine Man for one issue, allowing his next story to be spread over nos. 22-25. The other pages of Transformers no. 21 were filled with the usual kind of stuff, including a thrilling four-page historical comic about Erik the Red.

Then for Transformers no. 22, the long-awaited American Transformers #5 was finally available, and the Transformers content could go back up to 11 pages per issue of the British title! The third part of "The Saga of Princess Ugly" could be chopped in half and spread over two issues, with a "part 4" added to the top of the first page of no. 23.

As we saw in the last blog post, the American Planet Terry issue #3 was titled "Secret of the Space Warp", and that was the title shown in the British Transformers no. 24, which printed five pages' worth of material from the first 19 American pages. So why they reverted to "The Saga of Princess Ugly" for the title of these final three pages (in which Princess Ugly neither appears nor is mentioned) is hard to fathom.

But that's just a sideline to the most interesting part of this British printing. Not only is the dialogue rewritten to explain what the Devourer is, the second panel is entirely different! I didn't remember that at all, but it came back to me as soon as I looked at this comic. It's been lifted from the bottom of page 9 of the American comic - part of the large chunk that was chopped out for the British Transformers fans!

A scene that really happened in the American original has been repurposed as a flashback to Terry playing a video game! Now that's some clever editing! Although it does raise the unanswered question of why this Devourer knows who Planet Terry is, and specifically wants to eat him!

Slightly less clever is the way the page number has been very clumsily scribbled out at the bottom right of the British printing, but with that excitement out of the way, there's not much to note about the final two pages...

Ahhh. From the British comic-readers' perspective, Terry has found his long-lost parents at last, and everybody's happy!

From American comic-readers' perspective, next issue they turn out to be statues, and Terry's quest continues for nine more issues. And he never does find his parents; it ends with him still endlessly searching. I prefer the British one!

トロン・ボーン

 "The Misadventures of Tron Bonne" is a PlayStation game from 2000. Someone mentioned the character and the game to me in passing twenty years or so ago and I hadn't thought about it since then, until it popped back into my mind yesterday morning for no reason at all. So I had to look it up and find what it was all about, and it does look like fun. Someone should re-release it on the Switch.

Rhyme chime

Have you ever noticed how many songs use the word 'again' as a handy rhyme for pain, rain and all the other things that song-writers like to agonize about, but the singer invariably pronounces it 'agen' so that it doesn't rhyme at all? Lots of songs that I really like do this, so I probably shouldn't be too horrid about the whole thing, but even a wonderful piece of music like Don McLean's "Castles in the Air" is very slightly marred by a sequence of pain/agen/remain/plain.

But on the other hand, the Victor Meldrew song in "The Beast in the Cage" rhymes 'then' with 'again', but John du Prez pronounces 'again' to rhyme with 'rain'.

Following the herd

It's "trending" on "Twitter" and all kinds of other "new-fangled" and "cool" things, but I have to admit Wordle is a really great game nonetheless. Not only do you only get one puzzle a day, avoiding the likelihood of getting hopelessly addicted to it, but it's a real brain-stretching kind of exercise, searching your vocabulary for a word that can fit the letters you know. Plus I got it in three guesses today, and that's way better than anyone else I know!

Overthinking it

 Okay, the Simpsons episode "I'm Spelling As Fast As I Can" was on TV today, and I've always had a serious problem with it, which I will now discuss at great length, because I've got nothing better to do with my time on a Sunday night.

Lisa Simpson is competing in a spelling bee and the evil organiser wants an adorable little boy to win it for publicity reasons, so offers Lisa a bribe of a college scholarship to throw the contest, and she refuses. And then it goes like this:

Evil organiser: All right, your word is 'whether' [or 'weather']

Other contestant: Which one? Can you use it in a sentence?

Evil organiser: Certainly. "I don't know whether the weather will improve."

Other contestant: Umm... W... E...

Evil organiser gleefully presses the 'wrong answer' button. Adorable little boy comes to the microphone.

Evil organiser: Your word is 'rigged', as in "this contest is rigged!"

Adorable little boy: R-I-G-G-E-D. Wigged.

Evil organiser: Bravo, my pet! You shall be champion! Assuming Lisa misspells this next word... The word is 'intransigence'! As in "the little girl's intransigence cost her the college of her choice!"

Lisa: Attention, everyone! I was asked to take a dive, but I won't do it! I-N-T-R-A-N-S-I-G-A-N-C-E!

Evil organiser: You fool! It's E-N-C-E!

Lisa: Oh my god, you're right!

Evil organiser: And now you lose everything! And I go back to whatever it is I do!

Okay, George Plimpton as the evil organiser is hilarious, and the whole scene is brilliant, but it annoys me. If he could eliminate another competitor with the weather/whether gag, he could have done that to Lisa too! Much better, and funnier, would be to have the first competitor be given the word 'sellout', spell it X-J-Z-Q-T and be cheerfully thrown a huge sack of money with a dollar sign on it, adorable Alex get 'rigged', then have Lisa be given the whether/weather gag and the evil organiser realise that she got it right because he hadn't noticed there are two words that sound the same, adorable Alex get another hilarious word, and then have Lisa get 'intransigence' wrong. That would be much better all round, and not an insult to the viewers' intelligence!

I have made this point before, every time the episode has been on telly. One time, I was in Cambridge the next day for an othello competition, and a very intelligent person, an actual Cambridge University professor and everything, who doesn't normally watch the Simpsons, was still laughing about having seen that episode and saying how brilliant the whole weather/whether bit was. It almost makes me think that the episode wasn't so much an insult to intelligence as to pedantic quibbling, but no. It's the rest of the world that's wrong.

Urble-durbly burble-urble!

 35 years ago today, the Thundercats episode "Berbils" had its first showing on British TV. It's the third in the series (or the second if you run the first two together into one big episode, like the BBC did), and it continues the gradual introduction of the characters and concepts - they build the Thundertank, meet some of the inhabitants of Third Earth, tangle with Mumm-Ra for the second time, and start to build the Cats' Lair.

The episode is cut down dramatically on the video version of "Exodus" that I blogged about before. The opening scenes are restructured - the previous episode "The Unholy Alliance" ends with a Mumm-Ra scene and "Berbils" starts with one, so when they're run together into one full-length animated film it starts with the scene of Lion-O and Snarf exploring the forest, then jumps back to Mumm-Ra and his attack on the Thundercats and their newly-constructed tank, then goes on to Lion-O meeting the Berbils for the first time. But then the video chops out a very large chunk of the episode, in which Lion-O defends the Berbils from Trollogs and Giantors, going straight to Mumm-Ra launching a final attack on Lion-O as a swarm of insects. Then it inserts a bit of the earlier Berbils scene from immediately before the Trollog attack, and then shows Mumm-Ra arriving and continues to the end of the original episode.

It's a strange decision to remove that plot entirely - it's a sequence that perhaps doesn't work quite right, since it basically involves Lion-O messing up the balance of co-existence among the races of Third Earth and not entirely learning the lesson that one shouldn't do that, but it's not a particularly bad part of the episode at all. You can chop it out without harming the narrative, but why did they need to?

I'm feeling productive

 I've successfully had a brief conversation with someone today in which I said I'd do something, which definitely counts as a successful accomplishment in itself (but I won't tell you exactly what I said I'd do just yet, in case I don't do it and end up looking stupid), and I also remembered I'd decided to resume learning Japanese on Memrise, and firmly resolved to do it tomorrow. So that's two significant achievements in one day!

Census Day again

The 1921 census has officially been released! So, even though accessing the records is an expensive business that will no doubt become cheaper at a later date, I've just had to budget for a certain amount of splurging on it, since my blogging about the 1911 census proved so popular with friends and previously unknown relatives alike!

Census Day in 1921 ended up being June 19th, when the people of Britain filled in their forms that had been printed with the date 24th April on them. But the particularly fun thing about 1921 is that all four of my grandparents were already alive at that time! So here's a brief overview of the census data, starting as seems only right with a little baby girl in Wakefield...

My sainted grandma, who sadly died nearly four years ago now, was Dorothy Ada Bancroft, aged 1 year and 2 months at census time in 1921. She's living at 24 Cross Lane, Dewsbury Road, with her parents Herbert and Ada, Auntie Edith and Uncle George. Her dad is a motor mechanic, which was a very cool thing to be in 1921. Grandma was fond of telling people that her parents were going to emigrate to Australia until they found they were expecting a baby and so had to stay in Wakefield. Which is a little unfortunate, but I think it worked out for the best in the end.

Also available on the internet, less expensively, is the 1939 register - showing what people were up to in September 1939 and not protected by the rules requiring censuses to be kept secret for 100 years. Although it does black out anyone born under a hundred years ago who hasn't been officially ticked off as having died - here are the Bancrofts in 1939:

Grandma's still at home (now 18 Albion Street) with her younger brothers Leslie, Donald and blacked-out Kenneth and another Batty relative. Any thoughts of emigration are well and truly over by this point, but as the corrections to women's surnames made in later years show, Dorothy Bancroft / Ball / Robotham is about to go on some travels...

Bernard William Ball, aged five years and five months and probably already finding that with a name like that you're inevitably going to end up being called Bill Ball like your father, is at 223 Scotland Green Road, Ponders End, Enfield. He's the secret southern part of my heritage, and Grandma (who exclusively referred to him as "Aileen's father" in contradistinction to her second husband) would have lived her life down in London if he hadn't died tragically young, forcing her to move back up to Wakefield. I can't find him on the 1939 register (already in the army, maybe? Or just a transcription mistake meaning he's harder to search for?), but his parents and younger sister are at 16 Hyde Way, Edmonton, with grandma Emily and auntie Elsie...

And it would be rude to exclude Granddad, even if he wasn't technically my biological grandfather...

Lawrence Simpson Robotham, a two-year-old with two surnames for his given names, is at Hillside, Bradford Road, Wakefield. By 1939, at 41 Cliff Park Avenue, he's twenty years old, still with his parents and blacked-out younger brother John, and working as an order & shipping clerk. That's where my accountant genes come from, you know - it runs in the step-family.

Moving over to my dad's side of the family (who, since he was a very late baby, are all much older than my mother's side), we find my other grandma, who died long before I was born.

Catherine Violet Millership, of 248 Penistone Road, Sheffield, is 21 years old and taking care of her widowed father, four brothers and one sister. And I have to say, whoever filled this census form in has absolutely beautiful handwriting! If only they were all as clear and legible as this one!

She's probably already seeing Sid Pridmore, who lives nearby...

He's at 34 Hunt Street, chronicled in detail on my 1911 blog post, and now just occupied by his widowed father and stay-at-home older brother Oswald. Sid and Cath got married in April 1922, and had their first baby, Uncle Bill, in September that year, so it was obviously a bit of a hasty marriage - they and their rapidly-growing family lived at Penistone Road for a couple of years before getting a place of their own, where we find them in the 1939 register.

72 Robey Street isn't a particularly big house, but the Pridmores certainly managed to fill it up. Uncles Bill, Ted, Syd, Mick and Bernie are blacked-out, and this blog entry is dedicated to the memory of Mick, who sadly died this very morning aged 92, just as I was getting all excited about writing up the family history. Uncle Robert was four months away from being born at the time the register was taken, and my dad, who took everyone by surprise in 1946, wasn't even dreamt of.

And to catch up on the Pridmores of that 1911 summary, or their survivors...

Ernest Pridmore is still living at 4 court, 1 Shepherd Street - those back-to-back houses in the courts were tiny, but Ernest and Elizabeth still manage to raise their six children and find space for Elizabeth's brother Herbert!

By 1939, the widowed Ernest has left the court at last and moved in with daughter Nellie at 164 Southey Green Road.

Albert Pridmore was killed in 1917, and his widow Margaret is now living with her five children at 71 Hollis Croft. The census form doesn't give any indication as to how she's supporting the big family. She died in 1931.

John Thomas Pridmore was the first of the family to be killed in the war. His widow Harriet and their three children are living at 2/3 Ellison Street. In 1939, she's still living in the back-to-back houses, 5 court 1 Granville Street, but she's got the place to herself.

I draw a blank searching for Arthur Edward Pridmore's widow Annie in 1921 - she'll have to be the subject of further research in the future.

The families of Pridmore daughters Florence and Lilian are living in the same address, 10 Brough Street, and John May doesn't consider himself the head of the household, but for some reason they did two separate census returns. Florence had died of pneumonia the previous year, but her husband James William Palmer and their three children form one half of the household, with John Charles May, Lilian May May and their daughter being the other half.

By 1939, the merged family had moved into Hunt Street with brother Oswald.

Wilfred Pridmore had died in March 1921, not long before the census. His widow Chloris lives at 15 Silver Street, and has a visitor on census day, at least. Chloris died in 1933.

George Harry Pridmore, the second lieutenant, died in 1918, and his widow May had by 1921 opened a boarding house at 129 Whitehouse Lane.  In the 1939 register, she is remarried and living at 555 Herries Road with a Harry Foster (that was May's maiden name) and a Barbara Pridmore who subsequently married a John Foster in 1943. 

And I will need to research Barbara some more. She was born in 1922, her mother's maiden name was also Pridmore (presumably unmarried, but let's not cast any aspersions until we're sure), she wasn't the cousin Barbara who you can see in the comments of my post from ten years ago, but I have no idea where she fits into the family tree.

Which is just typical, isn't it? I'd firmly resolved that I can't spend any more time or money on family tree research in the immediate future, and I'd just limit myself to a carefully considered list of relatives to chronicle, and the very last name on the list gives me a tantalising mystery to solve! Genealogy - it's a terminally addictive thing...

Secret of the Space Warp

 For Christmas, I bought my brother a really cool comic book - Planet Terry, the complete collection! To understand just why that's so cool, you need to cast your mind back to 1985, when the coolest thing in the world (to eight-year-olds, at least) was Transformers.

The Transformers comic produced by Marvel Comics' UK offices had a bit of a problem in the early days. It started out in late 1984 as a fortnightly comic - some pages in monochrome and others in colour, as was the norm for this kind of thing - with the idea being that each issue would reprint half of an issue of the American Transformers comic, and the rest of the pages being filled up with any other comics that came to hand. And when the children of Britain inevitably moved onto the next big thing in a few months' time, Marvel UK would move on with them.

Thing is, Transformers turned out to be much bigger than anyone had expected - the American four-issue bi-monthly series was turned into an ongoing monthly title, but there was a three-month lag before it started, and the UK comic had caught up with it. They had to start creating their own Transformers stories, until American stuff was available to them! By amazing good fortune, Simon Furman soon got the job of writing these stories, and produced real works of literary quality where absolutely any dross would have sufficed, and the greatest era of British comic history had begun!

But there was still a definite shortage of material to fill a fortnightly British comic. By number 16 (20th Apr - 3rd May 1985), they only had six pages of Transformers comic to put in it, and so needed another backup strip to pad out the comic along with Machine Man. The qualifying criteria for Transformers backup strips was that there had to be a robot in it, and so the first thing the Marvel UK editor found was Planet Terry, a new American series. Terry wasn't a robot, but his sidekick Robota fitted the bill.

Planet Terry was part of Marvel USA's Star Comics brand - mainly designed for comic adaptations of children's cartoons (Ewoks, Get Along Gang, Muppet Babies, all that kind of thing) but also containing several titles in the style of Harvey Comics with adventures aimed at younger children than the usual Marvel titles were.

Everyone hated Planet Terry - or claimed to, at least. Personally, I always loved it, but when you're eight years old (nearly nine), you have to be careful about admitting to liking the part of a comic that's conspicuously written for younger readers than the rest of it. I'm sure a lot of other readers felt the same, because Planet Terry is really, really good! It didn't last long in the Transformers comic, ending in number 25, after which UK Transformers (having become stupendously, unbelievably popular with UK kids!) went weekly, full colour, and containing at least 11 pages of actual Transformers comic content in every single issue!

Reading the complete collection of the American Planet Terry series, most of which I'd never seen before, I was familiar with some parts, but had no recollection of others. My brother - who, as I've lamented many times before, has a much better memory than me - looked at it and said "Oh, that's interesting - to get to a suitable ending point in the British comic, they cut from the first tier of page 4 of the American issue #3 to the second tier of page 18! They must have changed the dialogue a little to make it work, but I don't remember quite how..." I personally don't think anyone should be able to remember in such detail a comic they read at the age of seven, but since our copy of the key issue number 24 of the British comic was lost many decades ago, we had no way to check exactly what it did.

Until.. today! Because I've bought on eBay a copy of that treasure, and can show the world how fascinatingly complex the adaptation of Planet Terry really was!

Wow, that's a great cover. Is it any wonder we loved this comic so much? The UK comic used the covers to the American one when they were available, but most of the time they had to create their own, and the UK originals looked so much better! And then, Shockwave was always super-cool, because he was one of the many American toys that weren't available in this country, so had that unattainable air of mystery about him! 

But anyway, the Planet Terry backup strip starts out with a straight reprinting of the first few pages of the American Planet Terry #3. American version from the collected edition on the left, British version from the Transformers comic on the right. And note how good the editor of the UK Transformers comic was - the credit for 'colorist' has been anglicised to 'colours' in the small print at the bottom of the page. It's all the stranger, since there's no colouring on most of the Planet Terry story in this issue - it's confined mostly to the monochrome pages!

But what's that at the bottom of page 3? The British comic has removed the bottom tier and replaced it with the first tier of page 4! This is how the American comic continued from that point...

And then Terry is abducted and forced to take part in a series of space arcade games! It's not until page 18 that he manages to get back to his spaceship and get back on track to finding his parents...

While the version of the story in the UK Transformers comic starts with the second tier of page 4, then leaps to the bottom three tiers of page 18!

That's a fascinating edit. If they'd left the original bottom tier of page 3 in place, it would have fitted more smoothly - I guess the editor (I'm assuming Ian Rimmer, though I wouldn't be astonished to find it was Simon Furman, who was very good at this kind of thing) thought it was necessary to retain the pathos of Terry's "picture of his parents" (an empty frame that he himself has signed "To Terry, love Mom & Dad" because he's sure that's something they would have said). It's been seen before in the series, but it's referenced a few pages later in the American comic, reprinted in the next British issue.

This means that the dialogue in the second panel of the top tier (a feed-line for a silly joke in the removed part of the American issue) has to be rewritten, as do Terry's and Robota's lines in the second tier. It's done very well, too! The British Transformers comic later developed a reputation for really obvious rewriting of the American material in clumsy and ugly handwriting, but these changes are almost unnoticeable!

Then the two versions of the story synch up for the final page of the British printing - which gets to appear in full colour, unlike the rest of the story!

There are only three remaining pages of the American comic, which seem to conclude with Terry finding his parents at last. The first page starts with Terry identifying the monster as "the Devourer who escaped game one!", so that must have been changed in the British printing of Transformers number 25. Don't worry, I've got one of those on order too, so I'll make sure the world knows exactly what those last three pages looked like to UK readers in 1985 as soon as it arrives!

I really did love Planet Terry. They don't make comics like they used to!

Leagues and leagues

How long is a league, anyway? Apparently it's "any of several European units of measurement ranging from 2.4 to 4.6 statute miles (3.9 to 7.4 km). In English-speaking countries the land league is generally accepted as 3 statute miles (4.83 km), although varying lengths from 7,500 feet to 15,000 feet (2.29 to 4.57 km) were sometimes employed. An ancient unit derived from the Gauls and introduced into England by the Normans, the league was estimated by the Romans to be equal to 1,500 paces—a pace, or passus, in Roman measure being nearly 5 feet (1.5 metres). Land leagues of about 2.63 miles (4.23 km) were used by the Spanish in early surveys of parts of the American Southwest. At one time the term was also used as a unit of area measurement. Old California surveys show square leagues equal to 4,439 acres (1,796 hectares). In the late 18th century the league also came to refer to the distance a cannon shot could be fired at menacing ships offshore. This resulted in the 3-mile offshore territorial limit." Which is a really useful thing to know, isn't it? How long is a league? Well, it could be just about anything, really.

One thing with better-defined rules is the Memory League, which is holding its first World Championship at the end of the month. I haven't qualified for it, which is the kind of thing that makes me resolve to do more training - really, if I can't be one of the top sixteen memory athletes in the world who have the time to qualify for and compete in a friendly online tournament, what kind of Memory Man am I? So I am officially going to devote myself to getting back up to speed and beyond on quickfire memory challenges! I can still memorise a pack of cards in under 30 seconds, after all, and that used to be a really big deal, so I'm sure I can catch up with the best (or nearly best) in the other disciplines too! I'll keep my devoted readers informed about my progress!

Mission Accomplished!

 I tend to get unreasonably stressed about things like getting a new washing machine delivered, so I'm pleased to report that the whole operation today went just swimmingly. And not in a literal sense, though I always expect disastrous floods of water to accompany this kind of thing. So now, having stood and watched while the very helpful man connected the new machine up and took the old one away, I feel like a real expert plumber and can successfully tick today off my 'do something constructive every day' list. What will tomorrow's great achievement be?

The Nose Knows

Now this is a blast from the past. When I was very young, I really loved a series of books about the McGurk Mysteries - about a gang of kids who solved, if not crimes as such, then definitely mysterious puzzles. They were really great, and it was a source of great annoyance to me that the library at Horncastle didn't have two of the books listed on the back. I was missing some mysteries! These are the editions I knew, but it seems there were plenty of different versions with different illustrations...

And it turns out I was missing more than I thought I was! Everyone needs to check out these YouTube videos by Sean, who shares my love of Chromobots and was decent enough to remind me of the wonders of McGurk! And there were way more than the eight books I was aware of in my younger days! I need to track them all down now and read them again!

I still only remember a few bits of the stories - now I've seen those videos, I'm fairly sure the ones the library was missing were The Nervous Newsboy and The Rabbit Rip-Off, and I read the rest of the first eight. I only remember a few particularly clever bits - Willie's flamboyant hand-kissing as an excuse to sniff people's hands, Brains claiming to be able to analyse handwriting but actually guessing who wrote what by what they wrote instead of how they wrote it, the invisible dog, and other little parts, but I'd love to refresh my memories and see what happened to the gang in later years!

Fascinatingly, it seems the author, E.W. Hildick, was British, writing about America. It's interesting, because as far as I can remember the stories were distinctly American in tone, but not so foreign as to be confusing or off-putting to an English reader who knew next to nothing about the USA (or, for that matter, anywhere much more than ten miles from his home). But maybe it'll feel different if I read them again, because I know I was surprised by another book I liked when I was young...

The Dragon Circle, by Stephen Krensky. I read it when I was very small, and I'm not sure if this copy that still lives on my bookshelves is the same one I had when I was young or one I found at a later date - you'd think I WOULD remember that, but you know what my memory's like. In any case, I liked it when I was tiny, either hung on to it or bought a new one when I found it in a charity shop, and read it again as an adult. And this book is VERY American! It's explicitly set in America, even though it's all about dragons and magic, and makes the point repeatedly that the dragons have relocated to America for the purposes of this book. I didn't remember anything about that at all! I remembered it as being a fun story about a magical family and the dragons they encounter, and as being the kind of thing that might well have happened right on my doorstep. To read it again and find it's chock-full of Americanisms (the very first page says it happens in Westbridge, Massachusetts and talks about the Salem Witch Trials, for crying out loud!) was a real shock to the system. Had I just blanked that whole aspect of it out of my memory?

So maybe I'll be equally shocked by the McGurk books if I rediscover them and read them again? I need to track them down, anyway!