Cowboy cover reprints

In The Thriller Libraries we were able to index the mysterious and very scarce Australian cowboy comics for the very first time. These comic book titles were published by the Amalgamated Press, written, drawn and edited in the UK for exclusive printing in Australia in an attempt to recapture some of the market the A.P. had lost during and immediately after the war. Many of the stories were subsequently reprinted in Cowboy Comics, the first British comic pocket library.

A great many covers were also reused by Cowboy Comics but with variations. Take, for instance, Kit Carson issue 17, published in April 1951; the same cover was used on Cowboy Comics issue 30 in June 1951 but with coloured in an entirely different way to take advantage - I believe - of the better printing process used on the British Cowboy Comics.

The cover artist was Geoff Campion, who would have supplied a black & white image in the first instance; the colour separations were handled by someone else, probably Kay Ivens who was, at one time, Edward Holmes' secretary - Holmes being the editor of both the Australian A.P. comics and Cowboy Comics. Kay Ivens later left comics to become a nurse, but what happened to her after that is unknown.

Geoff Campion, a master of dynamic action scenes, clearly thought he'd captured a moment in this scene and reused roughly the same image for a Billy the Kid cover story in Sun in 1952.

(* Artwork © IPC Media)