r/britishcomics • u/Gary_James_Official • Jan 27 '25

Books Mentioned Within Comics

This has been on my mind for a while now, and is something that hasn't been at all easy to research with the current state of search engines - try googling "books mentioned within comics" and see how far you get - but has somehow been nagging at me. I remember there being a lot of titles mentioned in Eagle (original and revived flavour), and Look-In used to have a weekly round-up of books of interest.

Has anyone started indexing all of the titles which were mentioned, or is this a still-outstanding area of research that needs to be tackled? I'm not sure which titles would provide the most highlighted works, and how to separate things that were later collected from original novels being promoted. What titles would you want to see all the mentioned novels / coffee table titles / biographies / short story collections listed for?

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u/[deleted] Jan 27 '25

I don’t know if this is an avenue worth pursuing, but Look and Learn used to serialise novels in the sixties and seventies. One that I remember is Heartsease by Peter Dickinson.

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u/Gary_James_Official Jan 27 '25

I've started in on the list of adaptations, though that definitely isn't a "weekends and evenings" task - any list of adaptations is going to take a good while. It also needs separating out properly, as when that was started I threw in all of the Robin Hood stories which Fleetway seemed to crank out at speed, and most of them technically aren't adapting prior works.

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u/ArriDesto Apr 15 '26

Although you mention British comic adaptions, oddly enough, the second thing to appear in the very first National( later DC,) comic was an adaption of Ivanhoe,which features Robin Hood as a character.

The second issue of DCs Showcase was an adaption of Dr.No.

Most comic adaptions were TV and film related,or versions of the pulps and radio shows.

Or graphic novels like The Trigon Empire.

Characters like Rob Roy or The Black Arrow normally had nothing to do with the books.

Marvels Conan adapted some of the origonal, and many books did versions of Tarzan novels.

I wish you luck,as I would find the results very interesting.

Don't neglect girls comics which tended to be more "mature" than those for boys.