Smash! (comics)

In 1966 the initial success of Wham! (which had launched in 1964 and quickly built up strong circulation figures) encouraged Odhams' London management to publish a second title, conceived by Alf Wallace (Managing Editor of Odhams' juveniles – Eagle, Swift and Boys' World) and Albert Cosser.[12] Leo Baxendale, who had created Wham! for Odhams in 1964, was too heavily embroiled with ongoing production on it, providing much of the art for each issue, so had little time for anything else. Also, Baxendale was then still working at long range from Dundee, Scotland (DC Thomson Ltd, Baxendale's former employers, were based in Dundee).

Accordingly, it was Alf Wallace and Albert Cosser (soon to be known to their young audience as Alf and Cos) who determined the initial format of Smash! They also recruited the artists who would draw the early issues, as it was plain that Baxendale was fully occupied with the art for Wham! Hence Baxendale's initial contribution to Smash! was limited to providing a list of titles and situations for the humour strips, together with brief written scenarios (script ideas for the individual weekly issues), which he gave to Wallace to be farmed-out to other artists. The Swots and The Blots was one of these.[13] Ironically, Baxendale's strips would eventually become a major contribution to Smash!, after March 1969, but only because the closure of Wham! freed him to work on Smash! instead.

Initially, Baxendale was asked only to create the Bad Penny strip, and to give Grimly Feendish (a character from his Eagle Eye, Junior Spy strip then running in Wham!) a strip of his own. Wallace also had Baxendale draw the covers for the first three issues.[13]

Smash! launched with the same format as the early issues of Wham!, namely 24 pages per issue, four of which were in colour. But it was printed on lower-quality paper than Wham!.

The initial lineup of strips mixed humour and adventure freely, with the comedic Ronnie Rich featuring on the cover of the first issue.

Leo Baxendale left Odhams in 1968, and transferred to Fleetway Publications, another IPC subsidiary, but he still contributed strips to Smash! — just not under his own name. For instance, for strips like Bad Penny and Grimly Feendish, Baxendale penciled the drawings, and Mike Brown, an animator by trade, inked them in. In this way, they together turned out large numbers of the strips, which they sold to Odhams under Brown's name — a situation Baxendale referred to, in his 1978 autobiography, as working "undercover":[25]

I was in a delightful situation. Working under my own name, a lot was expected of me. Publishers expected me to cram my drawings with funny detail. A double standard operated. Working undercover, I was able to reduce the layouts to the simplest terms. Backgrounds were minimal or non-existent – just a horizon line. And there was no ancillary comic detail – just the characters acting out the storyline against an empty backdrop."[26]

Some of Smash!'s best-remembered strips were only acquired in issue #137 (14 September 1968), from the merger with Pow! — which had already absorbed the most popular strips from its previous merger with Wham!. The most notable of these strips were The Cloak by Mike Higgs,[27] and Wiz War by Mike Brown.

The Cloak by Mike Higgs
Secret agent strip about The Cloak, the top agent for Britain's Special Squad, nominally a part of Scotland Yard; but he usually operates from his personal headquarters, known as the Secret Sanctum. The Cloak's ingenuity and never-ending supply of gadgets and secret weapons give him the edge over his somewhat odd enemies (some are very odd, including Deathshead and various other agents of G.H.O.U.L.). He has some equally odd colleagues. Assisted initially by Mole (the tall one with the bald head, big nose, and spectacles) and Shortstuff (the short squirt with the hairy nut and big eyeballs), he then begins having adventures in which he finds himself also alongside the sexy and flirtatious Lady Shady, the shady lady. The strip benefited from the unusual, idiosyncratic drawing style of Higgs, whose overt inclusion of pop culture imagery made the strip seem extremely modern.

Wiz War by Mike Brown
The "War" in the title refers to a feud between two wizards, Wizard Prang[lower-alpha 8] and his enemy Demon Druid. Other than the fact that Prang is robed entirely in white, befitting his status as the good guy, and Demon Druid is always in black, being the villain of the piece, their costumes are quite similar — a flowing wizard's robe with stars on it, and a pointed hat. They fly around on broomsticks, zapping each other with spells which turn the other into a toad or something equally amusing. Wizard Prang is alternately helped and hindered by Englebert, his pet bird. The best feature of the strip is the sign above Wizard Prang's front door. This usually reads "Wizard Prang is... In" (if he is at home) or "Wizard Prang is... Out" (if he is out and about); but if he's had a bad time in the story, the sign would often make a humorous remark in the final panel, such as "Wizard Prang is... All at Sea." Brown seems to have been unaware of the house rule banning artists from signing their work, as the strip often bore his name. Wiz War was one of a handful of strips to survive the changes of 1969.

Unfortunately canceled in the merger with Pow! were the Smash! strips Charlie's Choice, Ronnie Rich and The Man From B.U.N.G.L.E.. Also lost in this merger, in effect, was Ken Reid's Dare-A-Day Davey strip, one of several established features in Pow which were dropped instead of transferring to Smash!.[28]

Smash! and Pow! Incorporating Fantastic issue 144, 2 November 1968

Whereas 1968 began with all five Power Comics titles apparently flourishing, by the year's end only Smash! was still being published.[29] The increasingly frantic series of mergers resulted in ever more ludicrous titles, culminating in the astonishing Smash and Pow incorporating Fantastic (commonly spoofed as Smash, Pow, Wham, incorporating Fantastic and Terrific).

The repeated falls in the value of the pound sterling against the U.S. dollar in 1968 significantly increased the cost of publishing the American strips, which had to be paid for in dollars, and raised the daunting specter of further increases if the pound fell in value yet again. Increasing the cover price of the Power Comics titles to compensate was impossible because of stiff competition (with sales on a sharp downward spiral, as circulation fell victim to the ever-increasing popularity of television); so the fall in the value of sterling made the American strips unaffordable. Smash! had launched in February 1966 with a cover price of 7d for 24 pages. By March 1969, although its cover price had not changed, circumstances had conspired to increase its page count, such that each issue now contained 36 pages. In fact, the page count jumped overnight from 24 to 36 pages (a fifty percent increase), with a consequent sharp rise in production costs, and so a marked decline in profit-per-copy.

The tipping point was issue #144, in which Smash!, Pow, and Fantastic were merged into a single title. The recently created Smash! and Pow! lost its Daredevil and Spider-Man strips, which together had comprised a full third of each 24-page issue, but now had to accommodate both Thor and Fantastic Four from the other discontinued titles, plus a whole slew of new British adventure strips (which were being added in preparation for the comic's impending transition to solely-British content).

All this could not be achieved within the standard Smash! format of 24 pages. So IPC now "bit the bullet" and increased the page count, at a single bound, by fifty percent – a necessity if they were to achieve their intention of reproducing with Smash! the successful formula which was buoying-up sales of their most popular titles, Lion and Valiant, both of which were 36-pagers (in effect, to produce another clone of them: an identical mix of adventure and humour, with an identical page count, at an identical price).

As for actual losses incurred due to the sudden and unexpected nature of the problem, and the inability to quickly terminate the long-term contracts with the Americans, Smash! as sole survivor couldn't hope to generate enough income on its own to meet these. In fact, it didn't need to. Because the Power Comics line was published by Odhams Press Ltd, a subsidiary company with limited liability, meant that it was possible to ring-fence all debts on the Odhams publications within that one company, thus preventing any losses affecting the rest of the IPC Group (since IPC's other titles were all published by other IPC subsidiaries). Accordingly, with effect from 1 January 1969 Smash! was transferred to IPC Magazines Ltd, a new IPC subsidiary formed during 1968,[30] leaving Odhams with no continuing titles; Smash! started again from scratch.[lower-alpha 9]

A notable feature of the Odhams years was how few advertisements Smash! carried. There were occasional quarter-page inserts, mainly advertising foreign postage stamps for stamp collectors, or Subbuteo table-football; but they were few and far between, and their combined total didn't usually exceed one page per issue.

Reflecting its financial problems, the relaunched comic under IPC Magazines carried a significantly greater amount of advertising. One obvious change was the back cover (the only in-colour page apart from the front cover), which gradually began to carry colourful full-page advertisements. On the inside pages, too, there was a much more noticeable quantity of adverts: each issue typically carried four full-page ads, plus two half-page ads. It was a noticeable feature of the relaunch that the comic now expanded to 40 pages, in order to cope with the need to carry an extra four pages of advertising in each issue.[32] This was a potentially significant new strategy and a major change of policy. No longer did the profitability of the comic rest exclusively with the income derived from its sales figures. That sales income was now supplemented by advertising revenue, and without even having to sacrifice any significant amount of page space, nor cancel any strips, thanks to adding the additional pages.

In consequence of the decision to discontinue the American reprints, as each Power Comics title closed, its superhero strips were given up. Only in the case of Fantastic, where the existing contract with Marvel had some months to run, were those strips transferred to its replacement, the merged Smash incorporating Fantastic, until the contract expired in March 1969.

From issue 144 in November 1968 Smash! was the only surviving Power Comics, as this was the issue in which Smash and Pow! (as it then was called) merged with Fantastic. To plug the gap left by the loss of the withdrawn American superhero strips which had been major features of the four closed titles, five British adventure serials were introduced in this issue: At Night Stalks... The Spectre, Destination Danger, Laird of the Apes, King of the Ring, and Brian's Brain. All five strips commenced in issue 144; and all were serials, with cliff-hanger endings each week.

At Night Stalks... The Spectre
A crime reporter on the Daily Globe newspaper is apparently killed while investigating a news story. The world believes newspaperman Jim Jordan is dead, but he still carries on his crusade against crime, calling himself The Spectre.[lower-alpha 10] Jordan/The Spectre is now fighting crime, rather than merely reporting it, using an array of gadgets that make it seem he is the ghost of the missing reporter. Hence his opponents are terrified to find that if they shoot him he doesn't die (thanks to a bullet-proof raincoat). And he has a secret underground hideout beneath the statue erected in his memory, from which he covertly and unexpectedly emerges, or disappears into, under cover of an artificial fog, to give the impression he is coming and going from the spirit world. In his first case he tracks down Black Murdo, the racketeer who the world believes had murdered him.

Destination Danger
A motor racing serial about a feud between a young English racing driver, Jeff Jackson, who is working for Puma Motors in the U.S., and his enemy Vic Stafford, the Puma team's chief driver, who has taken a bribe to throw a forthcoming race.

Laird of the Apes
A science fiction strip set in the 18th century. A young Scottish laird returns to the Highlands to aid his outlaw clansmen in their struggle with the English Redcoats, bringing with him a band of highly trained apes. The strip was created to milk the popularity of the big-budget Charlton Heston motion picture Planet of the Apes which had been released earlier that year.

King of the Ring
A sports adventure strip about wrestling champion Ken King (although in the earliest strips he began as a boxer). As was not exactly uncommon in the Odhams years, there was a tendency to give the characters silly names. The most outrageous example in this strip was King's manager, who (in spite of not being Irish) was called Blarney Stone. Blarney's real name was originally Tim Stone, and Blarney was only a nickname, but this was soon forgotten. In order to fulfill Ken's ambition to travel, Blarney agrees to manage him on a world tour, if he'll agree to fight his way around the world.

In January 1969 Odhams ceased to exist as a publishing imprint, and Smash! now became an IPC Magazines publication. Despite being the longest survivor, and inheriting many popular strips from the other four Power Comics titles, Smash! was only a limited success.

Most of the consequences of the change in publisher didn't become apparent until the issue cover-dated 15 March, in which the comic changed dramatically, dropping the last remaining Marvel superhero strips, to shed the expense of the licensing fee for using them (having already dropped Batman), and ending many other strips too. Two new adventure strips joined the lineup, however, the reprint strip Sergeant Rock - Paratrooper and Bunsen's Burner. They were really a part of the coming relaunch, but were introduced slightly ahead of time to disguise that fact.

Sergeant Rock — Paratrooper by John Vernon[33]
Introduced with issue #156 (25 Jan. 1969), this strip featured World War II stories of the "Red Devils" of the Parachute Regiment. Initially, Sgt. Rock[lower-alpha 11] is merely a narrator, introducing stories featuring other characters, so that the strip is actually tales-of-the-parachute-regiment rather than tales of Rock himself. This was a device for reprinting old war stories from other comics. The reprints in Smash! were reasonably successful, running for a year; and Rock eventually featured as more than just narrator, with later editions sending him into action with the SAS, and marking the change by altering the title to Sergeant Rock - Special Air Service. This change was noticeable also by a change of artist; seemingly – from the similarity of style – to the artist on the discontinued humour wartime strip Nutt and Bolt the Men from W.H.E.E.Z.E.. The strip originated in Hurricane (where it ran 4 July 1964 – 8 May 1965), and was continued in Tiger when it absorbed Hurricane in the issue dated 15 May 1965.

Bunsen's Burner
Introduced in issue #158 (8 Feb. 1969), an adventure yarn with humorous overtones – its humorous content being trailed in its title: a reference to an item familiar to most schoolboys from chemistry class. Ben Bunsen is the owner of a vintage car known as "the Burner" because it is so old it is steam-driven! Like an old-fashioned steam train, it has a boiler which has to be stoked, as it runs on coal instead of petrol. Ben and his pal have to drive the Burner around the world, as a condition of Ben inheriting his uncle's fortune; but a rival claimant (shades of the later strip His Sporting Lordship!) is secretly out to stop them. (Bunsen's Burner was discontinued during the reshuffles of August 1969, when various changes were quietly made to the comic over the course of a month.)

IPC had waited three months to relaunch Smash!, because, on the one hand, it needed some lead-time in which to ready new strips, and, on the other, in the publishing industry spring was traditionally considered a good time to launch a new (in this case, a virtually new) comic.[2] With the first relaunch issue (#163, dated 15 March 1969), Smash! then introduced a new cover feature, new strips, and free gifts. In all but name, it was a new comic.

The symbol of the change was the new cover feature, Warriors of the World (replacing The Swots and Blots, which, drawn by Mike Lacey, had occupied the cover during the final part of the Odhams years; happily, The Swots and the Blots survived — and prospered — on the inside pages, now drawn by Leo Baxendale).[34] The Warriors of the World cover feature was an illustration of a historical army or militia with a short text description. The relaunch issue's cover feature was entitled Warriors of the World No.1, and Smash!'s former numbering was discontinued.[35] To have maintained the original sequential numbering alongside the Warriors of the World series could only have caused confusion.

Within the British market, boys' comics for the age group which was too old for titles such as The Beano, The Dandy, and Sparky tended to focus around adventure, sport, and war — in titles such as Lion and Valiant — or humour — in titles such as Buster. With the relaunch, Smash! sought to attract readers of both types, by offering traditional adventure as well as humour. In so doing, it became the last ever British comic to feature a varied mix of adventure, humour, and sports-themed stories. Subsequent boys' comics featured exclusively sports, or war, or humour; such as Scorcher and Score and Shoot (which featured only soccer), and Action and Battle (which featured only war stories).[36]

The revamped Smash!, now comprising 40 pages, featured all-British strips – adventure serials, humour strips, and sporting strips – but strictly no American superheroes.[36] One other aspect of the change: under the umbrella of IPC Magazines Ltd, the editorial team of Alf and Cos was replaced by a single editor, identified only as "Mike."[37] A hallmark of the new editorial policy of mixing serious and humorous strips was to be the even-handedness with which Mike and the editorial staff drew the multitude of reprint strips featured in the new Smash!. There were strips from Lion — Eric the Viking (originally Karl the Viking) and The Battle of Britain (originally Britain in Chains) — and from Buster — Wacker (originally Elmer), Monty Muddle - The Man from Mars (originally Milkiway — The Man from Mars), and Consternation Street. The number of reprint strips was another significant indicator of its troubled financial situation, reprints being significantly cheaper than commissioning new strips.

Of the former Odhams strips, only a handful survived. Humour strips that continued were The Swots and the Blots, Wiz War and Bad Penny. Additionally, Percy's Pets made occasional appearances (but did not appear every week). Much mourned were the loss of The Cloak and The Man from B.U.N.G.L.E., dropped due to the waning popularity of spy spoofs (in 1968 the TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. had been canceled); and especially mourned was the loss of Ken Reid and The Nervs. The serious offerings fared even worse. The only genuine survivor from the adventure strips of the Odhams years was King of the Ring, and even that had only begun with issue #144, in November 1968.

In light of how few strips of any sort survived from the Odhams era, and given that none of the superhero strips survived at all (which, according to the letters pages[lower-alpha 12] were the most popular feature of the Power Comics line), it would be stretching the truth to say that Smash! inherited the best of the Odhams strips. Stylistically, The Swots and the Blots was the most creative and sophisticated Odhams strip (save only The Nervs), and it did survive. But it was only one strip. And The Nervs, which was objectively a more sophisticated strip in 1968, did not.

After a few months, superheroes appeared to be making a comeback. The editorial column admitted receiving complaints from readers about the loss of the Marvel strips; and, in the autumn of 1969, six months after the Fantastic Four and Thor had been dropped, an all-British superhero called Tri-Man appeared, debuting in the issue of 13 September; the character also featured in the Smash! Annual that Christmas. (Some indication of the effort put into this character is the fact that he was given sole possession of the front cover of the Annual.) But the strip did not prove popular, and quietly vanished in the reshuffles of 1970.

Moreover, the publisher was taking a significant risk by re-launching the former Power Comic as, in effect, a clone of IPC's most popular titles, Lion and Valiant. The publisher hoped it could repeat the success of those titles by copying their successful formula. Nevertheless, compared to its stablemates and without its discontinued superheroes, Smash! had nothing unique about it that might attract new readers, featuring as it did a mix of strips reprinted from (or based on the style of) Lion and Buster.

After 22 weeks, in August 1969, a new round of changes hit Smash!. Six months earlier, various humour strips had been introduced as replacements for the (far more surreal) humour of Ken Reid, whose strip The Nervs had so disturbed IPC's management. Now another change was forthcoming, and one which reflected the pervasive sporting theme of the relaunched Smash!: two new association football strips — the humorous The Touchline Tearaways and the serious serial entitled The Handcuff Hotspurs began (replacing the departed – and rather more humorous – World Wide Wanderers). In addition, Nutt and Bolt the Men from W.H.E.E.Z.E. was dropped, and replaced from the 23rd issue by a more serious World War II strip, Send For... Q-Squad. These three new strips represented a minor change of emphasis, replacing two of the more whimsical offerings with two entirely serious strips – even though the third new entry (which was only a single-page) was simply one outright cartoon strip replacing another.

Send For... Q-Squad by Eric Bradbury
The adventures of a handpicked group of six specialists who were assigned to unusual missions that required special expertise both in the air and on the ground. Another of those initially drawn by one of IPC's best British artists, Eric Bradbury, and at other times by the Spanish-based artist Luis Bermejo Rojo,[42] and in its final months mainly by Fred Holmes.[43] Because the strip had a regrettably short run in Smash! (from 16 August 1969 to 30 January 1970 only), most of the run features art by Bradbury. This, too, in keeping with the need to cut costs, was a reprint, originally published in Buster from 1960 to 1964 under the title Phantom Force 5.[44][45] Q-Squad was marked out as a reprint by its unique style – which was both different from, and grimmer than, all the other strips. Whereas Sgt. Rock emulated Lord Henry (and Janus Stark), by maintaining a huge and confident smile, regardless of how much trouble he was in, no one in Q-Squad ever stopped looking worried. Its reprint status was also signaled by the fact that Q-Squad was plainly not the original name of the team. Some panels showed evidence of the name having been inserted over a previous one: a change in the lettering style for the name 'Q-Squad' and any adjacent words – which used a different lettering in a cruder style wherever the name appeared, but nowhere else.

The Handcuff Hotspurs
Hard-as-nails former prison sports instructor 'Toff' Morgan (so-called for his habit of always wearing a top hat) takes over the management of the ailing First Division side Haversham Hotspurs. Morgan begins to rebuild the team by "framing" ex-criminals who he'd known while working in various prisons, forcing them to sign on with the club in order to make use of their dishonest skills as footballing talents. These convicts become the "handcuff hotspurs" of the title. The club's former manager, Reg Jessup, constantly tries to sabotage Morgan's efforts, in order to persuade the directors to re-appoint him instead.

The Touchline Tearaways
Football-themed strip featuring three mad-keen supporters of Grimshot United, a totally useless English Football League team perpetually in danger of being relegated, as it is made up entirely of ailing and decrepit players. Each week the Tearaways – Hairy, Lug'oles and Clever Dick – execute some scheme from the touchline to help Grimshot win that week's fixture, usually involving a battle of wits with officials from the Ministry of Football, who, not unnaturally, try to put a stop to the Tearaways' well-intentioned cheating. The name of the club, Grimshot United, was a humorous indication that the team was not very good (i.e. that the players were "grim shots"). Each strip features a single match, with a plot based around helping the team overcome that week's opponent. Clever Dick masterminds all the ploys used in helping Grimshot, and apart from occasional words of congratulation or encouragement, he is generally the only "Tearaway" who has dialogue in the strip. Hairy and Lug'oles tend to be merely a pair of walking visual gags: Hairy's features are perpetually invisible behind a vast mass of long black hair that covers his entire face and head, and Lug'oles has a pair of enormous ears.

Thus, within six months, a number of the strips introduced in the relaunch had already bitten the dust. And more changes were looming. The most obvious problem faced by the new-look Smash! was the constant "churn": the incessant turnover of strips. Without its solidly popular superhero strips to rely on, the editorial staff seemed pathologically incapable of settling on a fixed line-up.[lower-alpha 15]

Smash! endured yet another major in the spring of 1970, when further changes of editorial policy were imposed by new owners Reed International, which had bought out IPC that year. In the aftermath of the changes made in August 1969, further changes made at the start of 1970 left Smash! looking very different from its appearance in the wake of the relaunch just 12 months earlier. A vast number of new strips were added, in a second relaunch, such that only half of those introduced in March 1969 now survived, although those which continued included Master of the Marsh, Janus Stark, His Sporting Lordship, Battle of Britain, Eric the Viking, Wacker, The Handcuff Hotspurs, The Swots and the Blots, and Percy's Pets – the latter two now being the only remaining Odhams strips.[46] Discontinued were King of the Ring (last survivor of the serious strips from the Odhams era), Sergeant Rock – Special Air Service, and Cursitor Doom. Three of the strips only recently introduced were also dropped, namely the wartime Q-Squad, British superhero Tri-Man, and the humour strip The Touchline Tearaways.

The first changes in 1970 occurred in the issue dated 24 January, when three new strips appeared, all reprints from Buster: The Kid Commandos, Consternation Street, and Monty Muddle – The Man from Mars (originally titled Milkiway – The Man from Mars). As had been done in the spring of 1969, by bringing in some of the changes a few weeks ahead of the relaunch, the publisher hoped to disguise the true extent of the changes.[46]

The 7 February issue then saw a full relaunch: with more free gifts, another new cover feature — The Thirteen Tasks of Simon Test — and no less than eight new strips, making an astonishing eleven strips added since the beginning of the year. New supporting strips introduced in the 7 February issue included Threat of the Toymaker, The Pillater Peril, Birdman of Baratoga, Nick and Nat – The Beat Boys, and three humour strips with a common supernatural element: Sam's Spook (drawn by Leo Baxendale), The Haunts of Headless Harry, and Ghost Ship.

The 1970 relaunch also resulted in the dropping of the Warriors of the World cover feature. The Warriors of the World covers had run into a problem, in that war stories were no longer a strong element of Smash!, which had dropped the humour strip Nutt and Bolt the Men from W.H.E.E.Z.E. some time earlier. When it was decided to also drop Sergeant Rock – Paratrooper (by then renamed Sergeant Rock – Special Air Service), and Q-Squad, the cover feature had to go too. It was not practical to advertise war stories on the cover if there were no war stories inside! (The newly added Kid Commandos did not count as a war story in this context, since the three fugitive children did not do any conventional fighting. The strip was more like a souped-up version of the discontinued Rebbels on the Run.)

Accordingly, after forty-seven weeks[lower-alpha 16] the Warriors of the World series was ended. Instead, the issue dated 7 February 1970 began The Thirteen Tasks of Simon Test, written by Angus Allan and drawn by the ever-popular Eric Bradbury.[47] Henceforth, each week's cover featured a full-page splash advertising the task which adventurer Simon Test would undertake in a new strip on the inside pages. This strip proved so successful that when the original thirteen-week series was completed (featuring one task each week), Simon Test was given a new series of adventures, extending his hold on the cover indefinitely. He would prove particularly enduring, being one of the few strips to ultimately survive the merger with Valiant in 1971.

Further changes followed: such that fully thirteen strips had been introduced since the start of 1970. In the issue dated 27 June 1970, a new humour strip began, Moonie's Magic Mate. In the issue dated 29 August, a humour strip titled The Fighting Three began (another reprint from Buster, where, under its original title Mighty McGinty, the strip had run in 1964).[48] And finally, in the last addition before the comic's closure, Tyler the Tamer was launched in early 1971. A common supernatural theme linked the three new humour strips. Dropped to make room for these were Kid Commandos, Threat of the Toymaker and The Pillater Peril (the Pillater saga seemingly reaching a natural conclusion, instead of merely being summarily abandoned).

In mid-November 1970, production on Smash! (and many other IPC titles, including Valiant) came to a halt due to a printers' strike, and no editions were published for the next three months.[46] By the time the strike was settled, in February of the following year, irreparable damage had been done to the comic's circulation, as its young readers had turned elsewhere in the intervening 11 weeks. Similar harm had been suffered by Valiant. In consequence of this latest financial disaster, after eight issues, in April 1971 the two titles were merged in an attempt to combine their surviving circulation. For a brief time the merged comic was entitled Valiant and Smash (10 April to 18 September 1971[55]), before reverting to simply Valiant.

Some strips from Smash! survived in the new comic, including His Sporting Lordship, Janus Stark and The Swots and the Blots, but most were lost,[56] although the Smash! Annual continued to appear for many years afterward (continuing, in fact, until the 1976 Annual, published in the autumn of 1975). A lot of the strips thereby continued to appear each year, including many which had not even survived into Valiant, long after Smash! had ceased publication as a comic.[57]

The sports-themed His Sporting Lordship had enjoyed perhaps the greatest popularity, surviving the shake-ups of 1969 and 1970, and then surviving even the merger with Valiant, though it was to last only a few months in its new home, finally ending in December 1971. However, it was revived in the 1972 Smash! Annual, published at Christmas 1971, and returned year after year: becoming the regular cover feature of the Annuals.[57]

The merged title was dominated by Valiant, which contributed nine strips consisting of twenty pages; whereas Smash! was represented by only four strips, totaling a meager nine pages: Janus Stark, The Swots & The Blots, Simon Test, and His Sporting Lordship.[58]

Despite all of the changes, the new Smash! had lasted only two years. Maybe it was only marginally profitable, but no title could have survived such a lengthy loss of production. Its demise was directly attributable to the strike.[46]

Smash! was the last attempt in the UK market to publish a general boys comic, mixing adventure, sports and humour strips. Subsequent comics would survive only by ruthlessly focusing on narrow, sectional interests: such as all-sports, all-war, or all-humour;[lower-alpha 19] just as the American market had already specialised into all-funnies, all-horror, and all-superhero titles. The writing was on the wall for non-niche comics in the UK, for, in the face of the competition from television, even IPC's flagship, Valiant, ultimately could not survive.[lower-alpha 20]

Part of the problem with Smash! was that it went through far many changes in its early days, particularly in its adventure strips. The Ghost Patrol came and went; The Legend Testers came and went; Moon Madness was particularly short-lived; and there were numerous others, equally forgettable. None proved popular enough to last.[25] Undeniably, none enjoyed the tremendous popularity of the American superhero strips which the comic would shortly feature, which genuinely had sufficient popularity to rival that of television.[lower-alpha 21]

Those readers old enough to have become emotionally attached to comics before Odhams introduced American superhero strips to British readers tended to dislike those superhero strips.[25] Whereas, according to the letters pages each week, those same Marvel and DC heroes were enormously popular among the younger age group who had not been reading comics previously. Accordingly, Wham! readers tended to resent the changes made in 1966, because British strips were canceled in Wham! and replaced with U.S. superheroes, whereas Smash! readers did not resent the superheroes, because in 1966 that comic had only just launched, so there were no real changes – Smash! more or less teemed with American strips from the very beginning.

The decision in 1969 to discontinue the American superhero strips was the real cause of the comic's demise. Other problems would contribute to the difficulties it subsequently faced – including strikes at the company's printers – but the root cause of those problems was the falling circulation it suffered, which was a consequence of not having any unique elements to distinguish it from other IPC comics such as Lion and Valiant. The key to understanding the situation is that the superheroes were the only element that genuinely had the necessary popularity to halt the decline in weekly sales caused by the competition from television.

• Baxendale, Leo: A Very Funny Business: 40 Years of Comics. Gerald Duckworth & Co., London (1978). Autobiography.

• Smash! at the British Comics website
• Smash! comic art
• 1960s British Comics review
• Smash! #150 cover art
• Smash! cover art at the Grand Comics Database
• Review of "Weird Fantasy 1," Savoy History website
• Dare-A-Day Davy Frankenstein strip, published in Weird Fantasy #1 in 1969, Savoy Pictures website
• The Battle For Britain - Art by John Stokes
• Valiant and Smash, Comics UK Gallery
• Stephen Poppitt's Blog-o-Sphere