*Boys’ Adventure & War Comics: With its 1,197th issue, dated 17th October 1959, the venerable D.C. Thomson story paper, Hotspur, breathed its last – but regular readers didn’t have time to mourn, as the very next week, the New Hotspur debuted as a comic (or ‘picture-paper’, as they called it). The reason for the relaunch may have been the spectacular success of the girls’ comic Bunty, launched the previous year, as it’s noticeable that with the early issues of the ‘New’ Hotspur, there’s a decided family resemblance – colour scheme, logo, eponymous host (‘Harry Hotspur’, who, like Bunty, had cover-featured adventures in rhyming couplets in later issues), and so on. The new line-up included western adventurers ‘Randy Walker’ and ‘Dakota Jim’, ‘Johnny Jett the Super Boy’, token humour page ‘Scruffy’, and the obligatory classics adaptation, ‘Coral Island’, with a few text stories so that old-school readers didn’t get too excited. Harry Hotspur was jettisoned early on, and the title settled down into the comfortable formula of adventure war n’ football, but had a very respectable run of 1,110 issues before being absorbed by Victor in 1981. This copy of Hotspur #1 is in an exceptionally attractive VG, the subject of much heated debate here at 30th Century HQ about whether it should be a higher grade; it has very tight corners and edges, with no wear, browning or brittleness, remarkably white pages, and a firm unbroken spine. The only slight flaw is minor creasing towards the bottom left edge, and light foxing/discolouration in the lower margins of the right cover. We’re confident it’s the nicest copy you’ll see in many a year, and it can be yours for £80. SORRY, THIS HAS NOW SOLD