*Boys’ Adventure & War Comics: A massive top-up to the D.C. Thomson adventure weekly Hotspur this week. When the first series of Hotspur, the story paper, breathed its last in 1959 after 1197 issues, the readership barely had time to mourn before it was relaunched the next week as ‘New Hotspur’, from #1 again – but although there were still a couple of token text stories, the thrust of Hotspur Mk II was comic strips. Over the next two decades, the series featured the usual mix of war, adventure and sport, but also ventured into science fiction (‘Return of the Fisters’, anyone?) and a surprising number of what our American cousins would call super-heroes – subterranean marvel the Black Sapper, daring aviator the Scarlet Hawk, teenage robot-botherer Red Star Robinson, time-displaced flying highwayman Nick Jolly and serpentine crimebuster King Cobra being prominent entries in the genre. Heck, even the Iron Teacher, a formidable robot who spent as much time inflicting corporal punishment on villains, dinosaurs and aliens as he did educating, would probably qualify. Hotspur Mk II absorbed its look-alike sibling Hornet in 1976, before itself stumbling into the maw of Victor in 1981, after a very respectable 1110 issues. We have 125 of said issues newly restocked, commencing with #2 and with a handful of other early numbers, but primarily dating from 1970 to 1976, when the quasi-superheroic craze was at its height.