Cricket Witness No 6 - His Captain's Hand on His Shoulder Smote

91 Chapter Five The Flood (2) HK Rodd The Wonder Man ‘HK Rodd was the best cricketer of all time’. Eat your hearts out, WG Grace and Don Bradman. HK Rodd, otherwise billed as ‘the Wonder Man’, was the more notable half of an experiment carried out by two scientists on a remote Scottish island in rearing twins. His extraordinary feats at cricket were complemented by his being the world’s top racing driver and one who, with respect to football, could spot a move five minutes before it happened. He was but one of many sportsmen to find imaginary success within the pages of a wave of ‘story paper’ comics that emerged in the 1920s and found particular traction in the 1940s, complementing the Gem/Magnet combine, then gradually overtaking it. They came from the Dundee table of DC Thomson, also renowned for such pictorial style comics as The Dandy and The Beano . They provided what might be termed a third generation of text-based comics for young people. These, too, were and are referred to rather clumsily but much more accurately than ‘comics’ as ‘story books’ or ‘story papers’. This sudden and intense enterprise began with Adventure in 1921, Rover (the home of HK Rodd) and Wizard , both 1922, Skipper in 1930 and Hotspur in 1933. The relative speed of the advent of these publications points to their obvious popular demand. It was as if most boys and many girls could not read enough of them. Amalgamated Press countered immediately with Champion in 1922 and Triumph in 1924. Triumph , although it slowly incorporated other Amalgamated Press comics including Gem , never seemed to gain as much popularity as the other five and itself merged with Champion in 1940 when wartime paper shortages were dictating publication policy almost as much as sales. And now let us at once celebrate the indomitable