Cardiff, 2nd January, 1941. For over ten hours, the Welsh capital was blitzed by over one hundred German bombers who were determined to turn the city to ruins. On the ground and among the rubble was the Martin family. The father, Charlie, was a firefighter in the AFS and his daughter, Freda, was an Air Raid Warden. While Charlie put out the flames from the incendiary bombs, Freda helped civilians get to the safety of the shelters. But the Blitz wouldn't be the only challenge the pair would encounter that cold Cardiff night...
CARDIFF BLITZ is the first COMMANDO story written by Gary Dobbs, also known as blogger and Western writer Gary Martin Dobbs. I believe he has several more scripts in the pipeline, and I hope so because this is an excellent homefront tale of World War II. The characters are very good and we can't help rooting for them, including a cat known as The General who prompts some of the action. I really enjoyed this one and look forward to reading more issues of COMMANDO written by Dobbs.
3 comments:
Really pleased to see this review - The Commando series has been running for decades and I used to buy them when I was a kid so seeing one penned by me was a real thrill. That young boy who spent all his pocket money on comics like these would have thought that was impossible. Thanks for bringing these books to a new audience across the pond.
Gary,
I know exactly what you mean. When I started writing the Mike Shayne stories, there was always a part of me that was still the little kid who checked out Mike Shayne novels from the bookmobile. Getting to write a Lone Ranger story was even better. Great job on this COMMANDO. I really liked the characters.
It's good to know that a couple of ex-Black Horse Western writers (Gary, Brent Towns) still have a market, and to read about the buzz Gary and James got in writing for publications they used to read as kids. My own first sales as a professional writer sixteen months after I left school were for war comic scripts. But in those days (the early 1960s) such markets were comparatively young. The COMBAT PICTURE LIBRARY series published not one but two 64-pagers by me in August 1963. COMBAT had been launched by Micron Publications in March 1959, followed by the very similar COMMANDO series from D. C. Thomson in July 1961. When I was a child in the 1950s there were adventure comics but I greatly preferred the text story papers like THE CHAMPION and THE ROVER, which took longer to read than comics and were therefore better value for my pocket money! So the buzz from seeing published books of my own as a young adult was not of nostalgia but financial success, especially as I also secured the editorship of COMBAT and a couple of Western comic book series partly on the strength of my scriptwriting.
In the 1960s COMMANDOs and similar books in Britain sold for one shilling. Today I see the cover price is 2.25 pounds -- an astonishing 45 times as much. I very much doubt whether D. C. Thomson is, or can, be paying its writers 45 times the 40 pounds it used to pay for scripts in the 1960s. I also wonder whether it's kids forking out today's cover price at their corner shops like we once did. Maybe the target audience is an older age group largely motivated like Gary by a kind of nostalgia. Where I now live, younger people do not seem greatly interested in Second World War heroes. As a fellow ex-pat Brit pointed out to me the other day, the German Blitz on British cities like Cardiff in 1940-41 took 43,000 lives. The British death toll from Covid-19 in 2020 stands at more than 72,500. James has pointed out elsewhere that people today are living in their own stressful times.
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