Lew Stringer

My partner said to me "What's the thing with Combat Colin?". Well, Combat Colin is a silly pastiche of all the macho war comics that used to exist, with a good dose of surreal humour and the occasional fart joke. It ran as a back-up strip in Action Force comic (the UK's version of GI Joe, American military franchise) and then joined Transformers when Action Force was subsumed into that comics. Thus the strips relied on a half-dozen boxes and the punchline was normally a bad pun. This is a show more collection of strips that first ran in Transformers comics in 1989 and 1990, none of which I read the first time round. There's nothing here to match the Kung Fu Penguins story, but its jolly stuff nevertheless, and functions very effectively as mocking foil to the boring Action Force strips. show less

Thoroughly silly though perhaps children today wouldn't get the references and enjoy it as much as this child of the 80s. For the unitiated, Combat Colin is a comic that ran as a support strip for Action Force and then Transformers comics. It sent up all the military nonsese of Action Force in a way that presented this macho gun waving as absurd. It was also a love letter to and satire of the jingoistic military comics of the mid-20th century that helped to instill pointlessly psuedo-heroism show more and suicidal patriotism into two or more generations of young Brits. But as well as being gloriously subversive, Colin was also silly, charming, and best of all, funny. I loved it so much when I was a child that I adapted the Mystery of the Missing Pyramids into a short play for some church event or other, which was received with the levels of incomprehension that you can imagine. It was sometimes better than the Transformers comic that it supported! This is the first part of a complete collection, and covers the earliest incarnation of Colin, and you can see him really come into his own as the space allocated to him gets bigger allowing for storytelling rather than gag strips, and its there that Colin is best! show less

The final (to date) dive into the Combat Colin archives, this is choc-full of strips that I had never read before and there are some crackers here. Highlights include Combat Kate and Doomed? Great stuff.

Some real gems in this. Stringer really does have a knack for silliness!