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Issue Description
Thunderbolt Jaxon (1949)
- Publisher
- Amalgamated Press
Volume Description
Prior to World War II, Australia had been a major export market for British comics, but between wartime paper restrictions in both counties, and then import restrictions on comics designed to help balance a wartime trade deficit and to protect the livelihoods of local creators from cheap, remaindered US comics brought into the country in ships as ballast, that market largely dried up for most of the 1940s. After the war, paper stocks gradually became available again, but the import restrictions remained in place, prompting local companies in both Britain and Australia to both create home-grown comics designed to visually mimic the banned US imports, and to get round the import ban by licensing the rights to reprint US titles locally.
Keen to dent this roundabout US incursion into the Australian market and to reclaim some of that market for themselves, Britain's Amalgamated Press took a leaf out of their competitors' books, and decided to produce comics specifically for the Australian market, written, drawn and edited in the UK, but printed in Australia and designed to match the physical format of the US reprint titles. One of these titles, launched in 1949, was Thunderbolt Jaxon, featuring Jack Jaxon, a young boy capable of transforming into a superhero after discovering Thor's magical belt of strength. Drawn by Hugh McNeill, Geoff Campion and Robert Rodger, and written by T.C.H. Pendower (a pen name for crime novelist T.C.H. Jacobs) and Edward Holmes, six issues were produced before the title came to an abrupt end. Simultaneous with the later issues of the Australian series, Thunderbolt Jaxon also appeared in U.K. comic Comet, enjoying entirely different adventures but by the same creators. He made a handful of subsequent appearances in other titles over the years, before eventually being briefly revived in his own title once more in 2006 by Wildstorm.
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