As an aviation enthusiast, I was particularly interested in a Swedish magazine titled Pilot (originally titled Pilot-22), an aviation-themed war comic initially published by Centerforlaget throughout 1965-1970, and subsequently by Semic Press (1970-1984), after the latter company acquired many of the titles previously published by Centerforlaget in 1969. To give you some idea of Pilot's unique mix of stories, one issue I picked up during my trip (No.1/1983) contained reprints of the French fighter pilot series, "Buck Danny", the British World War Two hero, "Battler Britton", and a European-drawn comic-book adaptation of "Biggles", the famous aviator hero created by the British author, Capt. W.E. Johns.
I was idly trawling the web, looking for further copies of Pilot, when I came across references to another Swedish air combat-themed comic book, Jet, which was also published by Centerforlaget during 1965-1968. Looking through the (incomplete) cover gallery for this series appearing on the Grand Comics Database, I was struck by how oddly familiar this cover seemed to me. Then I realised why - the revamped logo and cover design for Jet (which seemed to have taken effect sometime around 1967) was adopted for a similar aerial-combat comic book, Sky Riders, published by Colour Comics Pty Ltd (an imprint of the KG Murray Publishing Company), in Australia around 1967-1968. Just compare the following two covers from these remarkably similar publications:
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| Jet, Vol.3, No.12 - circa 1967 (Centerforlaget) |
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| Sky Riders, No.2 - circa 1967 (Colour Comics Pty Ltd) |
Is this evidence of a hitherto unknown connection between Swedish and Australian comic-book publishers? Despite the strong superficial similarities between these two comics, I'm inclined to think not. At present, I can't verify the sources of the stories that appeared in either Jet or Sky Riders; I have two copies of the latter title in my collection, but don't have them to hand as I'm writing this blog post. However, my memory of those Sky Rider comics was that they contained European-drawn stories (most likely produced by one of several Spanish comic art studios active in the mid-to-late 1960s), presumably intended for the British market.
However, my recollection of the contents from these Sky Riders comics was that they were of mediocre quality, and I suspect they would have been used - if they were published at all - by some of the minor British war comics publishers of the period (DC Thomson's Commando and Fleetway/IPC's War Picture Library and Battle Picture Library series, which dominated the British market at the time, typically featured superior artwork supplied by Spanish and/or Italian comic-art studios and European feature syndicates).
If that is the case, then the publication of Sky Riders in Australia is more likely consistent with Colour Comics Pty Ltd's growing reliance on European/Spanish-drawn comics originally produced for British publishers, which was especially evident in the company's range of romance and Western titles from the mid-1960s onwards. However, this would only be confirmed if we uncover any original British war comics of this era which sported the distinctive tailplane logo device used on both Jet and Sky Riders, and could match-up the contents of the British, Swedish and Australian editions to see where any further similarities or differences may lie. As yet, I've not seen any examples of a comparable British title - perhaps someone out there on the Internet reading this might be able to shed more light on this topic?
Yet another intriguing mystery from the publishing history of Australian comics, waiting to be solved! (Images courtesy of Grand Comics Database and AusReprints.com)
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