Vintage television adverts for classic British comics were recently discovered after over half a century in the basement of a building in Dundee, Scotland, owned by DC Thomson. The publisher and the National Library of Scotland (NLS) have restored and digitized the comics, including The Dandy, Bunty, and Jackie.

According to the BBC, the public can access the collection of TV ads for comics and magazines online at the Moving Image Archive. Ninety-nine films were found in the DC Thomson basement. “When we stumbled across them, it was quite a find,” said DC Thomson archivist Barry Sullivan. “But we didn’t know how much of a find because some of the canisters couldn’t be opened. They were rusted shut, and the ones we could open looked so delicate that we realized we were not best placed to look after them.” DC Thomson then approached the National Library of Scotland Moving Image archive.

“We brought the films down in 2022, and later that year, we were invited back to see some of them being run through the Steenbeck editing machine. It was fascinating to see these films for the first time in 50 or 60 years,” Sullivan continued. Acquisition curator at Moving Image archive Kay Foubister hailed the discovered comic ads as a stellar addition to their collection. “It’s highly unusual to get a complete set of adverts, especially from the early days of commercial television,’ she said.

“It only really began in Scotland in 1957, so to have a collection of ads relating to all these titles that we all know and all had in our households is fantastic. I grew up with The Bunty, my mother got My Weekly, and my granny got The People’s Friend. And now we have adverts for them all,” Foubister added.

DC Thomson used the ads to persuade readers to become regular readers of their classic British comics, with gifts from the publisher common across all their titles. Jackie magazine launched at the height of The Beatle’s popularity in the I960s, targeting young teens. Jackie went on to sell over a million issues a week and printed its final issue in 1993. The Dandy, another immensely popular comic, broke the one million mark in 1945, and by April 1950, sales were over two million. It was also the first title to issue a Christmas annual. Bunty, a comic for young girls, also saw success running from 1958 to 2001.

Gifts were a key feature of the classic comics. They were typically small, lightweight, and easy to attach to the magazine. “They were often interchangeable,” Foubister said. “Rings for the girls could be Elvis or Rosebud according to the age group. The boys were more likely to get things related to cars or football.”

Source: BBC