Lion was a weekly British comics periodical published by Amalgamated Press (and later Fleetway Publications and IPC Magazines) from 23 February 1952 to 18 May 1974. A boys' adventure comic, Lion was originally designed to compete with Eagle, the popular weekly comic published by Hulton Press that had introduced Dan Dare. It debuted numerous memorable characters, including Captain Condor, Robot Archie, Paddy Payne and the Spider. Lion lasted for 1,156 issues before being merged with stablemate Valiant.
Publication history
In 1952, Amalgamated Press (AP) editor Reg Eves ran an internal competition to come up with a competitor for the wildly successful Eagle. Bernard Smith, who had been with the company since 1922, won with the suggestion of Lion, and was rewarded with both a £5 prize and the role of editor of the new title. Smith had experience with boys' papers, having worked on AP's Young Britain and The Champion titles. Whereas those titles had featured text comics, Lion would mimic Eagle by switching to comic strips featuring speech bubbles rather than text captions. By using cheaper paper stock and fewer colour pages, AP hoped to undercut Eagle with Lion, which would be priced at 3d - a full penny cheaper than the Hulton title while matching its 24 pages. The cover proclaimed Lion to be "King of the Picture Story Pages". Like Eagle, most of the stories - bar the occasional humour strip - ran in weekly episodes of two to three pages.
AP identified Dan Dare as Eagles biggest attraction. Despite having no interest in science fiction, Eves was under orders from management to have a space hero to compete with Dare, and commissioned Captain Condor from writer Frank S. Pepper as a direct rival. Initially drawn by Ron Forbes, Condor started out - in Pepper's words - as "a non-character" but gradually developed a following of his own, though never matching Dare's fame and popularity. Despite most of the characters being created on a work-for-hire basis, Pepper was allowed to retain ownership of Captain Condor. Other comic strips in the first issue were Barry Nelson's "Sandy Dean's First Term", the first of several serials featuring the titular schoolboy; World War II strip "The Lone Commandos" by Edward R. Home-Gall; Scotland Yard ace "Brett Marlow - Detective" in the first of several cases; and Ted Cowan and Ted Kearon's "The Jungle Robot", which introduced Robot Archie. This was rounded out by prose stories "Rod of the Trading Post" , "Big Hank" and "Jingo Jones and His Invisibiliser", as well as factual pages - in this case features on sport in Ancient Rome, police reaction to 999 calls and unusual inventions - and enticements to enter a competition (prizes included bicycles, footballs and jack-knives) and join the 'Lion Club'. Readers letters were handled by Reg "Skipper" Clarke.
The first issue sold 900,000 copies before circulation settled to around 750,000. While failing to match Eagle's sales - which were typically around one million an issue - this was nevertheless a good figure for AP, and the comic would remain a strong seller for the rest of the decade. As the comic evolved strips came and went, though it retained a general mix of war, frontier era and science fiction strips. "The Jungle Robot" ended after six months before Robot Archie and his pals returned in 1957, and would run as one of Lion'''s star features until its final issue. 1957 also saw the debut of Paddy Payne, a World War II RAF pilot; drawn by Joe Colquhoun, Payne displaced Captain Condor from the cover for the first time and would remain a staple until 1969. Lion and Sun AP was acquired by IPC/Fleetway in 1959. Eves retired, while Smith guided Lion through the upheaval. This included a merger with Sun as part of the reorganisation; for several months the cover bore the title Lion and Sun before reverting to simply Lion. By the end of the fifties prose stories had disappeared in favour of either strip material of factual features. Popular additions over this period included stuntman Rory MacDuff and Norse saga "Karl the Viking", while Barrie Tomlinson joined the editorial staff in 1961. Several strips of the era would benefit from IPC's policy of moving towards cheaper artists based in Spain; this saw the likes of Alfonso Font, Víctor de la Fuente, Francisco Cueto and Jose Ortiz work on various Lion stories.