Jag

Jag was a weekly British comics periodical published by Fleetway Publications and IPC Magazines from 4 May 1968 to 29 March 1969. A boys' adventure comic, the title lasted for 48 editions before being merged with another title, the long-established Tiger. Creation Jag - named after the big cat jaguar to compliment the existing IPC boys' comics Lion and Tiger - was an attempt by the company to sell a higher quality production comic. Much like the Eagle (at the time being published by rival Odhams Press), Jag featured glossy photogravure printing for the covers and centre pages, compared to the four-colour newsprint paper stock used for the covers other weeklies; it also included four further interior four-colour pages. The printing was undertaken by Steel Bros. of Carlisle. The new title would also attempt to stand out by using a tabloid size of 11.75 x 15 inches for the pages, larger than the 9.25 x 11.25 inches of their standard comics. As a result, it would contain 16 pages, around half the size of its stablemates; this allowed Jag to be sold at the same price of 7d as Fleetway's other regular titles. Content was of the typical makeup of boys' weeklies of the time, though strips were typically allotted a single oversized page each, using between 12 and 15 frames. Front cover strip "New World for Old" blended war and fantasy; set in 3209 it featured a society in schism between factions modelled on different Earth time periods. With art by Jesús Blasco, "The Indestructible Man" was another fantastical story, starring an ancient Egyptian who had been entombed alive and used lost knowledge to cheat death, among other superhuman skills. World War II thrills were provided by "The Mouse Patrol", telling the story of three boys who set out to free their prisoner-of-war fathers in North Africa, with the aid of a monkey and an abandoned tank; the serial was drawn by Eric Bradbury. Geoff Campion provided both the painted centre page fictionalised biography story "Custer" and football story "The Penalty Area", while Joe Colquhoun contributed nautical humour cartoon "Cap'n Codsmouth". Colquhoun would also draw sport story "Football Family Robinson", which rapidly displaced "New World for Old" from the front cover and was written by Tom Tully.