Comic: The Greyfriars Rebellion

 

Billy Bunter, The Fat Owl of The Remove at Greyfriars School, must be one of the best-known schoolboy characters in English fiction. He rose to fame in the pages of the Magnet, a story paper that ran for nearly 40 years until 1940.

Bunter’s publishers knew they were on to a good thing and milked the character for all he was worth (quite literally) and he appeared in books, television series, and at least one stage production.

As story papers – which often contained written stories running into thousands of words – became unpopular they were replaced by comics which relied entirely on picture strips, Bunter was reinvented for the new market.

He appeared in a number of comics in the 1950s and beyond. One of these was the Comet which was relaunched in 1946 and ran until being merged with the Tiger in 1959.

The Comet reworked earlier stories in picture form and ran stories over a number of weeks. In this example Greyfriars Rebellion from 1953, Dr Locke, the headmaster of Greyfriars, has influenza and this being the 1950s he has to go away to convalesce. A new headmaster arrives to take his place and in a typical boys’ paper storyline he turns out to be a tyrant. So, the boys rebel.

You can find more of Billy Bunter in the Comet on the Friardale website here.

Picture credits: Amalgamated Press

For more Billy Bunter, click here

For more on Comics or Story Papers, click here

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