Eagle Holiday Special 1986

One of the main differences between collecting old American and British comics is the fact that British comics were weekly anthologies with only short chapters each issue which means to get the whole story the whole run has to be collected. Generally old US comics are self contained and it's easier to randomly buy as I used to until I started switching attention to the like of the Eagle.

This is also the reason posts on this blog have been fewer recently as it would become boring to constantly publish an update of the same comic. However having finished the 1986 run that I could find (there are gaps) I decided to finish off with the years Holiday Special.

Eagle did go through a number of changes during the year starting off with being titled Eagle and Tiger and finishing with just plain Eagle.

 

Stories started and finished, one of my favourites being Ant Wars which I believe may have previously appeared in 2000AD a few years earlier. The usual favourites continued during the whole of 1986 including Dan Dare and the sole surviving strip from the short lived but much missed Scream; The Thirteenth Floor.

Published on glossy magazine type paper unlike its week newsprint parent title the special leads off with The Thirteenth Floor starring every ones favourite rogue of a computer Max. During the year he had become a secret agent for MI5, spawned offspring in the form of Minimax and gone through a breakdown in which imagined paranoia led Max to imprison and nearly execute some of his tenants on his 13th floor. In this issue however his target is some criminals trying to hold some of his residents hostage....yes it is something they will live to regret.

Dan Dare goes to to the Planet Mysterol only to find its colonists have disappeared and discovers hostile ape men. What is the connection. And why should everyone avoid the marsh gas?

S.O.S. try to rob a hostile countries embassy and seemingly fail....

Plus amongst the other features is an obviously reprinted story, The Skyscraper of Doom. A mile high and falling!

As usual a cracking read. I'm a big fan of the second volume of the Eagle and there will more to come in the future as this title absorbs the majority of Fleetway's other adventure titles before Eagles own sad demise in 1994. Plenty of reading before that points reached!