Whenever a comic reached sales levels that made the title unprofitable, the powers that be usually sought to merge the failing title with one of their more successful weeklies. So when Thunder failed to make the grade off it and it's more popular features went to the Lion, a long running stable title. The new comic was simply entitled Lion and Thunder, the masthead of which actually lasted quite a long time.
Now having reently covered Thunder's short life of just 22 issues I picked some of the early merged comics and got a bit of a suprise.
So many of Thunder's stories made it to Lion.
Black Max, Fury's Family, Phil the Fluter, Steel Commando and Adam Eterno just to name a few. Lions own features had shrunk somewhat which indicates to me that that they must have had a large inventory to be used.
There's even Sam, a renamed strip from the long gone Wham! an Odhams/Power Comic that ended back in 1967, you'd know him better as Biff.
I used to read Lion in the sixties so this period is new to me. No Robot Archie? Maybe he reappears later on I'll find out one day...
This comic is actually a good read and back issues are not that expensive.
Sadly Lion itself doesn't last that much longer. Having run from 1952 the comic ceased publication in 1974 after a very respectable run of 1,156 issues.
Lion merged with Valiant, a story for another day.
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