British nostalgia site TV Cream has been a personal favourite of mine for years. I've remained a fan because TV Cream has remained fairly consistent as a site. The contributors are tastemakers, to be sure - TV Cream actually uses the term "The Wrong Kind of Nostalgia," the site relying on comments of the "this is bag"/"this is ace" variety. Still, TV Cream is not afraid to go obscure or esoteric, and that's where TV Cream's strengths have always been.
Parts of the site seem to have been spun off into books lately, TV Cream itself with a Virgin Books release and this article as The Ultimate Book of British Comics. Written by TVC's own Graham Kibble-White, the book acquits itself very well as an unofficial TVC tie-in. While not perfect, The Ultimate Book of British Comics is a very good attempt at trying to sum up decades of British comic books. It's informative, entertaining and personal, and it touches on both the milestones and notable failures of the British comics scene. Chris Claremont and Alan Moore, after all, had to launch their careers somewhere.
The Ultimate Book of British Comics isn't an overly exhaustive look at British comics - by the author's own admission, it's targeting modern British comic books and not the story papers that they emerged from. Old standbys like The Beano, Hotspur and The Dandy are included in The Ultimate Book of British Comics, but text-based papers are anathema to the book's purpose. The book also doesn't list "adult" humour comics in the vein of Viz, mainly going after the more ambitious attempts at reaching the adult market. Frankly, the exclusions make for a far more interesting book as ninety-eight comics are looked at in-depth and in a critical manner.
A lot can be learned from The Ultimate Book of British Comics. Pat Mills of 2000 AD, Crisis and Toxic! fame got his start, for instance, involving himself in girls' comics like Tammy, Jinty and Misty. In fact, Mills comes across as being the latter-day British comics industry in and of himself, exploiting every niche he could. Gory "boys' comics" like the infamous Action, girls' comics with more action and suffering, a comic book trying to shoehorn role-playing with Judge Dredd - all are given mention in The Ultimate Book of British Comics, enough that Mills' name starts to become more repetitive with every comic he's involved with.
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