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particular, was almost unimaginable to a child living in a country that had by now survived the worst of the Blitz, but was still struggling through on ration books and the occasional foray into the black economy. The publisher D.C. Thomson had begun something of a revolution in British comics in 1937 with the launch of the Dandy , followed swiftly by the Beano and by Magic , all of them cheerier and cheekier than their predecessors, but they faced a major setback with the outbreak of war. Paper in Britain was made primarily from wood pulp shipped from Scandinavia and, with the growing threat of U-boat attacks, such supplies were hard to come by. Newspapers voluntarily reduced their size by around fifty per cent in an attempt to preserve paper stocks, and children’s comics were similarly hard hit; Magic disappeared entirely, and the Beano and Dandy switched from weekly to fortnightly publication, alternating with each other, while they too shrank in size. Other titles, popular with boys as well as adults, also went out of existence, including Detective Weekly , home of Sexton Blake, and The Thriller , which had nurtured gentlemen outlaws of the 1930s like the Saint, the Toff and Norman Conquest. In March 1940, just before the fall of Norway made the position even more precarious, the formal rationing of paper was introduced by the government.
    By 1944 book production was at less than half its pre-war level, and educationalists were warning of a serious crisis as textbooks became ever more difficult to obtain. The situation had been exacerbated by the actions of the Luftwaffe, with an estimated 20 million volumes destroyed as a result of the bombing of Britain. Demand for books remained high, partly – it was argued – because of the need for escapism, and partly because the absence of so many goods from the shops meant that people had a higher disposable income than before the war, but there was a desperate shortage of supply. In this context, an American Superman comic would fall into the hands of a 13-year-old boy like Terry Nation as though it were manna from heaven. The child psychologist P.M. Pickard campaigned in the 1950s against the influence of the American comics, but even she recognised their appeal: ‘The glossy paper, the brilliant colours and the clear type far outshone anything the war-surrounded children remembered ever seeing.’ The contrast between the real experience of Britain and the fantasy imagery of America instilled a fascination with that country that was to dominate the post-war era, for Nation as for so many others.
    Paper shortages continued after the end of the war. It wasn’t until 1949 that Harold Wilson, then president of the Board of Trade, was able to announce that the rationing of paper was to end, by which time the damage had, for many, already been done. Strand magazine, where the likes of Sherlock Holmes and A.J. Raffles had made their first appearances, announced that year that it could no longer afford to continue, though the Beano and the Dandy had survived and were able to return to weekly publication. In the interim, the departure of the GIs had left a generation bereft, and the publishers of American comics, having discovered that there was a voracious appetite in Britain, responded by flooding the country with imported material, to the immense annoyance of their rationed competitors; in the immediate post-war years, the entire British publishing trade was restricted to around 2,000 tons of paper per month, the same quantity that was being shipped in every year in the form of comics. For Nation, who remained an avid reader of the imports, the gulf between the American and British productions was now even more marked, with a clear age divide having opened up; it was not until 1950 and the launch of the Eagle that comic publishers at home recognised that there was a demand to be met not simply among children but among adolescents as well. And by then, although