The Fantastic Adventures of Adam Ant was a comic strip appearing in Tops (later TV Tops) magazine, published by DC Thomson as a rival to Look-In Magazine. I’ve been trying to find scans of this for some time, it’s not been easy to track down but I’ve gathered bits and pieces so it’s probably time to try and assemble it all in one place. The story is barely coherent (even less so when I’ve only been able to source one page of an issue) but the core theme appears to be a Quantum Leap-ish time travel plot with various personas worn by Adam.
The magazine featured photos of Adam pretty much every week so this is someone’s logical conclusion to ensure constant appearances of his name at the very least. The artwork was believed to be by Maureen Gray and her husband, Gordon, at least initially. The scans presented here are a mix of Mag-a-zone content from flickr, comicvine and ebay seller images. I think I scanned a couple of these, but I can’t seem to find them for sure.
Anyway, I’ll update when I find more images. I think the strip skipped a few weeks here and there and went on hiatus between 31 & 38 but again, I can’t be sure right now.
I think this (lower middle) is the cover to Tops 22, as it looks as if it states March 6th on the cover. No internal images though.
Adam Ant is only listed as featuring in a poster here, so I’m not sure this issue had a strip.
No mention of the Adam Ant strip here.
Adam Ant Adventure Story inside!
I was assuming the strip ended in 42, but that seems mistaken. More likely it ends in 44 as 45 mentions a competition & pin-up, and most certainly by 48 as this introduced the Buck Rogers strip.
TOPS / TV TOPS additional information courtesy of Mag-a-Zone, Comicvine & Crazy About Magazines.
Desperately seeking Stuart…
I’ve mentioned before scraping old internet sources and necromancing data, this has included me finding dead content again. This time I found a reference to an Adam Ant strip in a topic about a strip called Spooky. There’s an inline image from the host tinypic (was at http://i36.tinypic.com/2chkzk8.jpg), but tinypic died in 2019.
So I had a look at the internet archive, and there is a load of tinypic stuff. Here’s archive stream A, with 100 x 5 Gigabyte archives and index files. So that’s a lot to look through.
I downloaded one index to start with, just to get a feel for the archiving strategy.
tinypic.com_images_201909_a.cdx.gz
And armed with my filename (2chkzk8), let’s take a look.
Looks like it might be in collection tinypic-seeded-00095.warc.gz, so let’s download that. This is a 5 Gb file, so might take a little while. The kicking Death in the face might be from issue 37, which is above, fwiw, but it’s worth it to explain how to find tinypic content for future reference. The “Spooky” image attachment unfortunately doesn’t seem to be in the same collection.
And now that I’ve downloaded the file, what do I do with it? It’s a .warc which is new to me. After a few hours of wandering/wondering, I find that replayweb.page can open a war, although needs to be a Chromium based browser.
And it’s not in 95 :(, so I guess I’ve misread the index and the file is in a different bundle. So let’s try that again, assume it’s in 12 and download the index file to check first.
Oh, wait, it is in 95. But it’s from a different server. I’m looking for one from server i36, this comes from i58.
And after checking all of the archive indexes, this file doesn’t seem to have been captured. The file was posted in 2009 and it was 2019 when the archiving was done, so it could have been removed by the uploader. I don’t know, it’s just odd that the filename was reused. Anyway, I’m going to assume it was the same file referenced above until I feel daft enough to try this again…
Current best guess at which editions had relevant content and page numbers:
xx, yy, zz = unknown pages, but expected strip
?? = unknown if strip appears
15 : 24, 25, 27
16 : xx, yy, zz (guessing 24, 25, 27)
17 : 24, 25, 27
18: 8, 9, 11
19 : xx, yy, zz (guessing 8, 9, 11)
20 : xx, yy, zz (guessing 8, 9, 11)
21 : 8, 9, 11
22 : xx, yy, zz (guessing 8, 9, 11)
23 : ??
24 : 8, 9, 11
25 : 8, 9, zz (guessing 8, 9, 11)
26 : ??
27 : 6, yy, zz
28 : xx, yy, zz
29 : 8, 9, zz (guessing 8, 9, 11)
30 : ??
31 : ??
32 : ??
33 : ??
34 : ??
35 : ??
36 : ??
37 : ??
38 : xx, yy
39 : xx, yy
40 : xx, yy
41, xx, yy
42 : 24, 25
43 : ??
44 : ??
Assuming it’s finished by 45, not sure though.