Wings Over Sealand

Man, I've been waiting for this to happen for ages. A long long time ago, when I was barely half as old as I am now, there was a magazine called Cut. A sort of artsier Scottish version of the NME, it was a music-and-culture-and-politics newspaper that came out either weekly or fortnightly, I forget which.

Either way, in 1989 Cut began publication of a comic strip written by Grant Morrison (the eccentric/mental creator of Zenith and The Invisibles, among many others), called The New Adventures Of Hitler.

The strip's subject matter (based around a possibly-true story that Hitler spent some time before the First World War living with in-laws in Liverpool) caused huge controversy, not least among Cut's own editors, with one of them – Hue And Cry vocalist Pat Kane – lambasting Morrison in public, and finally walking out on the magazine in protest.

(My own recollection is that the furore caused publication of the strip to be cut short, although Wikipedia disagrees. Frankly, I trust my memory better.)

In any event, the following year the complete run of the story was published in Fleetway's ill-fated "grown-up" comic Crisis (this time in colour, unlike Cut's monochrome incarnation), and a mere 20 years later the issues containing the strip have passed through the hands of the internet's diligent band of cultural-heritage preservers/copyright thieves, depending on your perspective.

The New Adventures Of Hitler has never been published as a collected edition, but when a kindly WoSblog viewer sent in a CD containing the Crisis scans, I pulled out all the TNAOH pages and have uploaded them here in CBR format. To read them, either download a comic-book reader prog like CDisplay, or rename the file suffix to .RAR, unzip it and use Windows Picture Viewer to navigate through the JPGs.

Make of it what you will.

(EDIT: File updated to include the two Crisis front covers above.)