Serenade
The cover of Serenade dated 5 January 1963. Art by Angel Badia Camps.
Publication information
Publisher	Fleetway Publications 1962 to 1963
Schedule	Weekly (Mondays)
Format	Ongoing series
Publication date	22 September   1962 ? 9 February   1963
No. of issues	21 [a]
Creative team
Artist(s)	Angel Badia Camps Frank M. Lea Jorge Longaron Carlos Prunes
Editor(s)	Robert Lewis

Serenade was a British weekly anthology romance comic published by Fleetway Publications from 22 September 1962 to 9 February 1963 ^[b] . Intended as a companion title to the company's successful Valentine with lavish production values, the comic failed to find an audience and was cancelled after 21 issues.

Creation [ edit ]

Amalgamated Press had found considerable success with a string of romance comics aimed at British teenage girls in the late 1950s, beginning with Marilyn and followed by Roxy and Valentine . ^{[1] [2]} At their peak the titles sold up to 500,000 copies, and the company's formidable stable of comics was a key factor in the company being taken over by the Mirror Group in 1959, which led to the juvenile magazine department being rebranded Fleetway Publications . The new owners began to look at launching new titles, including the girls' comics Princess and June , humour title Buster and educational magazine Look and Learn . ^[3]

Serenade was devised to join the romance comics, under the auspices of Marilyn creator Robert Lewis. It featured high production values compared to its stablemates, with a full cover colour at a time when the other titles were using black-and-white with a single colour overlay, and made extensive use of European art agencies, particularly the Spanish artists of S.I. Bardon. The first story of each issue started on the front cover, with a large splash image at a time when British comics largely focused on fitting in as many frames as possible onto a page. The colour covers have since made Serenade highly collectible. ^[1]

Inside, the stories were a mix of standalone and serialised romances, typically of two to three pages an issue; while most featured different characters each time, detective Mike O'Hara would recur. The first issue's editorial introduced the comic's features team - music correspondent Johnny Solo; agony aunt Penny; trivia expert and dogsbody Clancy; fashion writer Gillian; and The Editor's indispensable secretary Sally. Aside from the cover, the rest of the comic was in black-and-white; the format was a 32-page newsprint weekly, priced at 6 d (the same as Valentine ). ^[3]

Artists contributing to the series included Spaniards Jesus Blasco , Angel Badia Camps, Florenci Clave, Roberto Gonzalez Casarrubio, Carlos Freixas , Eugenio Giner, Jorge Longaron , Josep Maria Miralles, Antonio Bosch Penalva, Carlos Prunes and Manfred Sommer ; Italian team Enrico Bagnoli and Antonio Toldo; and British talent such as Shirley Bellwood, Rab Hamilton, ^[4] Frank Jarvis, Frank M. Lea, Roy Newby and Joan Riley. ^{[1] [5]}

Publishing history [ edit ]

The first issue of Serenade was promoted in Roxy , continuing the serial "Bon Voyage" from that title. It included a free flexi disc record featuring a message recorded by Cliff Richard ; ^[6] the second included a booklet containing '101 New Lights On... Cliff Elvis Adam ' while the third included ' Helen Shapiro 's Hair & Eye Book'. ^{[7] [3]} The print run for the first issue was announced at 600,000. ^[8]

Despite such offerings, Serenade entered into a crowded marketplace - in addition to Fleetway's other romance titles, DC Thomson were fielding the successful Romeo and Jackie , while the explosion of popular music and fashion saw many of the genre's readers tempted away to the growing number of magazines catering for them. ^[9] As such, Serenade failed to find enough of an audience to keep to its break-even point, and after 21 issues the comic was merged into Valentine in February 1963. ^{[1] [10] [11]}

Since 2018, the rights to Serenade have been owned by Rebellion Publishing . ^{[12] [13]} In 2023, 2000 AD artist and comics historian David Roach curated an anthology of romance comics for Rebellion's Treasury of British Comics label called A Very British Affair: The Best of Classic Romance Comics in 2023; the collection included the story "Love? Not For Me!" from the 26 January 1963 issue of Serenade , as well as reproducing several of the comic's covers - the splash image for the 13 October 1962 issue, by Badia Camps, was chosen as the cover for the collection. ^{[14] [15] [16]}

Collected editions [ edit ]

Notes [ edit ]

References [ edit ]

External links [ edit ]

• Serenade at the Grand Comics Database