The Unconquerable Garth mystery solved

Back in the late 1970s David Jackson and I communicated and shared photocopies of what we had collected and one piece I never thought worth chasing was the above "The Unconquerable Garth". How on earth would I ever find that small piece?

Well the magic answer is OCR - or Optical Character Recognition. It how computers read text from an image and then transcribes it to a database so you can search the database for your phrase - in this case... yes, you get the idea.

Well today I can reveal the answer! <<DRUM ROLL >>

Daily Mirror 24 March 1976

Who knew the Daily Mirror highlighted its strips (well, two of them anyway!)  on the front cover no less! Why did they do it? Well, the answer to that is in the words "Beware of cheap imitations!". To quote a contemporary New York Times article ("A Brash Sun Shines Ever Brighter on Fleet Street" by Bernard Weinraub, April 12, 1976) about the 1976 newspaper wars:

What sharpens the drama—and makes it unusually acerbic —is The Sun's stepchild relationship to The Mirror. Six years ago The Mirror's owners sold The Sun because the smaller paper seemed doomed. At that time. The Sun's circulation was 650,000, compared with The Mirror's more than five million.

Last month, The Sun's circulation reached a record 3,680,000, a rise of 35,000 over February. The Mirror's circulation hovered around 3,800,000. Officials on The Sun, as well as most of Fleet Street, are convinced that The Mirror will shortly be toppled. 

"Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window" - and trying to pin down this quote's source from Peter Drucker is just as difficult. Did the Daily Mirror die in 1976? No, it's still with us today but like all physical papers its numbers have dropped.  There are no longer officially disclosed figures but industry estimates place The Sun at roughly 550,000 copies and the Daily Mirror at around 166,400 to 205,300 copies

Anyway back to Bellamy.  If you know me at all, you'll know after finding this panel I wanted to know where it appeared. I sent David Jackson the Garth strip which appeared within this issue of the Daily Mirror with the exciting news of my discovery and.....

Garth: The Spanish Lady, K71 Daily Mirror (24 March 1976)

...he replied it's from The Spanish Lady but from one of the previous week's episodes K67 (19 March 1976)

Garth: The Spanish Lady, K67 Daily Mirror (19 March 1976)

And if that's not enough trivia for you, I wrote about the building in the second panel above back in 2017

You're welcome!