𓆝𓆟𓆜

Rummaging through a charity shop in the early 1980s, historian and documentarian Alan Dein stumbled upon a strange old comic. Costing him just 10p, the comic has since led him on “a remarkable journey” in the form of a decades-long passion project. Titled Candy, Andy and the Bearandas, the comic, as it turned out, was devised by Century 21, a production studio founded by Gerry Anderson, who with Sylvia Anderson created iconic 1960s TV shows Thunderbirds, Stingray and Captain Scarlet. Like those shows, Candy used puppets but this time life-size, and existing in a wholly more realistic universe – a picture-perfect English village, albeit one where two humanoid panda bears are raising two (unwittingly) creepy plastic children.

We just uploaded all 6 issues of Volume 9 of On Our Backs to the Internet Archive! We've been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to digitize a large collection of issues and have been slowly working through what we have, and we're hoping to upload more before long, and we're so excited to make more issues accessible to people online again!

If you know anything about the magazine's history since it was discontinued, you know there's been a lot of fighting over censorship and who has the right to access these essential pieces of S/M dyke culture. We'd love to post these and have no problem preserving access to them over time, but we want to plan for the possibility of censorship, so we want to ask for your help.

Download the files to these issues, and any other issue you can find (the rest of the publicly available issues we're aware of are included in our pinned post), save the file to an external hard drive, post it as a separate upload in other archives or anywhere you know of to share files like these. Make art from the scans, share screenshots on social media, show your friends. We'd love a link to help people find our archive and our page to support our work and see what else we do, but the important thing is that we get these scans to as many places as possible so it's impossible to completely wipe them off the internet.