What?! Charles Hamilton's work is incredible, there are arcs in his stories that resolved over decades of weekly episodes. Admittedly, there are piles of dogshit school stories from the era but he was great. And he didn't even particularly like writing them—he just loved taking the wages to Monte Carlo.
Rowling definitely read a lot of his stories before writing HP.
Oh hold on, I don't think you were calling him crap. Were you? Pesky unclear antecedents.
Nah, some of them surely were good; as a general genre they were a bit before my time though and there was, of course loads of other stuff absolutely churned out, comics I'm thinking fo especially, that you'd come across in a dated old annual really bored with nothing else to read.
And because of their success, I'm sure some of the stuff that had been good at one point got beaten into the ground so any random Billy Bunter comic might hugely vary in quality.
Not my cup of tea in general but they had their place very much.
(in fact, I've just read of Hamilton that he is in the Guinness book of records as the most prolific author, writing about a hundred million words. Some are sure to be good, some are sure to be not, lol, man I didn't realsie it was literally still just him)
I'd still say Harry Potter is way more multi dimensional than them, and the idea it counts as a copy or a rip off of the worst witch as idiotic I think is inarguable unless you're a twitter seethepot throwing anything to see if it sticks at JKR.
Honestly for people who endlessly cling to the phrase "bad faith" when shutting down any philosophical quibbles about trans shit-they constantly exist in bad faith and tell so many outright lies, they surely must be aware of it. It must be really weird to be telling flat out lies constantly and try to think you're some sort of hero. I wonder if they have any long dark nights of the soul about it.
Or if they never have twitter rout of their hands long enough to have a thought of their own.