BUSTER CHRISTMASES. PART ONE – THE SIXTIES

2012 was a good year for me as a collector. I have finished putting together several sets and made some serious inroads into my wants lists for other British comics that I want to have complete runs of. BUSTER happens to be one of them. With only some 20 weekly issues of the title remaining on my wants list, I have all but one Christmas editions of the title so I thought it would be fun to take a look at the four decades of BUSTER Christmases and see how the main character (and the comic itself) developed over the years – from the infancy days as Son of Andy Capp, to childhood and teenage years from the brush of Angel Nadal, to the youth and adult age of Reg Parlett era, to maturity portrayed by Tom Paterson and Jimmy Hansen and finally the feeble old age of reprint.

Let’s start with the 60s and the first Christmas edition – the only one I don’t have a hard copy of. I found the image on George Shiers' blog here. Art by Bill Titcombe.

A year later the illustrator was Hugh McNeill:

1962 was the beginning of Angel Nadal’s era:

BUSTER was a tabloid-sized paper from first issue until the middle of 1965. By Christmas of 1965 the paper had shrunk and become closer to the standard well-familiar format of IPC comics, but still larger than that. It looks like Nadal was substituted by another artist on this one:

With a few exceptions, Nadal contiued drawing Buster for well over a decade until 1974.

 

Come back soon for Buster Christmases of the 70s!