welcome and enjoy!

Hi and welcome to my blog about comics from other people’s childhood! It is dedicated primarily to British humour comics of the 60s and 70s. The reason they are not from my childhood is simply because I didn’t live in the UK back then (nor do I live there now). I knew next to nothing about them until fairly recently but since then I’ve developed a strong liking for the medium and amassed a large collection, including a number of complete or near complete sets. My intention is to use this blog as a channel for sharing my humble knowledge about different titles, favourite characters and creators as I slowly research my collection.

QUICK TIP: this blog is a sequence of posts covering one particular comic at a time. The sequence follows a certain logic, so for maximum results it is recommended that the blog is read from the oldest post up.

Copyright of all images and quotations used here is with their respective owners. Any such copyrighted material is used exclusively for educational purposes and will be removed at first notice. All other text copyright Irmantas P.



Tuesday, April 9, 2013

A LOOK AT SHIVER & SHAKE STRIPS: SCREAM INN (PART 4)


Rounding up this 4-part Scream Inn series, here is a page of Brian Walker’s original Scream Inn artwork for SHIVER AND SHAKE No. 62 (11th May, 1974). The piece is huge – it is four times the size of the printed page. The logo is a glossy photo print, so is the poster at the entrance, both glued to the paper. The logo has come off and there is the name of the author of the story idea written underneath, presumably by Mr. Walker himself. The stamp on the back shows issue number and date, alongside with the artist’s address and phone number.



In his interview for GOLDEN FUN Mr. Walker told the interviewer he took a long time over his work. He used a variety of nibs and preferred drawing on one sheet Bristol board that was virtually no thicker than paper. He liked it because it rolled up easily and he could get four or five pages rolled up inside a 1 ¼ inch plastic drain pipe in order to send them off to IPC. A friendly plumber kept pipe cut-offs for him. Here are some panels close-up for your enjoyment:



I wonder if any of my readers could enlighten me as to the dotting technique used by Mr. Walker to make grey shadows in his artwork? Looking at the printed version I assumed it was printwork but panels of the original page above suggest differently.

9 comments:

  1. It looks like letraset , a technique usually employed in colour artwork by American artists to display uneven shades , though also used in black and white occasionaly. This was laid on to the sheet and not drawn by the artist , though he may have provided the ootline template for it,

    The Cap.

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  2. Wow!

    What an honor to own this..also to see it in detail close up...
    I'm very impressed...

    I've just bought an original art of Whoopee!! Creepy Comix by Reg Parlett...

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  3. Thanks for sharing this lovely artwork. Brian certainly used a lot of ink compared to some of his contemporaries.

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  4. Thank you for this. Im green beyond envy of course.

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  5. This is only a guess, but I'm going to suggest the dots are some sort of letraset transfer. The pattern is too regular.

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    1. Cap has also mentioned letraset in his comment above. He suggested it was applied in-house by IPC rather than by Brian in his studio. I wonder if this was indeed standard practice.

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    2. It may well have been applied by the artist himself. You used to be able to buy the stuff in art supply shops, either on adhesive film that you cut out and stuck down, or rub-down dry transfer film (which is what these pages look like), and it was very common in British comics up to the 90s, when most of them went full colour.

      Letratone was the product name, Letraset was the company that made it (they're better known for their dry transfer typefaces). I believe the American equivalent was called Zip-a-Tone.

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