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.



Monday, December 8, 2014

KEN REID AS IPC SCRIPTWRITER




Ken Reid is widely recognised as one of the great UK comics illustrators but he is sometimes overlooked as a brilliant scriptwriter. In this post I will focus on Mr. Reid’s IPC work.

He only wrote two strips for the publisher – the first one was SUB in SCORCHER (the first of Mr. Reid’s eight soccer strips that he drew in 1970 - 1974). Ken wrote scripts for all but the first two of the 31 episodes of this hilarious feature. Here is an example:




The second was of course Faceache – the long-running strip that began in JET and transferred to BUSTER when it absorbed JET. The first two episodes were written by Ian Mennell (I think they were episodes one and three in the JET run of the strip) before Ken took over as the writer and continued for more than a decade until BUSTER became BUSTER AND JACKPOT. The last episode of Faceache that Ken drew to his own script appeared in BUSTER cover-dated January 30th, 1982. Here’s an example of an early one from JET:




I contacted Dez Skinn who was the BUSTER sub-editor in the seventies and asked him how he remembered Ken as scriptwriter.  Here is what he had to say: as the Buster sub-editor I dealt with Ken on a weekly basis, sometimes chasing him for his finished artwork, which would arrive with the pencilled lettering that he wanted. Sadly he was deemed to have overwritten his work (invariably his narrative panels) making it too detailed for little 'uns so we usually had to cut it back by at least 25%. Like Alf Saporito on Cor!!'s Gus Gorilla, Terry Bave, Leo Baxendale, Reg Parlett and many other writer/artists, his scripts were drawn up full twice-up size on thin paper for the editor’s approval... Given that IPC considered his work dark, they'd never give him - of all people - carte blanche!

Faceache was a big success, as evidenced by its spectacularly long run. After 8 years of writing and drawing Faceache, Mr. Reid was presented with two awards for the feature by the Society of Strip Illustration. One was Cartoonist of the Year and the other one – Humorous Script Writer of the Year. The ceremony took place at the Y-Hotel in London on Sept 23rd, 1978 where Ken’s prizes were handed to him by Michael Bentine. Untypically, IPC celebrated Ken’s achievement and recognition by including this short article in BUSTER cover-dated Nov. 18th, 1978:




When researching for this blogpost, I remembered Peter Gray’s old website where he showed Ken’s letter to his penfriend Chris. In the letter Ken tells Chris about the S.S.I. awards ceremony and his misadventures at the Y-Hotel. Here is the first-hand account by the man himself (click to enlarge): 


10 comments:

  1. Lovely stuff. I'm pretty sure that I used to own the original art for the 2nd strip you featured. Ken was still at the top of his game at this time. Even the strips written for him by others benefited from him adding his own little additions to them.

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    1. That was a nice piece of artwork to own! Did you sell it?

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    2. If it was indeed one of the pages I had, I did eventually sell it, Irmantas. I had around 70 or so pages of original art (by different artists, but quite a few Ken Reid ones - including a Sub strip), and they took up quite a bit of space.

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    3. Ah, I would have so bought one or two of those to give you some space!

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  2. He was a brilliant writer...and of course suited his manic comic style...

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  3. I know you specially focused on his IPC work here, but did Ken write for any of his Oldhams period, Frankie Stein, Dare a Day Davey etc.?

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    1. Ken wrote 20+ early episodes of Frankie Stein, the whole of Jasper the Grasper and most of Queen of the Seas. Dare-A-Day Davy scripts were supplied by Odhams, as well as those of the Nervs. Ken often added things to the scripts that he received from Odhams.

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  4. It never would have occurred to me that Reid wrote the scripts himself. For one thing, he wrote in common language very easily – “wiv” instead of “with” – not what I’d have expected from a man from Manchester! For another, that very style is agreeably jarring when compared to other characters’ mode of speech - i.e., Tony Broke’s frequent “You rich rotter”s. When I started reading Buster in 1980, Faceache’s common voice could hardly be ‘heard’, and was completely gone around the time of the Jackpot merger. Reading the earlier stories many years later, the madcap style and language made it very clear what was later lost – upsettingly so. Anyway, Happy New Year!

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