ARTIST SELF-PORTRAITS (Part 8)

Next up is the self-portrait of Mike Brown that can be found in Frankie Stein Holiday Special 1977 in the one-off tale entitled The Curse of Dr. Jackal:

Mike Brown was one of the most convincing imitators of Leo Baxendale’s style and his work is often indistinguishable from Leo’s. His career in UK comics started in the mid-60s and (supposedly) reached the pinnacle a decade later when he illustrated a number of Badtime Bedtime Books in MONSTER FUN COMIC. The latest work I’ve seen by him was in the first year of Nutty (1980 – 1981) where he drew Dick Turban, Desert Highwayman.

I find it a bit strange that Mr. Brown included his self-portrait alongside with Frankie Stein – a character he’d never had anything to do with until then. Maybe he liked the friendly monster a lot… Anyway, here is the 4-page story in full:

ARTIST SELF-PORTRAITS (PART 7)

Regular readers might remember the little series of self-portraits of those tireless but often anonymous and uncredited toilers of UK comics – the artists, that I did a year ago. You can view all the old posts HERE. I’ve found a few more cute examples in the course of 2013 and will show them in the next few posts before I switch to the Festive theme.

Let’s start with two nice examples featuring Tom Paterson, one from Buster cover-dated 2nd November, 1985:

…and one from The Beano No. 2356 from 1987:

 

More will follow soon.

ARTIST SELF-PORTRAITS (PART 6)

Quite a motley instalment today as I put all the remaining bits and bobs of artist self-portraits in a single blogpost. I’ll start off with another episode of Meet the Artists feature in Buster that I missed. Thanks to Peter Gray for the heads up:

Niblet who is another friend of KAZOOP!! alerted me about this self-portrait of David Mostyn in Whoopee! dated 29th January, 1983:

The other day I was checking my Shiver and Shake collection for something else and came across an episode of Frankie Stein in which Professor Cube had an idea he could get rid of his dreaded son by taking over the duties of the Shiver artist. This makes the tied-up bloke in the panel below Robert Nixon. The Shiver and Shake issue in question is dated 5th January, 1974:

In August 1984 Buster celebrated Reg Parlett’s eightieth birthday with a special story on front and back covers. Reg Parlett appears in the last panel surrounded by a crowd of his characters. I wonder who’s that Comics Historian in the second row of the second page?

I’ll close the series for now with a couple of Ken Reid self-portraits that were shown in the BBC Four series about the history of British comics. The images were used to illustrate the period when Mr. Reid suffered a nervous break-down though over-exhaustion and was unable to draw for many months: