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.



Showing posts with label Buster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Buster. Show all posts

Friday, September 25, 2015

MORE BUSTER COVERS BY BAX



Below are the remaining two Buster covers by Leo Baxendale from 1967, followed by examples of The Cave Kids and The Pirates by Bax from the same period. It appears that the artist also did the lettering throughout the runs of both strips.





By way of a teaser for the next post, I can say that I decided to check if I can find more examples of cap-less Buster. Come back soon to see some results of my quest. In the meantime, here’s an image of Buster-less cap from 1985:

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

BUSTER COVERS BY LEO BAXENDALE



The Spanish artist Angel Nadal was responsible for the vast majority of BUSTER covers in the period from 1962 till 1974. The few exceptions included six episodes of Buster's Diary by Leo Baxendale in 1967 (the issues cover-dated 6th May, 15th July, 5th Aug, 26th Aug, 23rd Sept and 21st Oct).

My speculation is that the Editor wanted to have insurance in case Nadal’s artwork didn’t arrive on time in the post from Barcelona, so he asked Leo Baxendale to draw some and kept them “in reserve”. Here are some of the covers. I prefer Nadal’s version of Buster’s Diary. 





Sunday, June 28, 2015

SIZE MATTERS?



During the long history of British comics the weekly magazines came in a variety of sizes but to the best of my knowledge THE BIG ONE gets the prize for being the biggest of them all at 37 x 55 cms, or 14.57 x 21.64 in, while Nipper, with its early issues measuring just 15 x 21 cms, or 5.9 x 8,27 in, is on the opposite side of the size-scale. 

Both experiments only managed short runs, which proves that size matters only as long as it is not one extreme or the other.

Below is a picture of the two oddities together to illustrate the contrast, followed by one where the pair is shown together with a copy of the familiar old newsprint Beano, to put the sizes into context.


 

Saturday, February 22, 2014

THE HIDDEN NUMBERING OF BUSTER WEEKLIES



Looking through the 1,000th issue of BUSTER I noticed that the coupon for readers to write down three of their favourite strips and send them to the Editor was marked B319:


The coupons in the neighbouring issues also have similar marks so I decided to trace them back to see when and why the numbering was introduced. Here are my findings...

IPC started keeping the number of their BUSTER weeklies from the issue with the cover date of 22nd Sept., 1973 (although the coupon was only marked with the date yet). Why they chose that particular issue for their reference point remains a mystery to me because BUSTER AND JET cover-dated 22nd Sept. 1973 was not remarkable or special in any way. On the other hand, the numbering was clearly intended for internal use to help the editorial team in sorting the coupons chronologically to see which strips were doing better when. In all likelihood they started doing this as soon as they realised it might be convenient and therefore they didn’t need a special issue to assign the first number to.

The first numbered coupon can be found 22 weeks later in BUSTER issue dated 23rd March, 1974 (B22). The practice continued for a while and was abandoned after issue B322 (8th April 1980). Since then (as well as before the numbering was introduced in 1973) the coupons were either unmarked or marked with a date (month and day but not the year). I haven’t checked every issue but I believe the first coupon with a date was in BUSTER of 12th May, 1973.

This ‘momentous' 'discovery’ also solves the puzzle on my original FACEACHE page from the 1978 Christmas issue of BUSTER. Some of you may remember AN OLD POST in which I showed some scans of the artwork and wondered why it was marked ‘No. 262 FLY’. It turns out the piece of paper with the hand-written text is in fact glued to the artwork. Underneath, the original page is marked like this:


No 264 fits nicely into the numbering sequence that starts from the issue of BUSTER dated 22nd Sept., 1973, and the coupon in the BUSTER of 30th Dec., 1978 is appropriately marked B264. I still can’t understand why they had to cut off the corner of FACEACHE original artwork from two weeks before (‘FLY’ episode in B262 dated 16 Dec., 1978) and glue it to the ‘SANTA’ episode:


…and then glue another piece on top of it. That other piece has yet another piece glued to it and you can see “in The Pied Piper” written underneath. ‘The Pied Piper’ was a two-part episode that appeared in BUSTER in the first two weeks of September 1978. They were surely fond of cutting and pasting at IPC…


IPC also numbered the coupons in SHIVER AND SHAKE weeklies but I haven’t found evidence they did that in other IPC children’s comics at the time. They definitely reintroduced the practice in TAMMY in the late 70s.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

BUSTER PUZZLE ANSWER







The correct answer to the question I asked in my previous post about BUSTER issue dated February 16th, 1980 is that it happens to be the one thousandth edition of the title. This is not mentioned on the cover or anywhere inside, and in all likelihood IPC were unaware that it was their landmark number, or they would have exploited this for promotion purposes. 

EDIT 11th January, 2016: some new information has recently come to my attention and it turns out that BUSTER No. 1000 actually had the cover date of 12th January, 1980. The cover and some comments are provided in this post HERE. This proves once again that researching old comics is an ongoing and live process :)

Differently from DC Thomson, Fleetway and IPC didn’t number their comics and we know they weren’t very good at keeping their count accurate, as illustrated by the example of WHOOPEE! dated November 5th, 1983 that was celebrated as No. 500 although in fact it was the 494th weekly edition published in the 504th week of publication.

BUSTER No. 1,000 came out in the 1,029th week of publication. The whole run of BUSTER consists of 1,902 issues published over a period of 1,984 weeks. The last 45 editions were fortnightlies; from 1994 onwards bumper X-mas editions covered a period of two weeks each; there were two double-dated issues in 1970 and the industrial action/production difficulties of the 70s and the 80s (to a lesser extent) are responsible for the remaining part of the deficit.