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 Ken Reid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ken Reid. Show all posts

Friday, May 20, 2016

GUEST APPEARANCES AT SCREAM INN - CREEPY CREATION




The third and the last guest appearance during the Shiver and Shake run of Scream Inn can be found in issue No. 73 (August 24, 1974), and on that occasion the visitor was a Creepy Creation. I covered the Creepy Creations feature in detail when I reviewed SHIVER AND SHAKE comic a couple of years ago. You can find the article HERE.




Here is that week’s Creepy Creation from the back page of SHIVER AND SHAKE, drawn by the usual artist Ken Reid (as if you didn’t know…):


All three guest appearances at Scream Inn in SHIVER AND SHAKE have now been accounted for. My detailed review of Scream Inn in SHIVER AND SHAKE comic can be found in another article under SHIVER AND SHAKE umbrella HERE.


I will start looking at the WHOOPEE! run in a week or so, and the first guest will be a very unusual one indeed! 

Friday, March 25, 2016

THE WHAM! EASTERS OF FRANKIE STEIN



Let’s take a look at all three Easter episodes of Frankie Stein in WHAM! comic. Those from 1965 and 1967 editions were by Ken Reid while the one in the middle (1966) was by someone else because Ken was too busy with The Queen of the Seas at the time and had to give up drawing Frankie Stein temporarily. Which is a pity because the period when Ken was substituted by another artist coincided with Frankie’s days at Madam McAbre’s Academy for Frustrated Freaks (or Monster Manor) inhabited by fiendish characters of all sorts. One can only imagine how brilliant the episodes would have been, had they been illustrated by Frankie Stein’s original artist.

Happy Easter! 




Sunday, January 24, 2016

FRAMED KEN REID PIECE



I have a few pieces of original comic artwork that are well-worth to be framed and displayed on my wall but so far I’ve only got round to mounting one – a World-Wide Weirdie by Ken Reid.  I thought it would be nice to put the original and the printed version side by side, so here’s the result:


Ken Reid inscribed the name and address of the author of the idea on the back of his drawing. I asked the frame shop to cut a hole in the mounting board so as to expose the hand-written text on reverse :



In the image below I have pasted the two versions ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ to give you an idea about the size of the original (assuming you are familiar with the size of WHOOPEE! comic :) )


Monday, November 2, 2015

GHOSTLY GO ROUND FEATURE



Ghostly Go Round was an interesting feature in WHOOPEE! comic. As young readers gradually lost interest in the once-popular horror comedy genre (as confirmed by cancellation of such brilliant WHOOPEE! features as World-Wide Weirdies and Scream Inn/Spooktacular 7) and the Editor needed to clear space for new material, he came up with an idea of bringing four strips under one umbrella and rotating them in sequence. The strips that formed Ghostly Go Round were Evil Eye, Fun-Fear, Creepy Car and ‘Orrible Hole. The feature was launched in the first issue of 1979 and continued for slightly more than a year before all the four strips were put to rest one by one.

Ghostly Go Round required a new logo that could be used with all the 4 strips and the job was given to Ken Reid. He used the idea of Bob Nixon’s original Fun-Fear logo, made it spookier and squeezed the four main characters into the bottom left corner. The result wasn’t so great, IMHO. I think Bob Nixon’s old version was much better. Below are both logos side-by-side.


Here are the first appearances of the 4 strips in the heyday of WHOOPEE! comic. Evil Eye started in the very first issue of the paper:


… followed by Fun-Fear in the issue cover-dated 17 August, 1974:


… then Creepy Car on 12th October later that year (UPDATE: the strip was in fact an immigrant from SHIVER AND SHAKE where it had started nine weeks before the paper folded. The episode shown below is the first one in the combined Whoopee! and Shiver & Shake, hence the recap of the origins):


… and finally ‘Orrible Hole in the first issue of 1975 (cover-dated Jan 18 because the comic missed a few weeks due to industrial action at the junction of 1974/75):