BUSTER CHRISTMASES. PART THREE - THE EIGHTIES

The beginning of the new decade coincided with the change of the logo. Reg Parlett was still in charge of Buster:

In 1985 BUSTER logo was changed once again and Tom Paterson took over as illustrator of the comic’s main character. 

I have mixed feelings about the change. Mr. Paterson was an excellent artist, his ‘manic’ style is beyond criticism and many of his BUSTER covers are absolutely beautiful but there is something about the stories that makes them difficult to follow at times, especially towards the end of the decade. I don’t know if Tom Paterson wrote his own scripts but IMHO his style worked well in monster humour like Sweeny Toddler, Strange Hill and Hyde and Shriek, not so much in stories about everyday life of ordinary school children. Why the majority of Buster’s fellow kids gradually developed into dumb hysterical brats is not quite clear to me. The difference between the Buster of Nadal and Parlett and that of Paterson is enormous...

Remember the 1965 Christmas issue?  In that nice little episode Buster and his friends found a gas cylinder and used the gas to blow up lots of balloons, eventually sending their scout hut floating into the air. The script writer created a believable story – gas-filled balloons do rise into the air, so perhaps if you blow lots of them up indoors they can cause your house go straight up... The idea of a house drifting in mid-air, courtesy of baloons, is recycled in the story below, only this time the writer doesn’t bother with small details like gas cylinders – here a bunch of worked up crazy kids rush about trying to decorate a Christmas tree, grab and blow up some balloons and the house goes up just like that. The same idea but two fundamentally different stories from very different eras… 

Here is the last BUSTER Christmas cover story by Tom Paterson. The comic was in for more changes in the coming year…

BUSTER CHRISTMASES. PART TWO – THE SEVENTIES

The seventies were off to a rough start for Buster because it fell victim to printers’ industrial action and no issues were published for eleven weeks in the end of 1970 and the beginning of 1971, hence no 1970 Christmas edition. 

Here are three more covers by Nadal with the snowy logo:

By Christmas 1974 Nadal was replaced by Reg Parlett who remained in charge of the character for more than a decade. 

 

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:

ARTIST SELF-PORTRAITS (PART 3)

In 1990 and 1991 Buster ran a Meet the ArtistS series where the then Buster artists drew themselves and provided some details about their lives and artistic careers. To the best of my knowledge, the series covered a total of twelve artists, here are the first four. Others will follow soon: