BUSTER CHRISTMASES. PART FOUR: THE NINETIES

One can’t help noticing that the editors of BUSTER believed in introducing major changes every five years and had a fixation on years ending with a zero and a five. 1990 saw another logo change that happened to be the last in the paper’s life and is also my least favourite one. The cover of the first Christmas issue of the nineties looks like Mike Lacey’s, all the later ones are by Jimmy Hansen. 

Buster became a fortnightly in 1995 (remember what I said about years ending with zeros and fives?):

The last Christmas episode was a sad reprint of the story from the 1992 Christmas edition of the paper. It was also the penultimate issue of BUSTER.

My next couple of festive posts will be dedicated to Christmas episodes of a long-running character in BUSTER whose name starts with an “F”. Can you guess who?

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.