*KAZOOP !!

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.

Monday, February 4, 2019

LEO BAXENDALE'S WEEKLY OUTPUT IN 1956

In the process of posting images of landmark episodes of When the Bell Rings and The Bash Street Kids by Leo Baxendale elsewhere on the web recently, and leafing thought the respective issues of DC Thomson’s comics in my collection, I realized how extraordinarily productive the young Leo was in the mid-50s. At that that point his weekly output amounted to a full page of When The Bell Rings, a half-page of Minnie the Minx, a half-page of Little Plum for THE BEANO, and one full page of The Banana Bunch for THE BEEZER on top of that!

Here are images of all the strips by Leo Baxendale from The Beano and The Beezer, both cover cover-dated February 11th 1956. Assuming that he drew all the pages in just one week, the man is unbeatable!

Sunday, January 13, 2019

POWER PACK OF KEN REID reviewed in Australian magazine!

The image above shows the cover of the recent issue of INKSPOT magazine published by the Australian Cartoonists’ Association. It has a review of the POWER PACK OF KEN REID (see below, click to enlarge), written by Nat Karmichael who is Deputy President of the Association and Editor of INKSPOT. Nat was also an early supporter of my crowdfunding campaign last summer, so thank you, Nat!

If any of my readers in Australia or New Zealand are considering buying copies of the books but are put-off by high postage cost, I thought I might let you know I will be visiting the two countries in March, and I could take a couple of sets with me to post from there. I travel light but I won’t be able to bring a lot of copies over, so do not delay to contact me as this is a first come first served offer :)


Nat Karmichael

Click on the POWER PACK banner in the right-hand column and get your copy of the POWER PACK OF KEN REID - the deluxe two-volume set of Ken’s strips in WHAM!, SMASH! and POW! comics of the ‘60s.

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

KEN REID’S CREEPY CREATIONS REPRINT COLLECTION – MORE EXTRAS

I am sure most of you already have your copies of Rebellion’s Creepy Creations reprint collection. I received mine a while ago and I think it is a nice package. It’s great that the collection includes not just the pages from Shiver and Shake weeklies, but also all of the other ‘Creations’ printed in the annuals, pull-out booklets and even those that Ken Reid drew for a competition in Buster a couple of years down the line.

I really look forward to Vol 1 of the World-Wide Weirdies because in my opinion Creepy Creations was Ken’s warm-up exercise before really going to town with his next series in Whoopee!

If you read my intro to the book, you may recall I mentioned Ken’s attempts to get a similar series published in the US. Ken drew quite a few detailed samples for the publisher. It would have been great if some of those could have been included in the book. Check out a couple of the drawings below, in colour. The image of the Monster of Molasses was supplied to me by Julius Howe who owns the original.

If you think these are scary, wait till you see my next post in a few days’ time…

Thursday, January 3, 2019

SERIALISED FACEACHE STORIES – PART SEVEN: HOT AIR

Faceache story arch No. 7 by Ken Reid was called Hot Air and appeared in Buster and Monster Fun issues cover dated 27 January and 3 February 1979. It went like this:

Mr. Snipe asks Faceache to nip to the store room and bring him some ink, a ruler and some blotting paper for his next class. On his way back, Faceache finds the door to the room holding the school’s hot-air central heating system.

He crawls down the vents planning to flip ink pellets and splat the teacher. Mr. Snipe tells his class how anyone of a rotten evil disposition will be singled-out and mercilessly smitten from above (it was a Bible class). Faceache’s ink lands on the teacher’s face.

Hiding in the vents, Faceache hopes he’ll never be suspected. Meanwhile, hot-air heating system cleaners call to offer their services to the Headmaster…

Cleaners seal the vents and start cleaning the system. Faceache is forced to scrunge to streamline himself against the blast but looses control of his scrunge muscles.

He crashes out of the system right into Mr. Snipe’s classroom. The teacher realises it was Faceache who fired the ink pallet and gives the scrunged Faceache a thrashing with Faceache’s upper body sticking from the vent in one room and his rear end from another five classrooms away…