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.



Tuesday, August 27, 2019

SERIALISED FACEACHE STORIES – PART TWELVE: DAWN CHORUS



Faceache story arc No. 12 was a two-part story which appeared in BUSTER issues cover-dated August 4 and 11, 1979.
 
Faceache doesn’t know what a birds’ dawn chorus is, so Mr. Snipe tells him to stay up with him in the grounds all night to await the dawn so that he can hear it first-hand and write an essay on the whole beautiful experience. 


Anxious to get some sleep, Faceache decides he can scrunge the dawn chorus forward a few hours. 


He creeps away behind Mr. Snipe’s back and scrunges his neck to treetop level and then some trillers, cheepers, chirrupers, chirpers, warblers, tweeters, twitterers and a carefree cuckooeee just for luck… 


He starts with the first sweet cheep-cheep of his fake dawn chorus. Enchanted by the beauty of the bird-song, Mr. Snipe leaps in the direction of the sound and discovers Faceache’s twist. Mr. Snipe climbs up Feceache’s neck and tells him to unscrunge this instant for a “Guinness Book of Records” thrashing. 


Faceache obeys:

 
...and Mr. Snipe crashes down from the heights of Faceache’s neck. 


Faceache leaves the dazed Mr. Snipe with his own little built-in dawn chorus and goes back to school to catch-up on some sleep. At dawn the real dawn chorus starts and Faceache can’t sleep because of the noise.


Characters are © Rebellion Publishing Ltd
 
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.

Monday, August 19, 2019

KEN REID’S SELF-PORTRAIT IN JINX



I once did a series of posts featuring various strips with artists’ self-portraits in them. I recently discovered another nice example in the opening episode of JINX – Ken’s last new strip that he illustrated for the BEANO before leaving DC Thomson. 

It can be found in the BEANO issue No. 1108 cover-dated 12th October, 1963.

The self-portrait is not as detailed as the one in POW!’s Dare-A-Day Davy (that appears on the slipcase of my POWER PACK OF KEN REID collection and in Rebellion’s CREEPY CREATIONS album), but I was still happy to have found it! Click to enlarge:



 Images © DC Thomson Ltd
 
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, August 6, 2019

QUEEN OF THE SEAS PANEL


Ken Reid was known to have sometimes been ‘text heavy’ in the strips that he scripted himself, making it necessary for editors to cut his writing down. Below is a nice example of that. The panel is from original Queen of the Seas artwork. I am not completely sure, but I believe I photographed it from the original piece owned by Peter Hansen:



The episode was printed in Smash! No. 31 (3rd Sept., 1966). The ugly colouring ruined the beauty of Ken’s linework,  but the reason I am showing the panel here is Captain Enoch Drip’s new speech balloon:



The Editor apparently thought Ken’s original version was too long, or eccentric…



This is how the panel looked in the reprint of the same episode in Buster cover-dated 8th July, 1972:


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.

Monday, July 22, 2019

A TREASURE TALE OF PRINCESS MARIGOLD, THE WIZARD’S BLACK MAGIC – PART TWO



Further to my previous post a few days ago, here are the remaining 5 pages of The Wizard's Black Magic tale, from TREASURE magazine issue Nos. 67 – 71 in 1964, artwork by Nadir Quinto. Click to enlarge.






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.

Sunday, July 14, 2019

A TREASURE TALE OF PRINCESS MARIGOLD, THE WIZARD’S BLACK MAGIC – PART ONE



Two posts ago I mentioned how I love stories in which characters have the power to control colours. A Treasure Tale of Princess Marigold - The Wizard’s Black Magic which ran on the back page in issues 62 – 71 (21st March - 23rd May, 1964) of TREASURE magazine for young readers is a brilliant example of that. Illustrated by Nadir Quinto, the 10-page tale features a villain who is delighted to be able to make everything loose colour but Prince Rupert and three little pixies save the day. Nadir Quinto was an excellent artist, wasn’t he?

Here are the first five episodes, the rest will follow soon. Click to enlarge and enjoy!






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.