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. 

 

BUSTER CHRISTMASES. PART ONE – THE SIXTIES

2012 was a good year for me as a collector. I have finished putting together several sets and made some serious inroads into my wants lists for other British comics that I want to have complete runs of. BUSTER happens to be one of them. With only some 20 weekly issues of the title remaining on my wants list, I have all but one Christmas editions of the title so I thought it would be fun to take a look at the four decades of BUSTER Christmases and see how the main character (and the comic itself) developed over the years – from the infancy days as Son of Andy Capp, to childhood and teenage years from the brush of Angel Nadal, to the youth and adult age of Reg Parlett era, to maturity portrayed by Tom Paterson and Jimmy Hansen and finally the feeble old age of reprint.

Let’s start with the 60s and the first Christmas edition – the only one I don’t have a hard copy of. I found the image on George Shiers' blog here. Art by Bill Titcombe.

A year later the illustrator was Hugh McNeill:

1962 was the beginning of Angel Nadal’s era:

BUSTER was a tabloid-sized paper from first issue until the middle of 1965. By Christmas of 1965 the paper had shrunk and become closer to the standard well-familiar format of IPC comics, but still larger than that. It looks like Nadal was substituted by another artist on this one:

With a few exceptions, Nadal contiued drawing Buster for well over a decade until 1974.

 

Come back soon for Buster Christmases of the 70s!