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.



Thursday, August 20, 2015

ACCIDENTAL RUDENESS



I recently received a small joblot of the Beano from the mid-fifties and found this early episode of When The Bell Rings in issue No. 630:




I decided to show it because of something I spotted in the first panel:




I remember reading somewhere that publishers had an internal directive warning against the use of certain innocent words in comics because they tended to look rude when printed, and ‘flick’ appears to have been one of them. It seems that in this case DCT realised it before it was too late but they were more careful when reprinting the episode in the Dandy Beano Magic Moments book nearly 40 years later:



All Images 2015 © DC Thomson, Ltd.  All rights reserved.




Saturday, August 15, 2015

ATTENTION, SPARKY PEOPLE!



As a special treat, today I offer you a look at Bill Ritchie’s first drafts of what later became front covers of the first two Sparky annuals. I photographed them during a recent visit to my mate Peter whose collection of UK comics, free gifts, original artwork, etc. is by far the biggest in the World.

I’ve placed the paintings side-by-side with the actual covers, spot-the-difference puzzle style. In reality, they are approx. twice the size of the printed versions. Enjoy!


 

Monday, August 10, 2015

AGHHH-IT'S-'IM-JONAH: THE REMAINING TWO EPISODES OF MINI SUB



Below are the remaining two installments of the “Mini Sub” story of Jonah by Ken Reid which ran in the Beano Nos. 985-988. This time I’ll show them exactly as they were printed in June 1961 because as you have seen in the two previous posts, those reprints in Buddy in the eighties were rather awful.

(Remember to click on the images to see them even larger) 




All Images 2015 © DC Thomson, Ltd.