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.



Saturday, June 11, 2016

GUEST APPEARANCES AT SCREAM INN – I SPY LOOK-ALIKE




Shiver and Shake merged into Whoopee! in October 1974 and Scream Inn was one of the strips that found its way into the new paper with the clumsy title of Whoopee! and Shiver & Shake

The first guest appearance in Scream Inn can be found soon after the merger, in the issue cover-dated 26 October 1974 (No. 34), and it was quite an unusual one indeed. That week’s guest looked a lot like I Spy from SPARKY comic published by DCT. I believe this is one of very few examples in British comics when a character appeared in a rival publication produced by the competitor. Brian Walker illustrated I Spy starting from SPARKY issue No. 300 (17 October 1970), so the inclusion of a look-alike into the episode of Scream Inn in Whoopee! and Shiver & Shake (published by IPC) must have been a cheeky experiment on his part. Here is the episode, followed by the three-page set of I Spy from SPARKY, the first one by Brian Walker.







While we are on the subject of SPARKY’s I Spy and cheeky sneak-ins by Brian Walker, who is that bespectacled bloke in the top right corner of this panel of Scream Inn from Shiver and Shake issue 51 (February 23rd, 1974)?



Sunday, May 29, 2016

THE MOONSTERS COVERS OF SPARKY - PART THREE


Time for ten more early Sparky covers with the Moonsters. The first and the last ones in this post are interesting: the first one (No. 50) because it celebrates the New Year, while the last one (No. 59) because Bill Ritchie later re-drew it as the cover of Sparky Book 1968 (see my old post HERE).











Tuesday, May 24, 2016

ROYAL MAIL BLUNDERS



I’ll add some variety to this blog and write about something else than comics today. The subject of this post is Royal Mail – the service that the vast majority of eBay sellers and other dealers have used over the years to send my comics from the UK to Lithuania where I live.

Generally speaking I have no complaints because only two or three of my packages failed to turn up in the course of nearly a decade. A few of the parcels, however, did quite a bit of travelling before reaching me, so I assume some people have no clue where my country is. Let’s picture two post office employees processing my package at a sorting station somewhere in the UK:

“Look, this one is to Lithuania. Do you know where it is?”
“Sounds exotic, should be Asia.”
“Asia be it, then…”:




I thought asking my sellers to add EUROPE after LITHUANIA in my address would help the post office do a better job. I am sure most of the times the hint was appreciated, but not on this occasion:


Friday, May 20, 2016

GUEST APPEARANCES AT SCREAM INN - CREEPY CREATION




The third and the last guest appearance during the Shiver and Shake run of Scream Inn can be found in issue No. 73 (August 24, 1974), and on that occasion the visitor was a Creepy Creation. I covered the Creepy Creations feature in detail when I reviewed SHIVER AND SHAKE comic a couple of years ago. You can find the article HERE.




Here is that week’s Creepy Creation from the back page of SHIVER AND SHAKE, drawn by the usual artist Ken Reid (as if you didn’t know…):


All three guest appearances at Scream Inn in SHIVER AND SHAKE have now been accounted for. My detailed review of Scream Inn in SHIVER AND SHAKE comic can be found in another article under SHIVER AND SHAKE umbrella HERE.


I will start looking at the WHOOPEE! run in a week or so, and the first guest will be a very unusual one indeed!