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, May 15, 2018

SOME VERY EXCITING NEWS FOR FANS OF KEN REID!


I said I was going to break the news a while ago, but things tend to take longer than one plans… At long last, here they are: 

I AM ABOUT TO PUBLISH THE OFFICIAL COLLECTION OF KEN REID’S COMPLETE ODHAMS WORK!

More details will be revealed soon…





Monday, April 23, 2018

HAROLD HARE’S OWN PAPER, April 1961



HAROLD HARE’S OWN PAPER was another nice nursery comic of the 60’s by Fleetway, and here is a random issue published at about this time nearly 60 years ago.


The cover is by Hugh McNeill, as was some of the artwork inside. I have credited the artists where I could recognise their styles. The comic was larger in size than companion PLAYHOUR and JACK AND JILL at the time, so I couldn’t scan complete pages, but the "clippings" below will give you a taste. If I were a British kid when these comics were around, I would have probably preferred PLAYHOUR but HHOP also had some nice art and stories to offer.



Here’s another strip by Hugh McNeill:



Moony was a weird creature from the Moon who could transform himself into any shape and form:



The centre pages had Here Comes Mr. Toad by Peter Woolcock:




The Adventures of Pinocchio was illustrated by Tom Kerr (I believe):





The back cover featured The Stories of Katie Country Mouse by Mendoza. His work here seems to be less inspired than that of Gulliver in PLAYHOUR which Mendoza had stopped drawing by then:


Tuesday, April 3, 2018

PLAYHOUR EASTER ISSUE 1959



It looks like my detailed account of Gulliver Guinea Pig’s stories will have to wait because I am now busy coordinating another exciting project which I hope to be able to announce here very soon…

I haven’t added a new blogpost for quite some time, so in keeping with the theme of the last few posts, here is a complete Easter issue of Playhour published at about this time of the year nearly 6 decades ago in 1959. It comes from a small batch that I recently picked up on eBay. The quality of artwork can’t be praised enough and it’s a shame the title appears to be largely forgotten and underappreciated among collectors. On the other hand, those old issues are rather difficult to come by. Click on the images to enlarge.

Enjoy!