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, September 19, 2019

THE ORIGINS OF GULLIVER GUINEA-PIG – PART THREE



Here is part three of the article by John Wigmans, a guest-writer on this blog, where he covers the genesis of Gulliver Guinea Pig. Check out the previous posts if you missed the first and second part.

The First Steps of an Unlikely but Very Likeable Hero: Gulliver Guinea-Pig (Part 3)
by John Wigmans


In February, 2018 I wrote this about what I then considered to be the first steps of our brave little hero, Gulliver Guinea-Pig: "As it turns out, Gulliver didn’t start his travels in Playhour dated 24 May 1958 (No. 189). As far as I now know, his real debut was in Tiny Tots dated 17 May 1958 (No. 1298), as part of The New Nursery Rhymes." Luckily I kept my options open as I continued the post: "Unless other information surfaces, Gulliver made his first steps in [...] Tiny Tots dated 17 May 1958, No. 1298." Well, other and more exact information did surface. High time to share these hitherto unknown details.

In September, 2018 I did some additional research in the bound volumes of Tiny Tots which are held by the British Library in London. In this often neglected comic I found, to my surprise, four delightful stories starring Gulliver, three of which I had not seen before (well, two actually: see the list below). All were published as centre-spreads in 'The New Nursery Rhymes’ series, three in May and the last one in July, 1958. The instalment I had assumed was the first-ever appearance of Gulliver (#1298), was in fact the second. By the way: buying the comic with this episode on eBay in November, 2017 led me to write about the first steps of our unlikely but very likeable hero.

To cut a long story short, here is a list of the numbers, titles of the stories and cover dates of the four issues of Tiny Tots featuring Gulliver Guinea-Pig:

#1296, GGP gathers his cherries; dated 3 May 1958:


#1298, GGP is shipwrecked; dated 17 May 1958 (presented on this blog, 15February, 2018)

#1300, GGP in China; dated 31 May 1958


#1305, GGP under the sea; dated 5 July 1958 (reprinted in Harold Hare comic,  4 April, 1964, and presented on this blog, 25 February,2018)



A revision of my earlier statement is now in order: As it turns out, Gulliver didn’t start his travels in Playhour dated 24 May 1958 (No. 189). His real debut was in Tiny Tots dated 3 May 1958 (No. 1296), as part of ‘The New Nursery Rhymes’. This official debut predates his adventures in Playhour by three weeks. But it still remains a mystery to me why Gulliver started his life in Tiny Tots. Was the fate of this comic already sealed in May, 1958? And were the travels of the guinea-pig used to entice young readers (and their parents) to switch over to Playhour, some eight months before the actual demise of Tiny Tots? Perhaps one of the readers of this blog can shed some light on this matter.

Now Irmantas can hopefully start working on a string of blogposts covering the entire run of the strip in Playhour, as he recently let me know. I can only hope he'll start this string with the adventures of our ‘roving world-traveller’ as published in Tiny Tots 1958 and the Tiny Tots Annual for 1959.

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 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.