THE MOONSTERS ON SPARKY BACK COVERS – PART 6

The other day I found Bill Ritchie’s self-portrait in an episode of Hungry Hoss (The BEEZER cover-dated Jan. 19th, 1985), which has prompted me to post the next 10 instalments of The Moonsters as they appeared on the back cover of SPARKY in 1968. 

Images are © D.C.Thomson & Co. Ltd.

MY FIRST PUBLISHED CARTOONING WORK

If you’ve been following my blog for some time, you may be aware that years ago I used to be a freelance cartoonist and comic artist here in Lithuania. In my interview for Steve Holland's Bear Alley website that I did to promote The Power Pack of Ken Reid, I mentioned that my first published work was actually in the UK! 

Here’s the story: I started learning English since my first year at school at the age of seven. When I was in third grade, I wrote a little story in English, and presented it in the form of a small illustrated 12-page book. Each illustration occupied a full page, with text on the opposite page. I showed it to my English teacher, and she posted it to her pen friend at Shakespeare Middle School in Leeds. A few months later my teacher gave me a copy of the 1978 Autumn edition of the School’s magazine with my story printed in full! I think they were impressed with the effort of a young non-native speaker from the other side of the Iron Curtain…

A few days ago I found the magazine in my archive. Here are the front and back covers - the latter looks a bit like a Creepy Creation by Ken Reid, don’t you think?

My little story is in the two images below. It even has a slap-up feed panel at the end! Considering I was only 9 or 10 years of age when I wrote it, and had only been studying English for some 3 years, the language isn’t too bad… The story was printed in black and white, and the print quality was rather poor, so my 10 year old self must have decided to colour it in and go over the handwritten text with a pencil… 

If you feel like checking out my published comic work of the early 90s, you can see some of it in my old blogposts HERE and HERE.

THE MOONSTERS ON SPARKY BACK COVERS – PART 5

It has been a quite a long time since my last gallery of SPARKY back pages featuring THE MOONSTERS by Bill Ritchie. Here is the next batch, from SPARKY Nos. 150 – 159 in 1967/68.

Images are © D.C.Thomson & Co. Ltd.

ANTHROPOMORPHIC STRIPS BY LEO BAXENDALE

Looking through my Beanos, I came across a curious example of Kat and Kanary in issue No. 770 (20 April, 1957). The curious thing about it is that the illustrator was Leo Baxendale, who to the best of my knowledge didn’t draw many anthropomorphic strips. In this case, Leo’s style is easily recognizable, don’t you think?

It is less obvious in the next episode from The Beano No. 771 – the last one by Leo before the strip was assigned to another artist:

I then found out that Leo drew another strip with animal protagonists, and it was The Katts in Knockout (second series). It ran in the first 14 issues of the comic starting from 12th June, 1971, but as it turns out, Leo only drew a few of the episodes. I stand to be corrected, but in my opinion his Katts appeared in 5 issues:

The rest were by Mike Lacey, weren’t they?:

 

Characters are © Rebellion Publishing Ltd