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.



Friday, May 10, 2013

A LOOK AT SHIVER & SHAKE STRIPS: JAIL BIRDS



Jail Birds was another short-lived strip about a cat and two caged budgies, both of whom were named Bluey.  The cat kept the two birds hoping to fatten them up for his Christmas dinner. He made no effort to hide his plans from the budgies and jailbreak was the only way for them to avoid the fate. They tried everything but luck was always against them, no matter how sophisticated the escape plots were. 

Jail Birds started in the first edition of SHIVER AND SHAKE and continued until No. 36 missing 6 issues in between (Nos. 10, 18, 21, 23, 24, 28). The illustrator’s name is unknown to me.






I expected the series to end with a spectacular break into freedom at Christmas (or maybe with the cat and the budgies becoming buddies), but the story was put to rest quite abruptly 7 weeks before the Holidays when the cat decided he didn’t want to wait any more and declared that today was Xmas day on his calendar. Under the circumstances, any escape plan had to work or else the young reader would have been faced with a disturbing ending... Did the writer run out of jailbreak ideas or was the feature doing poorly in the popularity charts – we’ll never know for sure. Here is the last episode from SHIVER AND SHAKE No. 36 (November 1oth 1973): 


3 comments:

  1. OMG! This final is amazing, i am reading these days those magazines... Thanks for let me read the last one. I think it is a great end.

    Thanks for sharing these kind of things.
    Do you know something about "Me, and my shadow" into "Whezzy and Chips" magazine?? I mean about dates.

    Sorry for my bad english. I am enjoying a lot your blog.
    Thanks, hugs from Spain.

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    Replies
    1. Hi, SadlyMistaken,
      I am glad you are enjoying the blog!
      As for Me and My Shadow (illustrated by Terry Bave), it started in Whizzer and Chips No 1 in 1969 (18th October) and the last one was in the X-mas edition of 1970 (29th December).

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    2. ¡¡Oh!! You answered, hehehe, thanks a lot for the information.
      read you... thanks so much

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