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, January 30, 2016

MORE OF MY COMICS WORK: THE FROLICS OF THE ONE-HORNED DEVIL, PART ONE


Some of you may know that a quarter of a century ago I used to be a freelance comics artist and had my work published regularly in the national bi-weekly humour magazine for a couple of years or so.  I showed some of my work in an old post HERE. I also said I might show more in the future, and the time has come! It is a 13-page tale that I drew to a story of a Lithuanian writer whose work we transformed into scripts for my comics.

The scans are from original art that I managed to get back from the magazine when they were done with it. Note that original pages are only A4 in size – roughly the same size as you can see them on your screen after you click to enlarge. The introductory colour page is in water colours and Indian ink, the rest are in Indian ink. I lettered them all myself but you can’t see original lettering because this time I made an extra effort and translated the text for my English-speaking readers.

There are a few things I would like to point out: the story that the tale is based on was written in Soviet times; the author was a humorist and satirist, and drinking was one of the vices of the society at the time, hence the numerous situations involving alcohol in the story. Deficit was another common thing at the time – it means that normal goods, like building materials for example, weren’t easy to find. I altered the English version of the text a little bit to make it more up-to-date, so to speak. If you can spot traces of the influence of Terry Bave or Reg Parlett, that’s because I tried imitating them a little bit; by the way, I found them a lot easier to copy than Robert Nixon’s and Mike Lacey’s style.

Here is part one of the three-part series. Let me know what you think :)





Come back soon for part two!

Sunday, January 24, 2016

FRAMED KEN REID PIECE



I have a few pieces of original comic artwork that are well-worth to be framed and displayed on my wall but so far I’ve only got round to mounting one – a World-Wide Weirdie by Ken Reid.  I thought it would be nice to put the original and the printed version side by side, so here’s the result:


Ken Reid inscribed the name and address of the author of the idea on the back of his drawing. I asked the frame shop to cut a hole in the mounting board so as to expose the hand-written text on reverse :



In the image below I have pasted the two versions ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ to give you an idea about the size of the original (assuming you are familiar with the size of WHOOPEE! comic :) )


Tuesday, January 19, 2016

WHOOPEE! No. 500 COVERS



In keeping with the theme of the previous two posts about landmark issues, here is the cover of the alleged issue 500 of WHOOPEE! that in fact was No. 494.


IPC did poorly keeping the count of their issues: the actual No. 500 came out a few weeks later. Here is the unremarkable cover:


All Images 2016 © Egmont UK Ltd.  All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Friday, January 15, 2016

MORE COVERS OF LANDMARK BUSTER NUMBERS



Further to my previous post where I showed the cover of BUSTER No. 1,000, let’s take a look at two other landmark numbers of the comic.

BUSTER No. 500 can be easily identified by simply counting the weeks in the calendar because the first industrial action to affect regular weekly publication schedule didn’t occur until 1970. Here is the cover of issue 500:


… and this is what BUSTER looked like a thousand issues later, behold the cover of No. 1,500:



All Images 2016 © Egmont UK Ltd.  All rights reserved. Used with permission.