Friday, January 5, 2018

GULLIVER GUINEA-PIG ORIGINAL ARTWORK BY GORDON HUTCHINGS



Here are some nice examples of Gulliver Guinea-Pig original artwork by Gordon Hutchings that I recently came across on eBay. I didn’t buy them, so the images are “borrowed” from the auction site.


They were first printed in PLAYHOUR in 1961. According to the auction description, the story was re-used in TEDDY BEAR’S PLAYTIME in the 1980s. It looks like the full page shown above was “constructed” from two episodes of the original tale. Here is how they appeared in PLAYHOUR:





Gulliver Guinea-Pig Saves Summer started in PLAYHOUR cover-dated 25 February, 1961 and ran for 6 weeks until Easter issue of 1 April, 1961. It was the second Gulliver story illustrated by Hutchings who took over from the original artist Philip Mendoza. Both did an excellent job on the strip. The quality of the artwork and the stories makes me want to do a detailed account of all Gulliver’s travels during the seven years of the strip’s existence (1958 – 1965)…

4 comments:

  1. Lovely artwork...magical stories...should be a book of them..

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    1. A complete collection would be around 600 pages! It would make an excellent book indeed.

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  2. That first image reminds me of the Rupert endpapers. Very nice.

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    1. The quality of artwork is impressive, and consistently so throughout the entire 7-year run of the feature. I really enjoy those young children's comics, particularly Playhour. It had a brilliant team of contributors in the 50s and up till mid-60s. Not sure about later years as I only have a few post-Gulliver issues (the strip ended in Sept. 1965).

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