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.



Wednesday, April 22, 2020

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.

3 comments:

  1. That's excellent, and your use of English at that age is impressive. I like the final panel - is there a tradition of slap-up feeds in Lithuanian comics as there is in the UK?

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    1. Thank you for complimenting the English of my 10-year old self :) Lithuanian comics don't have traditions because we never had comic magazines like you've had for decades in the UK. Folk tales, however, usually end with slap-up feed. There's even a standard closing phrase which goes something like this: "I've also been there, drank beer and spirits, had it dribbling down my beard, but had nothing in my mouth". I'm actually unsure what that means... :)

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    2. I'm sure it's deeply meaningful :)

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