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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.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

A LOOK AT SHIVER & SHAKE STRIPS: SCREAM INN (PART 4)

Rounding up this 4-part Scream Inn series, here is a page of Brian Walker’s original Scream Inn artwork for SHIVER AND SHAKE No. 62 (11th May, 1974). The piece is huge – it is four times the size of the printed page. The logo is a glossy photo print, so is the poster at the entrance, both glued to the paper. The logo has come off and there is the name of the author of the story idea written underneath, presumably by Mr. Walker himself. The stamp on the back shows issue number and date, alongside with the artist’s address and phone number.

In his interview for GOLDEN FUN Mr. Walker told the interviewer he took a long time over his work. He used a variety of nibs and preferred drawing on one sheet Bristol board that was virtually no thicker than paper. He liked it because it rolled up easily and he could get four or five pages rolled up inside a 1 ¼ inch plastic drain pipe in order to send them off to IPC. A friendly plumber kept pipe cut-offs for him. Here are some panels close-up for your enjoyment:

I wonder if any of my readers could enlighten me as to the dotting technique used by Mr. Walker to make grey shadows in his artwork? Looking at the printed version I assumed it was printwork but panels of the original page above suggest differently.

Saturday, April 6, 2013

A LOOK AT SHIVER & SHAKE STRIPS: SCREAM INN (PART THREE)

Here comes the second half of Scream Inn visitors’ book. For some weird reason the post with the first half is not showing in Google search. Here is the link for those of you who have missed it: Scream Inn visitors’ book Part One. Or you can simply scroll down to the older post.

Issue No. 41 ● December 15th, 1973 ● Gluemaker from Caerphilly

Issue No. 42 ● December 22nd, 1973 ● Secretary

Issue No. 43 ● December 29th, 1973 ● Good King Wenceslas (X-mas episode)

Issue No. 44 ● January 5th, 1974 ● Old Year who's supposed to be going out & Baby New Year

Issue No. 45 ● January 12th, 1974 ● Pantomime actress

Issue No. 46 ● January 19th, 1974 ● Bank manager

Issue No. 47 ● January 26th, 1974 ● Smelly tramp

Issue No. 48 ● February 2nd, 1974 ● Corporation Dustmen

Issue No. 49 ● February 9th, 1974 ● Injun Brave Lowawatha - Head Small Brother of Hiawatha

Issue No. 50 ● February 16th, 1974 ● Coward

Issue No. 51 ● February 23rd, 1974 ● Innkeeper tries to find a normal person to spend a night at Scream Inn. Fans of Brian Walker’s I Spy from SPARKY comic will recognise Chief reading the paper on the bus in the last panel of page one. This was a very unusuall episode, a kind of social satire:

Issue No. 52 ● March 2nd, 1974 ● Werewolf + This week's extra guest: Timothy Tester from Whizzer and Chips makes a guest appearance at Scream Inn (2 pages). This was quite a special issue because it had as many as four pages of Scream Inn – the regular 2-pager in the Shiver section and a 2-page set of Timothy Tester (guest-strip from Whizzer and Chips) in Shake. The latter set is of particular interest because the regular artist of Timothy Tester was Cliff Brown who was also the writer of Scream Inn. Thus, the set is a combined effort with Cliff Brown not only writing the script but also doing some of the artwork together with Brian Walker. Here is the first page of the set: