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.



Sunday, February 14, 2016

Friday, February 5, 2016

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



Time for part two the story that I drew in 1990 or thereabouts for the national humour magazine. You can read the first part HERE. The magazine lost my original artwork of the first page below, so the image is scanned from the printed version, hence poor quality.







The last four pages will be up soon!


P.S. Apologies for possible delays in publishing and/or replying to your comments – I will be travelling overseas starting from the coming Sunday until the middle of the month and may have limited internet access at times. I have scheduled the next part to go live automatically :)

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 :) )