SPARKY 'MOONSTERS' COVERS

SPARKY issue No. 59 with the cover date of 5th March, 1966 is one of the few issues that I still need to complete my set of the title. Someone is offering a copy on eBay this week but I think it is overpriced and postage rate to where I am is outrageous, etc., but that’s not what this post is about… I am glad the seller showed a decent image of the cover, so now I know what's on it.

It looks like Bill Ritchie later used the idea of Moonsters’ brass band for the cover of Sparky annual 1968. Some of the figures are near-identical, don’t you think? Remember to click to see the image full size!

In my opinion the whole series of SPARKY ‘Moonsters’ front page sets is among the best impact covers in British children’s comics. The action-packed, bright single-panel drawings must have been real eye-catchers on the newsstands. I might do a complete series of those covers (more than a hundred of them!) sometime in the future…

MY COMICS WORK: THE FROLICS OF THE ONE-HORNED DEVIL, PART THREE (FINAL)

Here’s part three with the grand finale of the story :) Go HERE for part one and HERE for part two.

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 :)

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!