Monthly Archives: July 2023

Comic Reviews, Jurassic Park

THE LOST WORLD JURASSiC PARK #2: SUPERiOR SEQUEL

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I’ll admit my eyes rolled a little when I saw this cover to the second issue of Titan Magazine’s The Lost World Jurassic Park comic for a couple of reasons. Not the photo of the glorious animatronic Tyrannosaurus rex of course, they’re always incredible to look at. No, the top-right and bottom-left made me sigh a little and to be honest it’s just me being pedantic, so apologies to all you blog readers for having to put up with me when you’re just trying to find out about some classic comics.

The Jurassic Park novels and films made a huge deal out of the fact that they were helping dispel the myth of dinosaurs being large, lumbering reptiles and who can forget the scene when Dr Alan Grant told people dinosaurs are more closely related to modern day birds. Hence why we saw fast, fluid movement from the animals in the films and yet here we’re asked “will the reptiles strike back”? Plus, it’s not a “free” poster when it’s part of the page count of the comic. To be fair many comics did this, OiNK included, but it niggles me. Or maybe it’s because I’m writing this at a very early hour and really should’ve got more sleep.

Anyway, eye rolling done, let’s move on to what is a much improved issue and one I enjoyed very much once inside!

I’ll give the Jurassic Park movie adaptations something, they certainly know how to write some atmospheric narrative captions. Walter Simonson did a superb job of this throughout his comic version of the first movie and here Don McGregor is certainly following suit. Of course, these could be taken from the script he was working with or indeed the novel, but we’ll give him credit where it’s due in pulling us in to specific moments like this on the opening page of part two. The art team are once again penciller Jeff Butler, inker Armando Gil, letterer Ken Lopez and those are editor Renée Witterstaetter’s gorgeous colours.

It’s just a shame these moments are rushed through for much of the comic strip. Don’t get me wrong, this is a much improved chapter over last issue’s. There are more character moments from the film left intact and even one or two which must’ve been part of that earlier draft of the script. We get the scenes of Dr Sarah Harding excitedly explaining her discoveries and Dr Ian Malcolm turning them around into accurately predictive doomsaying. But we also get a few moments here that weren’t in the film, such as this exchange between the two.

I’m not sure if this would’ve been in the script, I just can’t imagine Ian using the word “chick”. Then again, with so little room (88 pages in total) to convert the script to a comic I can’t see Don adding in extra dialogue either. When Roland Tempo’s team and the slimy Peter Ludlow turn up in their helicopters there are more examples of how the narrative captions can be used to eek out some characterisation that the brisk pace of the adaptation would normally struggle with. Nick Van Owen, as played by Vince Vaughn, was a good character and criminally unused in the climax of the film so I’m glad to see him getting some more exploration here.

With the hunters now on the ground we get to that heartbreaking part of the film where they’re capturing as many dinosaurs as possible, caring not for the fact these are living, breathing animals, never mind a miracle of science. Roland made his debut in the film at this point but of course we’ve had the bonus of the entertaining deleted scene last issue so we feel like we already know him by this point. Here you can see the viciousness with which his second-in-command Dieter takes down the Parasaurolophus, or ‘Elvis’ as Roland called it.

It’s all over very quickly and it’s here that the unevenness of the adaptation comes to the fore. I’m finding it hard to figure out what Don’s rationale was for what he keeps in and what he jettisons. Later on in the issue there’s a fascinating article written by the man himself about the challenges of adapting a long movie script into a tight four-issue mini-series. He mentions keeping characterisation is very important and I can see that in some of the scenes he’s included but elsewhere that’s simply not the case.

I can’t help feeling I’d have preferred a more balanced approach

While the examples above are nice to see (Sarah and Ian’s exchange lasted for a few pages, for example), ones featuring Ian’s daughter are inexplicably missing or cut down to a few lines and other scene-setting moments have been taken out completely while some of the big dinosaur moments are rushed through, eliminating any spectacle or menace, which seems a strange choice in a Jurassic Park comic. Obviously I’m not a comic writer and Don lays out his reasoning in the article but as a reader I can’t help feeling I’d have preferred a more balanced approach.

We’ll come back to that in a moment but first the story takes a four-page break with some adverts, another dinosaur fact-file page and a double-page spread. This is on pages 18 and 19 of the comic, it’s not a separate entity and so it’s not a free gift (can you tell that’s still niggling me?). It’s a shame these weren’t large separate glossy posters but at least editor John Freeman made sure there were no strip pages on the back of them.

Julianne Moore as Sarah Harding reaches out and touches the snout of the baby Stegosaurus in a moment that was excised from the story last issue. Over the page is another fact-file dedicated to one species from the film and the Stegosaurus gets top billing this time. However, remember how I thought the design of the page wasn’t finished last time? It appears that is indeed the finished design. It looks awful and does no justice to the great piece written by Steve White.

An ardent dinosaur aficionado, Steve has clearly done his research (or knew the subject matter extensively already) and this would’ve been a fascinating read to young fans of the films, adding depth to the scenes in the movie featuring these animals. It’s still fascinating for this much older fan too. We then head back into the story and the last eight pages of this 22-page chapter, beginning with two new scenes I hadn’t been aware of until now.

While overlooking the hunters’ camp it sinks into our team that the creatures are being taken off the island alive and exported to the mainland. After what happened in the park this is obviously a terrifying realisation and this is the part where we find out Nick was actually sent as back up by Hammond and he sets off with Sarah to free the dinosaurs. It’s during this we get the new element, one of Ian’s little speeches that we liked so much in the first film, this time about something called Gambler’s Ruin.

While it’s only for a couple of panels it’s something that’s referred to later in the strip and by Don in his article. Don states things like this are deemed important and must be kept in, which is ironic since it didn’t make it into the film. I reminds me of those little moments in the first movie that expertly summed up the pages and pages of fascinating monologue from Ian in the novel. It’s a shame it didn’t make it into the finished film, whereas I’m glad the next page didn’t.

This scene isn’t a deleted scene in the movie’s extras so I can only assume Steven Spielberg chose not to film it. On the screen we see Roland and Ajay watching the baby T-rex and coming up with a plan to use him to lure the male adult back to the nest. A few moments later the baby is seen tied up with one of its legs covered in blood. Later we find out it has a fracture and Sarah and Nick try to set it for him (or else he’ll become food for a predator). The implication of how it happened is clear but here the real reason is meant to be a pratfall.

I really don’t like this and it’s not Don’s fault of course, it was in the script he worked from but I can’t blame Spielberg for not including it. Roland is meant to be a seasoned hunter, the very top of their game in the whole world, so bored with it now that only the promise of killing a T-rex buck could lure him back into picking up his gun again. When I watch the film I like the way the reason behind the baby’s leg injury is kept ambiguous.

Spielberg left it up to the viewer to assume either the baby struggled and did this to itself as the two men struggled to tie it up or, more viciously, they deliberately broke it so the baby would cry out in pain for his parents and the scent of blood would bring the adult male quicker. But to have it as a result of Ludlow clumsily tripping just feels wrong. I prefer the film without this scene and clearly the director agreed. After this the chapter rounds itself off with the moment a Triceratops breaks out of the camp after being freed by Nick and that’s us for another fortnight.

If you’re thinking I’m being overly critical it’s only because the previous Jurassic Park comic showed how much potential there is in bringing this franchise to the medium. The last chapter of the first film’s adaptation may have rushed things too much but the first three instalments were fantastic and showed me it could be done. Then the vast majority of the sequel strips were great fun, full of action without sacrificing the characterisations. It even gave depth to a group of Velociraptors!

A pin-up of Pete Postlethwaite in character as Roland brings us to Don’s article, Script to Strip. I really do find this interesting. I like how he describes the difference in the comics medium, things we may not have considered as fans of the film. I found it shocking everything was written before he’d seen anything of the movie at all! Yes, the comic would be published to coincide with its release so deadlines would’ve been very early, but I expected him to have access to photos from set, pre-production art, maybe early footage but nope, he only had the written words to adapt into his own written words.

Part two really is a big improvement and after reading Don’s own words I can’t help but cheer him on

He makes several good points about the maths of adapting a film to a comic, namely the page count difference and when he lays this out for the reader you get a sense of the enormity of his task. I’m not sure I agree that each part of this mini-series should be able to work as a story in its own right though. Maybe if he was writing his own original comic but in adapting a movie it’s never going to come across like that to a reader, these are very much individual chapters of one story.

He makes good points about the risk of having no dinosaurs for too long, something a movie that’s building tension can do but a comic can’t. This was why Walter Simonson reworked the order of some scenes and added actual Velociraptors to Dr Alan Grant’s famous scene with the “That doesn’t look very scary” kid in his adaptation. I’ve mentioned Don’s characterisations and choice of scenes to include throughout the review, so without further ado here’s a fascinating look into how this insurmountable task was achieved.

While I agree with his sentiments and he clearly had good intentions I feel the adaptation hasn’t quite got the balance right. For example, instead of including every single word of some scenes and none from others would it not have been better to trim all of them down so that the essence of them all is still intact? Jenny (Ian’s daughter) in particular is badly served. The same with the dinosaur scenes; there are some great spreads (we got two pages of the Stegosaurus family walking away from Sarah at the beginning) at the expense of scenes that would’ve been the most memorable to readers waiting to watch it again on home video.

Part two really is a big improvement and after reading Don’s own words I can’t help but cheer him on for the second half of the comic’s limited run. I hope he’s successful, especially when there’s potential in his style and the art is so enjoyable. We’ll find out over the next month. The third of these four issues will be reviewed on Monday 7th August 2023 and if you’re just discovering the blog via this comic there’s a whole bunch of Jurassic Park comics already reviewed over the past couple of years that you can check out, including the first official sequel long before The Lost World Jurassic Park.

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Annuals, Christmas, Comic Introductions

ANNUALS: iN REAL TiME

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Classic comics in real time. It’s what this blog is all about, it’s right there under the title at the top of the screen. Each issue of the various comics are reviewed on the dates we originally would’ve got our hands on them. Normally that means on the date they were released, but applying the rule to this section of the blog poses a bit of a problem. So we’re going to do things a little differently here. Just a little.

As anyone who collected books like these as a kid will know, they went on sale around the time we’d return to school after the summer holidays, usually mid-September. But we didn’t get our trotters on them until Christmas Day when the jolly man himself would bring them down our chimneys. So when do I review them? On their release dates or when we got them? Those aren’t the same dates for annuals.

I’ve fond memories of looking endlessly at the huge variety of annuals on the shelves of my old hometown’s newsagent’s, or their large table displays set out at just the right eye level for kids. But as tempted as I was I never looked inside any of them, believe it or not. I didn’t want to ruin the surprise of finding out what they contained during my very favourite time of the year. Instead, I’d let the anticipation build over those few months until I was looking forward to them just as much as the toys and games (and the food)!

So I’ve decided to review these during the festive season. They were always a Christmas treat, many of them including themed content and even if they didn’t they were still very clearly marketed for that time of the year. So this is where I bend the rule a little. As much as I love you all I’m not going to be spending my Christmas Day every year writing a handful of reviews, not even for Knight Rider (my favourite thing in the universe)! Many of the reviews will be spread over the month of December, with any relating to an ongoing comic series published on The Big Day itself (so they’re in the right position in their own read throughs elsewhere on the blog).

A section of the blog I have a particular fondness for

Patience will be a virtue with this particular section. The books were released once per year (the clue is in their name) so depending on the amount of books in a series they could take quite a while to cover. Also, the overall collection of reviews won’t be listed in the order in which they’re written for obvious reasons (they’re essentially all different read throughs).

Instead they’ll be listed in original release order, meaning you’ll be able to take a trip right through the years covered. Perhaps you’ll remember those holidays when you received these books, or check out ones you recall from those newsagents’ tables, or discover ones you never knew existed. (For example, a lot of people contacted me about the Visionaries Annual after the review asking if I had a spare, having seemingly slipped under the radar of many fans in 1988.)

All these years later I’m still just as much a fan of Christmas as I ever was, perhaps more so. As such, this is a section of the blog I have a particular fondness for and the fact I have to wait so long between new additions just makes it even more exciting when the time comes around again. So, even though it’s a once-a-year thing you can expect just as much attention paid to these as anything else, including the occasional special feature.

As you’ll see it won’t just be annuals based on comics, although those based on other properties such as televisions series will have comics content. You can expect a nice mixture of the books I collected at the time and those I wished I had. This is going to be a really fun section of the blog. I’ve a shelf full of content just waiting for each year to roll around (the will power is strong with this one, it has to be) and more on the horizon.

I hope you’ll enjoy this section of the blog as much as I am.

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Comic Introductions, OiNK Comic Reviews

OiNK!: iN REAL TiME

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November 1986. The issue that started it all. A month-and-a-bit before my ninth birthday, while I shopped for sweets in my local newsagent’s I stumbled across a big, bold and very pink logo with a funny picture of a pig picking a butcher out of a police line-up. It was #14 of OiNK and it would end up becoming my first ever comic and a fundamental part of my youth. I was hooked the instant I read it and the next two years brought so much laughter it’s not an exaggeration to say the OiNK team helped form my sense of humour.

However, time moves on. After I moved out of home my parents decluttered and all but key editions of my comics collections were binned. Thankfully three OiNKs made their cut and The OiNK! Book 1988 would get revisited now and again, always making me (and friends) laugh no matter how much my age had advanced beyond the range of the comic’s target audience. Then in 2010 the sad news broke of the passing of Chris Sievey, better known as the papier-mâché-headed 80s megastar Frank Sidebottom, a staple of children’s Saturday morning TV and the pages of OiNK.

I dug out my three issues to relive some of his comedic moments and ended up buying a few more from eBay, and then began tracking down the full run. Surprised at how well they held up decades after they were written I joined the OiNK Comic Facebook group and was soon chatting with some of the incredible talent who had brought the comic to life. One of them was Lew Stringer, who reminded me that the anniversary of OiNK’s original release was fast approaching and he suggested I could read them on their original release dates and enjoy OiNK in real time.

You can see where this was headed. Looking for a project at that point in my life I began the original OiNK Blog and waffled away about each issue every fortnight. I eventually covered them all but when the host website I was using started to crash more frequently (and wishing to create more of a full website myself rather than a linear blog) I moved over here to WordPress and began the real time read through all over again from scratch. This version of the OiNK Blog is all brand new and much expanded over the previous version.

Back in the 80s the UK’s comics industry was slowly declining. In the days of fashion faux pas and sarcastic talking cars, television and computer games were suddenly direct competition for the attentions of the nation’s youth and OiNK was a bold move on the part of its creators and its publisher IPC Magazines to reverse that trend. OiNK would be a comic to deliberately break all the rules of traditional titles, with its three co-creators and editors (from left to right above) Mark Rodgers, Patrick Gallagher and Tony Husband bringing in an eclectic team to produce what they felt 80s kids would actually find funny.

Tony was working in a jeweller’s repair shop when Patrick met him, both of them cartooning part-time at that stage, and Tony introduced Patrick to the idea of working on children’s comics. About a year later in a Manchester library Mark saw Patrick writing comic scripts for the same titles he worked on (Buster, Whoopee etc.) and they went for a coffee and immediately hit it off. Patrick saw the potential in the three of them working together and it was in a railway pub in West Didsbury that they started to develop an idea for an alternative children’s comic. That idea would eventually become OiNK.

Its strips brought a fresh inventiveness to the comics scene, many of its cartoonists having never worked for the children’s market before. Jeremy Banx created Burp the Smelly Alien and Mr Big Nose, J.T. Dogg’s incredible artwork on Ham Dare and The Street-Hogs wowed readers, The Fall band member and future radio DJ Marc Riley dressed up as Snatcher Sam in photo stories and created his own strip characters, Lew Stringer got his big break with Tom Thug and Pete and his Pimple, the likes of David Leach and Kev F Sutherland were first published in the comic and a teenager by the name of Charlie Brooker landed his first paying job as a writer and cartoonist for OiNK. (Whatever happened to him?)

I’ve only mentioned a fraction of the talent involved, which also included the likes of Davy Francis, Simon Thorp, Davey Jones, David Haldane and so many more. Even veterans of the more traditional comics such as Tom Paterson and John Geering would pop over to spoof their own work and legends like Kevin O’Neill and Dave Gibbons would lend a hand (or a trotter) upon occasion! This was a children’s humour comic with a creative team and vision like no other and that’s a key reason why it hasn’t aged in the years since.

What always stood out for me were its parodies of those things we loved at that age, like the big toy and television franchises of the day and even the other comics on the shelves. Famously a parody of classic children’s storybooks in a very early issue led to a couple of complaints to The Press Council. It was never upheld but it was enough for conservative retailers W.H. Smith to top-shelf OiNK away from the children. But the comic soldiered on and enjoyed a wonderful two-and-a-half-years in our little piggy hearts.

Very deliberately it was the punk rock of children’s humour comics and spawned a fan club, a vinyl record, clothing, a computer game and more. The story of OiNK is as fascinating as the comic was funny and this post is only the very tip of the plop, the tiniest little piglet of an introduction to what is still my very favourite, as well as the funniest, comic of all time. The blog’s namesake rightly has the pig’s share of space on this site and you’ll find sections devoted to everything from its creation to its marketing, from its merchandise to its media coverage and everything in between.

So, 35 years after its original release I decided to read through the whole run all over again and rebooted the entire blog as a full website devoted to reading not only this comic in real time, but also the others I collected in the 80s and 90s after OiNK introduced me to the medium. I hope you’ll enjoy all of the OiNK content so far and what’s to come in the future, and that you’ll have as much fun reliving the antics of its characters (and its creators and cartoonists) as I’m having. OiNK’s important place in UK comics history deserves to be remembered. More than that, its comedy deserves to be enjoyed for decades to come.

Let’s have some fun pig pals, as we make our way through this complete collection of complete and utter joy!

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OiNK! #65: POLiTiCAL PORK

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What we have here is the final Ian Jackson cover for OiNK, which is a sad moment. In fact by this stage Ian had finished his work for OiNK, with a page or two held back for publication in the issues to come. Not to take away from anyone else’s hard work of course but Ian was synonymous with the comic, as a child he was OiNK and his Uncle Pigg, Mary Lighthouse, Hadrian Vile, Golden Trough Awards and everything in between were highlights of every issue they were in.

Speaking of those characters, it’s also sad to see our editor Uncle Pigg permanently relegated to the letters page with no sign of Mary anywhere. On the cover of the first monthly there was a cheeky reference to two monthly humour magazines and it does feel like OiNK is trying to fit into that part of the market, instead of leading the way with something completely original for children’s humour comics like it had done for its first two years.

I remember thinking there was something different about OiNK now

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still got those regular characters and a unique line up of contributors who make me laugh like no other comic. As a kid it was still ‘OiNK’ to me, however I remember thinking there was something different about it now, other than the logo and frequency. Now I feel it was trying to be something different. I understand the change was well intentioned, but sometimes I wish IPC Magazines had never sold it to Fleetway Publications and that it had stayed as the themed 32-page fortnightly. But let’s concentrate on the fun!

Peter Porter, Post Office Sorter by Kev F Sutherland only appeared in three issues (this being the middle of the trio) and that’s a shame, although with only three regular issues left I guess there just wasn’t a chance to make more. From the three we did get I always got the feeling he was a new regular character. After he hunted down a customer to threaten them over not including a postcode last issue, this month’s is somewhat different but no less funny, showing how Kev could get great mileage out of just about any concept he came up with.

On to our cover star, although do I mean Nostrahamus or Ian Jackson? A little bit of both. For the cover character to only get two pages inside a 48-page comic feels a bit underwhelming but I think it may have originally been intended for the 24-page weekly OiNK where it would have been more of a headline act. Most likely written by co-editor Mark Rodgers it’s very funny and has lots of little moments you could easily miss, so take your time and you’ll find some real gems in here, such as the change to King Louie XIV’s name (sound it out).

That first page in particular feels very apt in this post-Brexit world we find ourselves, showing up the kind of people you just know voted for it without a hint of irony. I think this reads much funnier to me nowadays as a result. Nice little cameo from Tintin there too. Although, Ian’s art doesn’t feel as considered as normal, the people in the crowds not as detailed as they’d usually be for example. Perhaps it was one of his final pieces and had to be completed a little quicker than normal, but it’s still great to see his work regardless and of course there’s that wonderful cover.

David Haldane’s Incredible Amazing Bizarre World was a new addition to OiNK when it became weekly and has been an increasingly bizarre (it’s in the name after all) and random part of the comic with a handful of usually unconnected examples of David’s wild imagination. This issue the title is shrunk and on this half-page there’s just the one example of the crazy nature of our world, it needs the space all to itself to really get across the gag.

In fact there are three instalments this issue, although two of them are for competition winning entries from readers who wrote in and told David what they saw outside their window after he asked them to do so way back at the start of the year. Below, Richard Howard of Dublin’s entry was a particularly crazy entry, which David then had to draw of course! Another reader highlight can be found on the letters page with a particularly classic OiNK-like joke from Allan Maxwell of Cardross, perfect for Nasty Laffs and Specs.

Marc Riley brings us a rather morbid instalment for one of his long-running characters called Less than 101 Uses for a Dead Harry the Head! No, really. I mean, just look at that shoe! Lew Stringer’s Pete and his Pimple and Tom Thug both enjoy double-page spreads and will be able to stretch out further in the months ahead. Pete’s strip has an amusing opening that plays against the expectations of readers when a magical cure is suggested by a pig pal and Tom does something a humour comics character never did before.

David Haldane’s Incredible Amazing Bizarre World
Letters page compiled by Patrick Gallagher
Harry the Head by Marc Riley
Pete and his Pimple and Tom Thug by Lew Stringer

I remember those final panels and reciting Tom’s chant for years when school holidays rolled around, but little did I know how ground-breaking this strip was. Tom actually left school here, an idea Lew tells me was originally Mark Rodgers’. Humour comics characters are usually stuck in time, rarely developing beyond their original premise. OiNK had already played against type by having Hadrian Vile age along with the comic and seeing his mum’s pregnancy play out over months, but this was on another level. Next month Tom even signs on! I’ll definitely be including that as a highlight.

“Punk rock saved our bacon!”

Dirty Harry

We’re on to our final strip for the issue already and the reason has nothing to do with a lack of quality content, it’s because this final strip takes up no less than 13 pages. Originally created as a six-part serial for the weekly, The Street-Hogs’ return is included in its entirety in this one issue, spread out throughout in its requisite parts. (They really should’ve been the cover stars.)

Their previous serial ended way back in #35 and told us Emma Pig, Dirty Harry and Hi-Fat would return in Malice in Underland and finally that story is here. While the title is the one mentioned almost a year ago I wonder how much the story was developed in that time because this is very much a political satire and seems more suited for the older teen audience the comic was now trying to attract. As an adult it’s much funnier than I found it at the time and makes this issue worth tracking down on eBay if you can. It kicks off with the first ‘mixed school’, something that would’ve been very topical for my fellow Northern Ireland readers back then.

The name of the giant butcher is a bit risqué for a comic I was buying at ten-years-of-age.

While not as long as their original 12-part story it’s longer than their first sequel but there’s a certain something missing. Or rather I should say someone. There’s no sign of Hoggy Bear who, given the fact he was a spoof of the pimp character from Starsky & Hutch I thought would’ve been perfect for OiNK’s new older target audience. The tone of the story certainly is. I can remember J.T. Dogg‘s beautiful, vivid artwork as a kid and loving certain aspects of it, even the renderings of politicians who I only knew from Spitting Image rather than the news.

However, having read OiNK all the way through in real time to this point it seems a bit out of place, despite the reboot with #63. The comedic references to the names and characteristics of 80s politicians seem ill-suited to the comic we’ve come to know and love and I doubt they had much of an impact on my funny bone at the time. Thank goodness for our three heroes and their special brand of silliness (see Harry’s secret body language below) and the return of their arch-nemesis Don Poloney the mafia butcher!

Despite The Street-Hogs strips usually being just plain silly randomness I love the fact there’s actually a bit of continuation from the previous serial here, with Poloney’s appearance explained as being linked to one of the Triffics who ate him last year. The seeds of that particular plant were brushed down a drain and into the sewers, his brain living on in one of the seeds, from which he grew himself a new body. This could only have come from the mind of writer Mark Rodgers! Discovering underground caves with primitive creatures he brainwashed them with stolen videos from the surface of news and the aforementioned puppet show.

Moments like these remind us this is still very much an OiNK strip at its heart, even with the sometimes overbearing references to the politics of the day. As an adult reading this I find it all very amusing but I can’t help remembering my disappointment in it as a ten-year-old boy when so much of it flew over my head. Back to the story and the crazed god-like leader grabs the ‘Hogs with his vines and decides there’ll be no fancy schemes or death traps, just simple strangulation! That’s the cliffhanger leading into our three-page climax.

These final parts don’t have that big bold logo, just a photocopied name in the corner, but what the finale does have is a cameo from some former OiNK stars and it suits the comic perfectly that punk is the answer. It’s an enjoyable strip and funny today even if it doesn’t seem as wild as the Street-Hogs’ previous stories, lacking the wonderfully ridiculous cliffhanger solutions and basically having the one joke to play with (the political lookalikes) until Poloney shows up. But once he does it becomes classic Street-Hogs again. The back page of the whole comic was certainly memorable too. Such a shame that named fourth instalment never materialised.

There are no OiNK Superstar Poster reprints this month but there are half a dozen other repeated pages from earlier issues, albeit absolute classics. Seeing #6’s Fish Theatre with its page overloaded with puns always brings a smile to my face no matter how many times I read it. This issue was originally the first time I read these particular strips so they actually added a lot to the issue for the young version of me and even now, as a little selection of ‘Best of’ strips, their older (as in original, younger target audience) OiNK humour helps make this issue a great overall package.

The Next Month promo promises the return of a certain mechanical porker and from memory it’s a huge multipage strip, another originally meant as a serial but which actually ended up created specifically for the new format. That should be an exciting enough prospect to lure any pig pal, so make sure you come back on Sunday 20th August 2023. OiNK Monthly was released on the third Saturday of each month so we’ve five weeks to wait this time instead of four. Boo!

CRACKLiNG TALES BOOKS < > iSSUE 66

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COMiNG UP: OiNK! #65

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Readers flicking to the back page of the latest OiNK back in 1988 may have let out a little piggy squeal of excitement when they saw the return of The Street-Hogs was almost here! Last appearing way back in #35, their return had been hinted at in the weeklies as one of a few new serials to come, but since then of course OiNK has gone through something of a facelift and so the entire story was printed in one issue! I can remember the excitement the moment ten-year-old me realised I could read it all at once when I flicked through the issue before reading it.

Promo art by J.T. Dogg

Surely there couldn’t be anything else in this issue that would be as memorable as that? Actually, there’s a first for a humour comics character which was kind of a big deal, at least for the remainder of the issues of OiNK. It’s right there in the caption on the bottom-right. I’m sure pig pals will remember which one I’m referring to. The next OiNK review will be right here this Sunday 16th July 2023. I can’t wait!

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Comic Reviews, Jurassic Park

THE LOST WORLD JURASSiC PARK #1: LiP SERViCE

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Well isn’t this a pleasant surprise? We thought we’d seen everything the UK comics scene had to offer for Jurassic Park fans back when Dark Horse International’s excellent comic came to an end with #16 in November 1994. While it was a suitably open-ended finish to the first official sequel it had actually been cancelled with several more chapters of the American comic to go. Not that we knew this.

Three years later in the summer of 1997 Steven Spielberg’s The Lost World Jurassic Park appeared in cinemas and I have very fond memories of going to see it, at one point jumping out of my skin so much (when one of the Velociraptors poked its head beneath a door, if you’ve seen it you’ll know the moment I’m referring to) that I made my friend beside me jump, which in turn made me jump again! Cue nervous laughter while our hearts came back down to a normal rate. I loved that film. I didn’t know there was a comic to match though, something I’m making up for now. Here is #1, edited by Down the Tubes‘ John Freeman, no less.

Despite this being from a completely different UK publisher (Titan Magazines) the US strip is once again from Topps Comics. Their continuation had come to an end and now their adaptation of this movie would contradict everything they’d previously created. Obviously this couldn’t be avoided, Michael Crichton’s second novel and the sequel movie were never going to follow what the comics had done. That ‘What Has Gone Before’ is lifted straight from those Dark Horse issues which is a nice touch.

However, the opening editorial seemingly makes some early errors straight out of the gate. Already established is how John Hammond spent many, many years with his dinosaurs before inviting Dr. Alan Grant and Dr. Ellie Satler to the island, it wasn’t something he threw together in a few years. More glaring for us with hindsight is the suggestion the dinosaurs were destroyed. We know they weren’t but only from later films and to be fair the sequel novel also said they were all destroyed, so that’s lifted from the book rather than the film.

“All along we have held significant product assets that we have attempted to hide, when we could have safely harvested them for enormous profit!”

Peter Ludlow

I should mention I haven’t read Michael Crichton’s second Jurassic Park book, in fact I was surprised to find out recently Dr. Ian Malcolm was the main character in it after he died at the end of the first book. (That’s properly explained, apparently.) Of course in the movie he didn’t die so we don’t need to worry about that here. The opening scene is from The Lost World movie but was actually based upon a story point from the first novel that didn’t make it into the original film. The differences between the second book and movie is something this issue will touch upon later. For now, let’s see how that story translates to comic form.

After the opening comes the first of two deleted scenes which were filmed but never made it into the final cut, although they can be viewed as extras on DVD, Blu Ray and digital. It involves the loathsome, slimy character of Peter Ludlow, nephew to John Hammond, perfectly portrayed by Arliss Howard in the movie. Cut by Spielberg because he felt it slowed the pace of the film, I initially thought it should’ve been included. While it’s particularly pertinent today when certain politicians seem more determined than ever to rape the natural world (as Ian Malcolm put it) for profit, now I agree it was right to cut it, although for different reasons.

It mentions the destruction of all the animals and the park after the first film and buying media and political silence, as well as paying out millions of dollars in wrongful death settlements to the families of the characters who perished. Just as a side note, for the first time John Arnold’s death is mentioned in comic form after he just disappeared in the first adaptation. As such, this scene’s inclusion means the editorial was actually correct for this version, but it’s good it was deleted from the movie so that the animals survived.

The other deleted scene involves Pete Postlethwaite’s animal hunter Roland Tempo. I’m still sad about this being cut from the film because it adds some more depth to his character. While a person who hunts animals for sport and money is always going to be loathsome, at the end of the film after he’s helped capture the Tyrannosaurus rex alive for InGen he’s mournful for what he’s done. Through his experience in the story he changes and realises the devastating consequences his actions have had.

A perfect balancing job of having a clear likeness without sacrificing what makes a good comic book character

This scene sees him standing up for the honour of a lady some American tourists are hassling and he does it in a rather funny way, playing on the fact he knows they’ll assume he’s a fragile old man. He has no interest in further game hunting until his friend and assistant Ajay tells him what it is InGen want him to hunt! Again cut for pace, when viewed the scenery and setting do feel a bit too similar to the scene setting up the character of Denis Nedry in the original, even though it plays out very differently.

This is about as in-depth as I’ll go into the story of The Lost World during these reviews, after all it’s the movie’s story so I don’t really need to. Just as I did with the first five issues of the original Jurassic Park I’ll be assuming you know it already and I’ll be concentrating on the adaptation itself. The next big difference I notice is one I’m not sure I can come to terms with. Maybe it’ll grow on me as I read the series, but it’s an addition I just feel isn’t needed. I mean, just look at Jeff Goldblum’s moustache!

Maybe Dr. Ian Malcolm has one in the novel. Apart from that I am taken with the likenesses here. A lot of times in comics based on TV shows or movies the characters either look nothing like the actors or the artists concentrate so much on making them look identical that they lose all ability to emote. Here penciller Jeff Butler (Godzilla, The Green Hornet and TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons games) and inker Armando Gil (who brought a scratchy realism to the previous sequel strip) do a perfect balancing job of having a clear likeness without sacrificing what makes a good comic book character.

For most of this opening chapter it feels very much like your typical comics adaptation, writer Don McGregor (James Bond 007, Black Panther, Killraven) taking the main beats of the script and moving between them with as little fuss as possible, cutting and trimming a lot as he goes. Funny moments are pretty much eliminated too which is a shame because the movie was full of them. A particularly memorable scene when Ian, Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff) and Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn) are calling out for Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) when they land on Isla Sorna is conspicuous by its absence.

The scenes with Ian’s daughter Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester) are there but again have been chopped down to their bare minimum which is a real shame as they felt really genuine on the screen. The chapter ends with the Stegosaurus scene although the grandeur of their entrance is lost when our characters are just miling about among them. Also the baby, key to what happened next, isn’t involved and it all feels rather rushed to get to some form of cliffhanger. But what is quite wonderful is the depiction of the Stegosauruses. It’s certainly more detailed than the previous adaptation and a lot more so than Armando’s sequel art.

Ken Lopez is our letterer for this story and returning story editor Renée Witterstaetter’s colours are a particular highlight, especially on these final pages in the jungle. In fact I’d say in the three short years between the comics there’s been a marked improvement across the board in terms of looks, even with a team made up of some very familiar names. Speaking of familiar names, that cover (taken from #3 of the American comic) is by original adaptation writer Walter Simonson and Richard Ory (Cloak and Dagger, Marvel Fanfare, Doctor Fate).

Regular blog readers will know I’m not usually a fan of movie adaptations but that the original Jurassic Park one had me thinking differently. At least for the first three chapters anyway, with their added information from an earlier script draft, passages from the book and interesting ways in which it shook up and changed key parts of the movie in order to make it work in a new medium. I enjoyed that. But the final two chapters became what I abhor about all other adaptations I’ve read.

Instead of being a considered reworking for the comic, the finale just jumped from one key scene to the next as quickly as it could to get to the end of the story, excising whole chunks of it in the process (including just suddenly forgetting about the only black character mid-story), eliminating anything that wasn’t basic plot, combined with what felt like rushed artwork to meet the deadline of the movie’s release. While the art is a big step up in my books, The Lost World Jurassic Park seems to be more along the lines of those final chapters, unfortunately. But it has time to improve and it’d be a shame if it didn’t, what with that lovely art.

This being a UK comic there are of course extras. The four middle pages are made up of a poster of one of the film’s best scenes, a profile of the more rugged (but still sans moustache) Ian and a page about the T-rex written by Steve White. There’s a lot of information here but for some reason it doesn’t mention their visual acuity, the whole “it can’t see us if we don’t move” thing which was so important in these first two movies. The page actually looks messy and unfinished, with what seems to be a placeholder rectangle, a clip art frame and an image sitting waiting to be edited together, with text over the top that’s difficult to read as a result . Strange.

Towards the back is Something Has Survived by Jim Swallow (who’d go on to write Marc Dane, Sundowners and Warhammer 40,000 novels), a text article which basically reiterates what we know already from the strip, although it does give an interesting nugget of information about the film’s ending. There’s also an advert for the graphic novel of the comic which is a bit weird to include when you want people to buy it in individual chapters instead (although the original comic did run a competition for its graphic novel after it had printed the whole story already) and the Next Issue page is rather basic with two different versions of “buy it or else”, the second of which just feels wrong!

The most exciting extra for me is actually an advertisement for a completely different magazine.

I loved Babylon 5 from the moment I decided to tune in to the first episode broadcast on Channel Four. I was completely hooked and I remember the magazine fondly, placing a regular order before the first issue appeared if memory serves me right, so I must’ve seen an advert for it somewhere else. I remember being particularly fond of show creator J. Michael Straczynski’s column and his brutal honesty when discussing working in the television industry and how hard it is to make a living as a writer. I’d no idea John Freeman edited it until just recently. I’m beginning to think he and Steve White (colourist and editor at Marvel UK and who did exceptional colouring work for Xenozoic Tales in the original Jurassic Park comic) are a bit like Lew Stringer in that there seem to be very few publications from my youth they weren’t involved in!

Unlike most comics at the time The Lost World Jurassic Park was fortnightly rather than monthly. With no further strips coming from the States there was never any intention of continuing it beyond the adaptation so, just like over there, it was a mini-series of four. The artwork has saved this opening chapter, will the writing catch up? You can find out in two weeks on Monday 24th July 2023.

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Comic Reviews, Dragon's Claws

DRAGON’S CLAWS #2: COLOUR ME iMPRESSED

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It’s been a long time coming but Dragon’s Claws’ sophomore issue is finally here. After spending the first couple of years on the blog covering fortnightly and weekly comics (the one exception being the short-lived Visionaries right at the beginning of the blog) it’s strange to find myself in a position where, at the time of writing this, both Dragon’s Claws and even the site’s namesake comic OiNK are monthly. I’ve gotten so used to what came before that the four-week wait between issues feels so long!

Could this have been an attributing factor to Marvel UK’s new range of US-sized comics not being the success they may have deserved to be? British comics were often more frequent, and if any did become monthly you always knew that meant they wouldn’t be lasting much longer. Things would change a lot in the 90s of course when most comics became monthly but sales figures also declined drastically across the board at that time. A month was a very long time to wait for us back then, especially when computer and videogames were now grabbing our attention.

If last month’s debut felt like a typical yet very enjoyable 80s action flick, this feels like it could actually be the second half of that movie. The threat of The Evil Dead teased in the premiere issue’s opening pages comes full force this time around. The opening pages once again see that Game team take on a trained group of fighters, this time at a weapon’s depository that was apparently built to withstand an entire army. Over the course of these first seven pages they decimate the defence and make off with the weapons.

What I particularly like here is just how very ‘English’ The Evil Dead are, especially their leader Slaughterhouse. Shouting “Orf with their heads” before two soldiers get brutally decapitated, tutting when others put up a fight, using drawn out proper grammar and such words as “splendid” while all around is death and destruction. Believe it or not, there’s even a funny moment used to lighten the dark opening when they win their battle and dead bodies are strewn everywhere.

There’s something of note right off the bat with this issue’s story. The government is referred to as that of ‘Greater Britain’. Now for any readers of an international flavour who may not be aware, ‘Great Britain’ as we know it today is made up of England, Scotland and Wales. I live in Northern Ireland and that’s part of ‘The United Kingdom (UK) of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. Northern Ireland is separate from ‘Great Britain’, a mistake many make. The fact the Dragon’s Claws comic refers to the government of Britain rather than the UK makes me think we’ve scarpered and rejoined Ireland away from the dystopia of the land within which The Game is set. Thank goodness! But anyway, I digress.

The one surviving soldier is taken to N.U.R.S.E. where Dragon, his team and the already irritating Deller (he’s meant to be irritating) are assigned their first mission by Stenson to kill The Evil Dead, as if they were nothing more than an irritant rather than murderers. The order is given in such a blasé way it’s clear N.U.R.S.E. care not for those they’ve hired. They give the orders and the foot soldiers must obey. This results in Dragon losing his temper because as far as his was concerned his team were independents, going out into Britain to clear up the mess of the government’s Game on their own. But Stenson has them over a barrel, he knows their lives felt meaningless without The Game and they back down.

“Mercy – you let your father’s business go bankrupt while you chased vendettas”

Stenson

We find out a little more about the various members of Dragon’s Claws here after last issue concentrated almost solely on Dragon. The most interesting one for me is Mercy, the sole woman of the team. Since they withdrew from The Game she’s used all the money from her father’s business to chase after those lawbreakers who had enough money to stop any potential repercussions from occurring. In the current climate we find ourselves in I do hope we find out more about her time doing that, it’s quite topical after all. (There’s also something very ‘Knight Rider‘ about that, a show where the hero chased after “criminals who operate above the law”.)

Dragon takes off and over the next couple of pages we see him back at his farm, now a desolate, abandoned wreck after the battle with the Wildcats last time. It’s these little quieter moments that have made these first two issues for me. It would’ve been very easy to have action from cover to cover but in such a fantastical set up these scenes ground our characters, the result being we believe in them, and care for them and the outcome of the story more. His family haven’t returned and then Scavenger turns up to warn him Deller has pulled rank and taken the team out in search of The Evil Dead.

Dragons Claws were opponents worthy of his skills, now he sees them as mere government lackeys

Deller is desperate to be the hero, the leader responsible for bringing them in or killing them, obsessed with personal glory. Of course, we can immediately see where this kind of character will end up leading the team, and that’s into immediate danger. The team’s protestations and attempts to quell his blood lust and self-importance fall on deaf ears. Seeing the lion-like Feral feasting on a dead body out in the open Deller immediately gives chase into an enclosed area, the Claws trying to stop him but it’s too late. Of course it’s a trap.

Another little moment here is the area this is taking place in is referred to as ‘The ‘Pool’. Clearly meaning Liverpool, it’s an area Steel stays away from because it’s known as The Evil Dead’s home, somewhere they know like the backs of their hands and would obviously have the advantage. One-by-one this advantage see the Claws fall. Captured, Slaughterhouse is more disappointed than angry. Dragons Claws were opponents worthy of his skills, now he sees them as mere government lackeys.

As you can see Dragon appears at the last moment, saving Deller’s life. He’s no stranger to having an advantage himself and as the Grim Reaper-esque Kronos sneaks up behind him Feral notices Dragon has no scent. He’s a hologram and there’s a pressure pad just behind it, which Kronos steps on, instantly exploding. The other members of The Evil Dead are Hex, a circus showman with poisonous darts and hypnotising eyes and Death Nell, Slaughterhouse’s other half who appears to have had some kind of romantic history with Steel!

Anyway, the battle we’ve been building up to is rather short and sweet but no less entertaining and ultimately satisfying. On one page Slaughterhouse’s order to kill the Claws falls on deaf ears, or rather dead ears. Scavenger, a master of stealth if last issue’s cameo and the fact he was able to sneak up on Dragon on his farm are anything to go by, has quietly severed his team mates’ bindings (without even them knowing how), meaning Steel can surprise Nell in a moment that initially confused me. Initially, I questioned why he didn’t just hit her earlier? It hadn’t been clear from previous panels they’d had their hands tied behind their backs until Mercy’s explanation made me go back and check.

Dragon is sniping from scaffolding on top of a very tall building nearby and as Slaughterhouse lunges at him he’s apparently taken by surprise, getting scraped by huge nails and kicked in the head in the process. But like the hologram there’s a bit of clever misdirection here on Dragon’s part. Riling Slaughterhouse up until his anger takes over and he leaps through the air, Dragon doesn’t dodge out of the way or put up a fight, instead grabbing Slaughterhouse and letting his momentum push them both over the edge.

Special mention must be made of Steve White’s colouring. It’s glorious!

Then, as we turn to the final page we can see he’d actually tied his ankle to the building, stopping him as Slaughterhouse falls to his apparent doom.  Of course with a team made up of such characters as The Evil Dead, and with hints in the story that they may actually be dead already, there’s no sign of his body. As for Feral, it looks like Scavenger made a meal out of dealing with him! Their leader and his girlfriend may be the only ones to have survived now that Dragon’s Claws have been sanctioned to kill.

Written by Simon Furman and enthusiastically brought to the page by Geoff Senior, with editor Richard Starkings on lettering (under the pseudonym ‘Zed’), special mention must be made of Steve White‘s colouring. It’s glorious! His work on Transformers was always exemplary but this surpasses even that. His backgrounds are atmospheric, shading can be subtle in places like faces and in-your-face in others. It’s big, brash and bold in the very best possible way. (Check out his colour work for Xenozoic Tales in an issue of Jurassic Park too!) This is a collection of creative people that could give Dragon’s Claws a run for their money in the teamwork stakes.

Strangely one of the Marvel UK adverts in this issue is for the comic the reader was actually holding. Weird. There’s also a humour strip, a constant in most of the publisher’s action titles. The Reverend P. Gunn’s debut last issue wasn’t great but this one is funny and the art is great fun. Along with Richard and Steve, writer John Carnell and artist Andy Lanning were well known to me at the time from The Real Ghostbusters and this is a perfect outlet for their bizarre sense of humour that I loved so much in the licenced comic. Would further strips have been funny or more like last month’s? Who knows? This was also Gunn’s final appearance!

So yes, Dragon’s Claws has produced another dynamite issue. It feels very much like the second part of last issue’s introduction and I am perfectly fine with that. I want to find out so much more about these characters already and I know there’s the real potential here for that to happen while not skimping on the action, thanks to Simon’s writing. If I’d known about the comic at the time these first two issues would’ve had me hooked and placing a regular order at my newsagent. Today I’m hooked and you can look forward to regular coverage, the next bit of which will be the review for #3 on Sunday 13th August 2023.

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Book Reviews, OiNK Comic Reviews

UNCLE PiGG’S CRACKLiNG TALES: VOLUMES OF FUN

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In the issue of OiNK on sale now (at the time of writing) back in 1988 a special competition was published in which pig pals could win a set of two new books called From the Pages of OiNK!: Uncle Pigg’s Crackling Tales, new entries in publisher Knockabout’s Jester range. These were novel-sized collections of strips from the first couple of dozen issues of our favourite comic. The competition in #64 also acted as the only advert they’d ever receive. They passed me by as a kid and I only found out about them again a handful of years ago.

I’ve read online from certain quarters that apparently they were of very low quality, that all the reprints were very badly reproduced and that they felt like cheap cash-ins, but nothing could be farther from the truth! So today, at the point in OiNK’s real time read through when they were first announced to the readers I’ve decided to take a closer look at both books, while showing you just how good they actually are.

Given the rough matt quality of paper used for novels these feel like OiNK has been given the Big Comic Book treatment. Novel-sized and with 100 pages each, volume one contains a whopping 53 strips and the second has even more, with 63 classic funnies. They both come with new introductions, the first from Uncle Pigg and both books finish with a little promotion to buy OiNK every week using the design from the OiNK 45 record (the comic was still weekly when these were put together but monthly by the time they were released).

Uncle Pigg’s introduction is full of his usual boasts and I like what the initials after his name really stand for. Rhyming off the achievements of the comic up to this stage makes it all the more saddening to know that at the time of their release we were only a handful of issues away from the end! Also, while he tells the reader to watch out for her, unfortunately Mary Lighthouse (and Uncle Pigg himself) is nowhere to be seen in strip form.

But it’s the person who wrote the introduction to the second book that’s a real surprise. It’s none other than Alan Moore himself (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Batman: The Killing Joke). Yes, that Alan Moore has written his own personal introduction for this OiNK collection. While it’s great to find out such a legendary comics writer was a fan, initially I thought it was a shame he seemed to get some facts wrong and didn’t seem to have gotten the point about a character. Thankfully Lew Stringer has clarified the latter.

It did read like Alan had missed the point about Tom Thug somewhat in his comparison to Dennis the Menace, which would be completely wrong; Tom was just a bully and always the loser and butt of the jokes. “Alan Moore’s comment about Tom Thug is tonue in cheek of course,” Lew has says in his comment below this post. “He certainly gets what Tom’s about as he compares him to a fascist movement.”

Mad Magazine’s satire and the wish to make something relevant to kids of the 80s inspired OiNK

While some did liken OiNK to Viz after it was released, its three creators certainly did not take their lead from Viz, a myth that particularly irks me as it takes away from its (and their) originality. Viz had no influence on the team’s creation whatsoever. Mad Magazine’s satire and the wish to make something relevant to kids of the 80s inspired creators Patrick Gallagher, Tony Husband and Mark Rodgers. That last important point Alan correctly points out.

I asked Patrick about the books and Alan’s inclusion. “From what I remember, when we were working on the Crackling Tales books, we were also really busy dealing with the early stages of the TV side of things, which, initially, was to produce OiNK! for TV,” he told me. “I think we allowed [publishers] Knockabout to produce the Crackling Tales covers to our specifications but we provided everything else. I also think that Knockabout was the contact for Alan Moore.”

These are excellent additions to anyone’s OiNK collection

So what makes up both books? There’s a star strip in each, with 12 Burp strips by Jeremy Banx in the first volume and a ten-part Horace (Ugly Face) Watkins story by Tony Husband in the other. Things kick off with the very first Burp strip in fact and after reading his misadventures all the way through to the final weekly by now, these early editions feel so different. That’s not to say they’re any less funny than they were originally of course. Both characters are perfect ways to highlight OiNK’s uniqueness.

As you can see the strips are printed sideways which makes more sense when you think about how much smaller these pages are than the comic’s; if they’d been printed normally they’d be far too small to enjoy properly. With 100 pages the books aren’t thick enough for this to get in the way of the strips and their middle panels are still easily read, even spaced out a little more when the art allows. This makes for a decidedly different reading experience, which let’s face it suits the OiNK perfectly.

Alongside Burp and Horace you’ll find a selection of other regulars such as Tom Thug, Weedy Willy, Cowpat County, Zootown, Hugo the Hungry Hippo, even the likes of Lashy the Wonder Pig and a Butcher Watch are included. Also here are some others who never made it past the first year of the comic, like Maggie Pie, Pete’s Pup and Kid Gangster. There are also a selection of one-offs like Jeremy’s excellent Curse of the Mummy and Mrs Warsaw-Pact which I found so funny back in #13 and #10 respectively. Absolute classics!

As you can see from these photos of one-off Scruff of the Track and a Cowpat County the reproduction is superb even on this very different paper, all of the intricate details of Andy Roper’s and Davy Francis’ artwork still as crisp as they were on OiNK’s much larger glossy pages. It’s great to see things like Scruff here too, especially for readers who had come to OiNK much later and could use these books to catch up on some of what they missed. I expected these to be made up solely of the regulars still in the comic at the time of publication, so I’m glad to see I was wrong.

Below you can see the smaller strips look just as good with anything between two and four of them fitting in when spread across this format. Some of my favourites from the whole run are here too such as Henry the Wonder Dog by Davey Jones and Ian Knox’s Roger Rental He’s Completely Mental, who I’ve been really missing from the comic for a while now. The regulars also have a chance to share this space, their half-page entries sitting alongside their larger strips elsewhere, as you can see in two from Lew Stringer here.

When OiNK was printed on gloss paper (up to #35) greyscale colouring was something unique for us to enjoy, with other humour comics printed on newsprint of much lesser quality they were unable to produce the same result. Even when it changed to matt paper initially it was of a good enough stock for artists such as Lew to continue with this style (although it did stop when the comic went weekly for a while due to the paper). Pete and his Pimple above may not look quite as good as they did originally but I don’t think it looks bad at all for this paper.

So where did all those criticisms of the reproductions come from? There are some examples of strips losing detail in the transition to these books, although across the combined total of 116 only three strips suffer from this. One is below and unfortunately it’s a really rather good Burp strip. I’m not sure how this was okay for the publishers, maybe it just slipped through by accident, but to write off these books because of three such instances is just silly.

It’s great to see Willy here too in some of his earliest adventures back when he was guaranteed to pop up in every issue. His earliest pages were definitely among his strongest (not an adjective Willy was used to) and it’s been great to see him back on form these past few months in the read through ever since the second Holiday Special. Reading those and his starring role in these books, it’s clear he was a good choice to make the transfer to Buster later in the year.

Some other pages I was very happy to see reprinted were an early Tom Paterson contribution when it was still a possibility he could’ve been a regular cartoonist for Uncle Pigg, there are a few Christmassy strips which made me very happy indeed including a classic entry from The Sekret Diary ov Hadrian Vile, it was great to see Pete’s Pup again from the late Jim Needle, a character who really should’ve stayed around, and the first appearance of Tom’s Toe poking fun at conventional comics still grabs your attention thanks to his cartoonist being none other than John Geering!

Meet Mister Cheese by Tom Paterson
Hadrian Vile written by Mark Rodgers, drawn by Ian Jackson
Pete’s Pup by Jim Needle
Tom’s Toe written by Tony Husband, drawn by John Geering

These books appear on eBay quite regularly for a few quid each and for anyone who wants to relive some of their favourite childhood comics but doesn’t know which issues to choose from, or who likes the fact they can do so while storing them easily on a book shelf, these are a must. Unfortunately, there would be no more volumes in the series. “I don’t think we had any concrete plans to produce any more Crackling Tales books,” Patrick says. “That would have been dependent on how the first couple sold. But by the time that information might have come through, OiNK was probably history!”

Sadly that was most likely the case. I doubt these got much of a promotional push by Fleetway by this late stage in OiNK’s lifetime, especially seeing as how it had basically been rebooted as a monthly ‘magazine’ for teenagers by now. As it stands though, these are excellent additions to anyone’s OiNK collection, or even for your book collection as a great round up of OiNK’s crackling sense of humour.

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