15 | September | 2024

If there’s one name synonymous with the 80s humour comics a lot of readers of this blog grew up with, like OiNK, Buster, Whoopee etc., it’s Mark Rodgers, whose birthday it would’ve been today. To say Mark was a prolific comics writer is probably the largest understatement I could make. Working across a multitude of titles for the likes of IPC/Fleetway, he’d often write up to a dozen scripts a week.

These were for comics he’d eventually feel were a little outdated in their humour, but that’s not to say he didn’t love reading them. OiNK may have taken shots at Beano and The Dandy, but Mark was known to love both comics, even making sure there were copies of their annuals in the bathroom of his house for visitors to read while on the loo.

During a visit to a local Manchester library one day he spotted Patrick Gallagher writing scripts for the same comics Mark did and they immediately hit it off. Patrick had already met Tony Husband and together the three of them went on to create a new kind of children’s comic, an alternative to the old-fashioned jokes and traditional weeklies kids were becoming tired of in favour of television and computer games. Obviously, this was the beginning of OiNK.

When I began reading OiNK as a young child, thanks to there being no credits in comics at the time, I’d always assumed the cartoonist had written everything they’d drawn. While this was the case with some of OiNK’s contributors, there was one person who wrote so much of the comic for loads of different art styles. The volume of Mark’s work was phenomenal.

When you look through any issue you’ll see his name (or “MR”) on the majority of pages. My favourite creations of his were of course The Sekret Diary ov Hadrian Vile, brought to the page in all of its jaggedy-art glory by a young Ian Jackson, and Mark’s riff on Saturday morning cliffhanger television serials, The Street-Hogs, illustrated by J.T. Dogg. Highly original and unlike anything you’d have read elsewhere, Mark’s imagination was let loose, finally able to express his sense of humour without the restrictions he’d faced in other comics.

Where else could we be squeamish over Hadrian’s disgusting hobbies or laughing at the torture he put his long-suffering parents through one minute, then enjoying a heartwarming moment at the birth of his baby sister the next? Almost all of Uncle Pigg’s and Mary Lighthouse’s hilarious confrontations were written by Mark and any issues that contained a full-length strip of theirs have been favourites of mine (for both young me and young-at-heart me).

Mark wasn’t shy at starring on the pages of the comic either, sometimes alongside his fellow editors Patrick and Tony, sometimes with his partner Helen Jones. Whether it was as the captain of the Enterpies in Star Truck or as a terrifying alien invader alongside Ian while learning a lesson in love from their spaceship (really Mark and Helen’s boiler in their basement).

OiNK writer Graham Exton was a close friend of Mark and Helen’s and after he moved away to lived in the Bahamas the couple decided to visit, and while there they photographed a few pieces for OiNK. One was Castaway, a hilarious one-off written by Graham with the two of them in mind. That washed up body/dinner for Helen? That would be Mark. Mark wasn’t above writing in some funny little cameos for his other half too!

Mark’s productivity, his dedication to making kids laugh and his commitment to the comics medium can all be summed up in one bittersweet joke he wrote for a back page spread in the Time Travel edition of OiNK, drawn by Ed McHenry. You’ll notice that long before modern day A.I., Mark had predicted Uncle Pigg would be using a ‘Script Computer’ in the future to produce his comic. But upon closer inspection you can see who was still writing those scripts, long after he would have left us.

The bittersweet nature of this gag comes from the fact that we did indeed lose Mark to cancer in the 1990s. I know it’ll sound like a cliché to say it, but there really has been no one like him in children’s comics since. OiNK never spoke down to us, it’s three editors understood this and together they were an unbreakable team whose work brought so much joy and laughter to so many people before, during and after its run.

Apart from a few early strips Mark never drew for the comic and, until I started to notice the signatures and little initials beside so many of my favourites as a child, I’d no idea that Mark was so instrumental in moulding my young, developing sense of humour. Several years back, when I mentioned online how I’d lost my OiNK mug decades ago, Helen very kindly sent me a special Christmas present. I can’t begin to describe how happy I was when I unwrapped it and found out it had been Mark’s! I’ll always treasure this.

There are simply too many highlights of Mark’s for one post. In fact, there are literally too many highlights of Mark’s for this entire website! Believe me, I’ve tried. The man was a creative giant in the UK comics industry and when I spoke with Tony a couple of years ago he had possibly the nicest thing to say about his departed friend.

Tony often likened working on OiNK to being in a punk band and that kind of anarchic, rebellious sense of humour was at the forefront of everything they did. “Mark was the glue,” Tony said. “He was the drummer.”