Originally created for the 2024 London Comic Con, Lew Stringer’s Comic Sampler does exactly as you’d expect with a title like that. Inside its card sleeve is an abundance of Lew’s characters in a seemingly random selection of reprints that shows off the wide variety of funny strips he’s produced over his career. Beginning with a small introduction and a sample of his earliest work from Marvel UK’s The Daredevils, it’s a smorgasbord of delights for fans.

Transformers fans are well catered for with Robo-Capers and a couple of Combat Colin strips, the first of which features not only the debut appearance of his archenemy The Brain, but also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo from none other than OiNK’s brainless bully, Tom Thug. Tom also appears in a small cover strip from his time in Buster comic and Lew’s perennial superhero Brickman is also here.

Above is a sample of the second Combat Colin strip printed in digital anthology comic, Aces Weekly. So for any Transformers UK readers out there it’s a new adventure for you to enjoy. Alongside this new (for me) Colin strip there was another duo I’d never read anything of before, namely Tough Guy and Scruffy from the pages of Triffik! comic, a two-page story from the front and back cover of that publication. Here’s the first page.

Triffik! was a very short-lived comic, lasting only 12 weeks in the early 90s, a time when I’d moved on from humour comics as a child (hey, we all make mistakes). Lew’s Tough Guy strip is fun and at the end there’s a small advert for a free digital comic collecting together his misadventures over those 12 issues, so watch out for a review of it soon on the blog. (Or, you know, go and download it now from Lew’s site, what’s stopping you?)

The whole comic is printed in monochrome which adds a lovely retro, homemade fanzine kind of feel to it. On Lew’s blog he elaborates on why even the cover itself is in black-and-white when his reprint collections usually have a colour front page. “Why is the cover monochrome?,” says Lew. “Mostly to keep the costs down for this one-off special, but also I wanted to go ‘back to basics’ and do an entirely black and white comic like I used to many years ago.” And now, Daleks!

Haha, I have to admit I did chuckle at the “Oops, too late” bit of that Christmas with the Daleks strip. Lew’s comical killers pop up every month in Doctor Who Magazine, a publication I personally only buy irregularly so it was nice to get a glimpse of Lew’s work I usually miss out on. Similarly, the back page has another I hadn’t read before, namely a Sgt. Shouty strip from The 77.

Robo-Capers, two Brickman strips, two Combat Colin strips, Tom Thug, Tough Guy and Scruffy, Derek the Troll’s hilarious spoof role-playing game, the Daleks and Sgt. Shouty, packaged together on high quality A5 paper (with card cover) and all for only £3.50. If you’re a fan of any one of the aforementioned characters then you really can’t miss out on Lew Stringer’s Sampler Comic.

When I decided to include this in a future OiNK Contributor Releases review it was available on Lew’s eBay page. However, as is the way with small press comics, at the time of writing the comic has currently sold out but that doesn’t mean it won’t make a return at some point as other titles of Lew’s have, so go to his shop and see what you fancy. *

In the meantime, make sure you also check out the Contributor Releases page of the OiNK Blog for more of Lew’s comics (link at the bottom of this post) and Lew’s own blog to keep up to date on his latest published work as well as news of future comic releases, such as the fact there’s brand new Brickman coming this year as mentioned in this comic! So bookmark his site now, pig pals!

OiNK CONTRiBUTORS’ RELEASES MENU

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(* Due to some ridiculous changes eBay are introducing, Lew will no longer be selling his comics on it. His original artwork will remain, but he’s currently considering options for where to sell his comics. As soon as he decides I’ll update all blog links.)