This post is being written for OiNK’s Pre-Release section of the blog, and this is about as pre-release as you can get! We’re going right back to 1978, in fact. Back to OiNK co-creator and co-editor Mark Rodgers and writer Graham Exton’s university years and a special project they created, certain parts of which may be of particular interest to you pig pals out there.
“The Literature Degree that Mark and I were studying for at Leeds Uni had a publishing module, so we figured it would be fun to do a comic,” Graham tells me. That comic was Germs, the title an anagram of their initials (Graham’s middle name is Stafford). Looking back, it’s a fun little insight into the developing talents of both before they got their breaks in the comics industry, and you can read the whole thing in this post thanks to Graham.
Graham is very honest about what he thinks of the end result. “We did everything wrong, like drawing a whole page on A4 paper (not Bristol Board), not using scripts, lousy lettering, and cramming in so many pages we couldn’t break even when we sold it on campus,” he says. “Mark’s mum came to our rescue by charging 50p a copy to each customer at the British Legion she ran, then taking them back when they were ‘finished with’. She was brill, Our Shirl.”
Shirl wasn’t the only parent to help out. “My mum did the typing for the contents page on her fancy word processing computer,” recalls Graham. “Probably Ventura or some such. She had to figure it out herself as no one knew what a word processor was. It was the most professional part of the comic! So, like Ian Dury’sClever Bastards we had help from our mums. We learned a lot about publishing, which was great for Mark in particular.”
Eight years before OiNK hit shelves (six years before the team completed their dummy issue for the publishers as a proof of concept), there are hints within Germs of what was to come when they’d once again have the same level of creative freedom. While reading it you can tell that unique OiNK humour is in there, albeit in an early guise. There are plenty of spoofs, very random moments, strips referring to themselves as comic strips, even the way some of the titles are drawn feels familiar.
Mark and Graham were learning their craft, a craft they would both excel at, culminating in the comic we all love so much to this day
However, that’s not all. There are a few actual precursors to specific OiNK strips in here. The Mad Monk from #28 actually appears here in pretty much the same form, albeit drawn by Graham instead of Davey Jones. There’s also The Jolly Wedding, another one by Graham that would transform into a smaller three-panel strip drawn by the legendary Tom Paterson in The OiNK! Book 1988.
There are more too. “I liked Mark’s Police Vet strip [which would be developed further for the first book and #64], which involved getting a stuck Rhino out of a tree by chucking a brick at it,”says Graham. “Mark liked my Mad Monk strip, and had Davey Jones illustrate it for OiNK. Mark may have plundered a few others. There was one about a beach encounter where someone got hugged to death [turned into a page drawn by Lew Stringer in OiNK]. You can tell Mark and I grew up in the 60’s, when Bax and Ken Reid were at their wackiest and most violent.”
Yes, it’s rough around the edges but Germs should be seen in the context of when it was created, as Mark and Graham were learning their craft, a craft they would both excel at, culminating in the comic we all love so much to this day. There are some little treasures here though. Personally, I giggled at the array of different copyright notices, the depiction of an “Asst. Director”, all of the brill Bermuda ‘Narna (“Yoo hoo”) and the rendition of the 1812 Overture!
A rather simple Transformers and Visionaries cover by Jez Hall in comparison to the comic’s usual high calibre of front pages belies another excellent issue inside, while our characters’ dialogue on Dave Elliott’s cover for The Real Ghostbusters doesn’t make much sense given the image, which has been pointed out to me is a spoof of a Fantastic Four cover. This still doesn’t make the speech make sense and who out of this comic’s young audience would know an obscure FF cover? Weird choices abound.
In the American Transformers story the Mecannibals may have looked silly when we first met them but by now they were already among the best original creations the comic ever had. Pure evil with a comedic slant, I loved them! In the UK story the animated corpse of Starscream is the real highlight of the issue. Not confirming whether he’s actually living or dead, this had me glued to the story as a kid! Check out the link below to see Andrew Wildman’s depiction of him including some brilliant in-jokes.
In our other comic, main story Snack Attack had no dialogue whatsoever, playing out like a very funny silent comedy. A bold move for the strip that took up the most space in the issue. Spengler’s Spirit Guide tied in with this week’s prose story and included a spoof history of horror comics, while the Dead True series detailed a spooky urban myth tale centering around jealousy. Another great read all round.
Nice to see Visionaries actually getting a mention this week. In fact, Transformers gets a good chunk of the checklist to detail all of its strips beyond just credits for once. While the Mecannibals were a great addition to the story, the all-female warriors were sadly depicted as cringingly poorly as you can imagine. A bit of a spoiler about the true nature of Starscream there too! Also, you’ve just got to love some of the strip names the Real Ghostbusters team came up with.
Action Force Monthly and Death’s Head are the same issues as last time and if you haven’t checked out the latter before then you simply must read the highlights in the review from the comic’s real time read through, link further below. Such a funny story, full of slapstick. The big issue of the week was the latest Doctor Who Magazine, although I’m not sure if The Ice Warriors were the stars of the strip or a written article.
I’ve had the pleasure of reading some of the classic issues of the magazine for the blog and their rather unique output while the show was in its wilderness years. You can check out the latest of these in the Death’s Head section of the blog, an issue he made a tiny cameo in a few years after his comic ended. That’s us for now. Next time, we’ll finally get our next contemporary comics advert. It’s for a comic that really didn’t appeal to young me despite it starring a favourite cartoon and comics character. You can see what it was in just seven days.
Saturday 8th November 1986. The day everything changed for me. I’d browsed my friends’ humour comics but they never made me laugh enough and all looked the same. This was the day I’d discover a truly unique comic for myself, one that genuinely made me roar and had me obsessed from that day onwards.
I could get like that as a kid. In all honesty, I can still become fanatically obsessed when I discover something new that speaks to me, it’s one of life’s pleasures. OiNK was the latest in a long line of childhood obsessions and one that has stayed with me for four decades, to such a degree that I’ve written this mammoth blog and am launching my own writing career off the back of it. All because of a silly comic featuring pigs, puns… and plops!
Like most of my greatest childhood loves I’ve a huge amount of personal memories associated with OiNK. Yes, there are direct memories of enjoying the content of the comic itself and I’ve whittered on about such things throughout the real time read through. But I’ve so many other wonderful, more personal memories that I simply wouldn’t have 40 years later without this comic.
Take for example those who are no longer here. I remember my cousin giving me a few of his back issues when we visited them one evening in 1987 and as I sat looking through them next to my nanny she clocked the cover to #3 (by Tony Husband) with its bare pig bottoms floating in space. I wasn’t sure how she’d react. She often complained about violence and swearing in movies… but she looked at it, then at me, and let out a little schoolgirl-like giggle.
For many years my mum and her best friend May (who I called Aunt May despite not being related) would take it in turns every Thursday to make lunch for each other and spend the afternoon gossiping and drinking coffee. During what I called OiNK’s Golden Age (the last few months of 1987) I discovered it had begun arriving into the shop every-other Thursday instead of Saturdays as it had previously.
My mum and May are both no longer with us. Mum passed a couple of years ago and May has been gone a long time now. However, I can so vividly remember running from school to the newsagent and then to her house, sitting laughing away to myself with those issues while eating her fancy foil-wrapped Viscount biscuits. I can remember reading the Halloween issue and hearing them discuss whether I still believed in Santa or not, thinking I was too engrossed to listen, and confirming nine-year-old me’s suspicions that year.
This resulted in me searching my parents’ bedroom a few weeks before Christmas, not for the toys I’d asked from Santa but for The OiNK! Book 1988. I’d seen it sitting on the display table in the newsagent for a couple of months and now my excitement was spilling over. It was my most anticipated present that year. I remember my fingers stumbling across the brown paper bag underneath their wardrobe and pulling that grinning pig face out from within it! I didn’t read it. I didn’t want to ruin Christmas Day, instead it was the thrill of finding it and the excitement of knowing it was in the house, waiting.
By this time OiNK stickers were adorning my headboard, wardrobe, cupboards and the family fridge. The massive calendar poster that came with my first few issues of the comic took pride of place on my bedroom wall. That Christmas Eve I sat in bed, empty stocking by my feet, reading the first Christmas issue for the umpteenth time, so much better than a cartoon movie or classic festive tale from one of my books. I repeated this the next Christmas Eve too, and I remember being somewhat heartbroken the year after that with no new issue to see in the most exciting night of the year (after OiNK had been cancelled in 1988).
OiNK #14 (top of this post) was my first. I can’t remember why I was scanning the comics shelves but Jeremy Banx’s cover made me laugh and that big, bright pink logo excited me for what was inside. My dad also passed the same year as my mum and since then a fresh memory of my first issue has come flooding back. I can remember us trying our best to solve the riddle of the murder mystery page together, then dad giving up and checking the answer only to laugh as he realised we would never have got it! I ended up cheating and checking the answer myself in bed that night, trying to work it out way past when I should’ve been asleep. (Here it is below, the answer is in #14’s review.)
After I moved out of home my dad wanted to gut out a lot of the stuff I’d left behind, so I had to choose a few issues of each comic series I’d collected as a kid to keep. For OiNK I chose the first weekly, the last issue and of course that book. These copies are still the ones I have today. That book in particular is a cherished item and one I’ll never part with, not only because of how funny it is but for the personal memories attached to it.
For example, I remember during the 1987 Christmas holidays showing the cover off to any family friend that came to visit, eagerly anticipating their reaction as I turned it over to show them the rear. (Literally the rear.) “Oh, he has to show you this first,” my mum would say to everyone, laughing before offering them a cuppa and telling me to go and play. These are the sorts of memories that I treasure, and they’re still as clear as a bell in my mind thanks to their association with OiNK. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any photos of that Christmas, so here’s one from a good few years earlier and the cover in question. I definitely got my love of the season from mum.
Some individual characters and strips played a huge role in my growing years. Tom Thug helped me laugh at a school bully in my later teen years, a funny rhyming strip about a popular girl with bad dental care scared me into brushing my teeth before bed every night, the comic’s anti-smoking Madvertisements were the bane of my parents’ lives for a while, Horace (Ugly Face) Watkins gave me the strength to stand up to friends who decided to pick on a new kid at school, I made friends in my new scary grammar school partly through showing some 2000AD fans the Judge Pigg strips… the list goes on and on.
Throughout the real time read through there are examples of reactions from myself or friends to some of OiNK’s contents. One set of reactions elicits such funny memories that I’ll retell it here. I asked my dad if I could have The OiNK ! 45, the vinyl record with The OiNK! Song, The OiNK! Rap and Frank Sidebottom’s OiNK! Get Together Song. Little did I know how atrocious these would sound to my now-adult ears. Of course, at ten-years-old I loved that about them! My parents’ horrific reactions were genuine, but then they’d start to exaggerate and it became so funny to hear them pretend-scream from three floors down.
That was only half the story. Unfortunately for me (very fortunately for them) the excruciating sounds were short-lived. I went out to play with friends one day and, while it was the autumn and not exactly warm, my bedroom was on the top floor with a skylight. The autumn sun streamed in, the glass heating up the spot on the bed beneath it, right where I’d left the record without its cardboard sleeve. I was devastated to come home and find it badly warped and beyond use. Seeing a way out from the torture my mum and dad both laughed when they saw it and told me they wouldn’t order another after I’d been so careless with it. However, upon seeing my disappointment they asked what other OiNK things were for sale and a few weeks later I very happily received my mug.
There’s a whole other story about that cup and how it ended up linking me with the comic in a way I simply could never have imagined! But you can read about that elsewhere.
Originally I thought this post would be a way of sharing some memories of reading the comic as a child, highlighting favourite moments from its run that I never forgot enjoying 40 years ago. However, as I began to write I soon found OiNK was triggering all of these very personal thoughts, especially of mum and dad. I was going to publish the post at some point over the next month or so but as these memories came flooding back, and as I’ve found myself equally missing my parents and smiling at the funny moments with them, I’ve decided to post it today on the big anniversary of #1.
I can’t think of any better way to mark the 40th anniversary of OiNK. Thank you to the whole OiNK team for the memories; not just the memories of your work but also those you created in the lives of your readers. I’ll be eternally grateful to you all for these moments with my loved ones that’ll forever be fresh in my mind thanks to OiNK.
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