Buster is back on the OiNK Blog. It makes a change seeing this comic’s characters guest star in something OiNK-related rather than the other way around. Just like last year this is another hardback volume of 112 pages, made up of a mix between regular matte and higher quality stock, this time alternating between the two. It means we’ve a bit more colour but only a bit, a lot of these pages are still black and white or two-tone and there’s no change to the length of the strips.
It still feels like several issues bound together but at least more of them have been printed on better paper. Our first OiNK star (of which we’re now down to two) is Lew Stringer’sPete Throb in the shorter-titled Pete’s Pimple. Pete had already said goodbye to regular Buster readers by the time this annual was released so it’s strange to see it’s more of an introductory strip than anything. In fact some elements are very similar to his first Buster strip.
These annuals could be brought by Santa for kids who weren’t regular readers so it wasn’t unusual for some strips to read this way. There’s a nice little cameo from Tom too but I can’t help feel a little underwhelmed by him in the last panel. I’m so used to these characters in OiNK, Tom should be covered in pus and discombobulated on the floor, not mildly upset in the corner of the panel. Regular blog readers will be familiar with the reasons behind this though when I covered the initial merge. Lew also informs me the colouring job was done in-house by someone at Fleetway, hence the somewhat subdued colours in comparison to his previous OiNK work.
Weedy Willy is no longer with us. He just didn’t click with the readers of Buster and so Mark Rodgers’ and Mike Green’s strip didn’t last long. However, the stand out star was back. A huge hit with Buster fans, Lew’s Tom Thug would sometimes even get a colour page in the weekly, which was at a premium in Buster as opposed to OiNK. However, while his Skooldayz strip may be on one of the higher quality pages like Pete’s, he remains in black and white here.
Did you ever play conkers as a child? I could never get on with it. For someone who loves their videogames today I must’ve had rubbish hand-eye coordination back then and I could never hit anything… apart from the occasional friend’s hand. Kids in comics always seemed crazy for them and those in Tom’s class were no exception. Maybe if this had been an OiNK strip we’d have seen Tom inflict the cricket ball on himself after trying to harm someone else, but the strip still raises a smile.
These aren’t all from Lew in this annual. In fact, OiNK’s co-editor Mark Rodgers created and initially wrote the following characters. Unfortunately, by this stage his illness precluded him from doing so anymore. Lew then took over sole responsibility for The Vampire Brats. First appearing in June 1989 they enjoyed nearly two-and-a-half years in Buster and from comments on social media and Lew’s blog they’re very fondly remembered. I’ve read the occasional strip on Lew’s blog before now but this is the first time I’ve owned anything with them in it.
They were Vampires of the same age as the readers, so despite being undead they still had to learn. In their own unique way, of course. While they may not have a strip in the annual, they do get pride of place with their version of a school’s ‘ABC’ wall chart as the double-page spread that rounds off the entire book. It’s a fun and imaginative entry and in particular I laughed at U, V and W and really any that follow on from the previous letter. With this little sampling I do hope I can get to read some of their actual strips next year.
Next up is another character who (much like Gums) continued on in the pages of the Buster Books long after they’d disappeared from the weekly. Despite winning a Cartoonist Club of Great Britain award, Wonder Wellies only lasted two years in the long-running comic, ending in 1985. According to Lew and John Freeman, these Fleetway annuals could sometimes use reprints to fill out their pages so there’s always the possibility that’s the case here but I can’t confirm. Written by Roy Davis this stood out to me because it was drawn by OiNK cartoonist Dave Follows.
Accidentally created by Professor Krankpot, the wellies belong to Willie (of course) and they’ve called themselves Lefty and Righty, names which could probably mean something rather different today. They were stubborn and had the power to walk by themselves, morph and fly, sometimes taking Willie along with them without his say-so, with enough autonomy that they’d not always do as he wanted or come to his rescue.
Young Arfur is back and seeing as he’s drawn by fellow OiNK cartoonist Pete Dredge I had to include him again. UPDATE: Not only that but OiNK co-editor Patrick Gallagher helpfully left a comment (below) on this post to let us know he wrote it! It was a hard choice between his strips but this one just pips the others with its neat twist on the usual formula; instead of talking his way out of something he gets his teacher to do it for him. Arfur disappeared from the pages of Buster in 1987 so either he continued with new yearly strips for fans or this could be another reprint. My money is on the former because he has pride of place on the higher quality pages in the book.
He’s a lovable rogue, a phrase which could be used to describe certain brothers in a BBC sitcom that starred David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst, characters that were definitely not inspiration for the next strip. Nope, not at all. Actually, I think the word “inspiration” is being rather kind and that’s why it stood out. A Buster original drawn by Gordon Hill, Rodney and Dez lasted only one year in the comic around the time of this annual’s release.
Perhaps it was too on-the-nose even for the young ‘uns!
They bring this year’s look at the Buster Book 1991 to a close. Chances are there’ll be no Pete and his Pimple… sorry, Pete’s Pimple next year so fingers crossed Tom Thug’s superstardom has kicked in with the readers and he’s afforded more space next time. Until then, this annual can sit proudly on my shelf with last year’s while I await the Buster Book 1992 and continue to stretch out the OiNK love just that little bit more.
This is the first Buster Book I’ve ever read and it’s surprised me straight away, but not in the way you may think. The Buster Book series has been added to the blog because of OiNK star Tom Thug. He continued in the pages of Buster weekly all the way to its end over a decade after OiNK’s cancellation. I thought buying the remaining annuals in the series from the moment Tom appeared would be a fun addition to the blog every Christmas. New Tom Thug is always a treat after all!
Knowing Weedy Willy and Pete and his Pimple were also in this edition I was looking forward to large multi-page strips or special stories of some sort, the likes of which we’d have seen in the OiNK books or the Beano and Dandy annuals every year. Surprisingly however, apart from a few exceptions this book feels more like several editions of the weekly wrapped in a cardboard cover.
The first and last 14 pages are of a lovely and smooth, higher quality paper stock, with some of the strips in full colour, but the rest of the 112 pages in total are the same matt paper as the Big Comic Books, mostly in black and white with the occasional two-colour strip. Also, apart from 2-page Buster, Ricky Rainbow and Chalky stories in those outer pages, and a 4-page BeastEnders inside, all the strips are the same length as they would be in the weekly comic.
Once you hit those inner matt pages it just doesn’t feel as special anymore. So yes, I was surprised when I compared it to its contemporaries but the main reason we’re here is for the OiNK strips (and perhaps a couple of other little treats too). The first of our piggy publication’s characters we bump into is Weedy Willy, as ever written by Mark Rodgers and drawn by Mike Green.
This wouldn’t feel out of place in OiNK itself. The simplest of tasks were always an epic struggle for Willy and going to see a slushy movie was no different, complete with the obligatory snow for the Christmas annual, albeit five snowflakes. It still counts. Surprisingly, it’s Pete and his Pimple who gets the full colour treatment on the deluxe paper rather than our next star.
The yearly annuals are written and drawn so far in advance of publication (and publication is a few months before Christmas, although they were always Christmas presents), Lew Stringer’s strips for this particular book – released in 1989 – would’ve been created soon after OiNK’s cancellation in 1988. While both characters were fan favourites, Pete was probably the more popular of the two in OiNK and Buster’s editor may have thought that would be the same in Buster.
You see? More snow and ice. Of course these books were for Christmas! I’d loved to have seen the impact into that tree, though. Maybe we would have in his original comic, but it’s still a fun strip. As the months rolled on Tom’s popularity soared in Buster while Willy was quickly dropped and poor Pete went the same way a few months later. In the years that followed Tom became one of the comic’s standout stars, getting full colour pages to himself and he even appeared on the cover. But for now, a single black and white page must suffice.
Pete, on the other hand, is in glorious full colour (coloured by John Michael Burns – thanks to Lew for the info). Alas, this doesn’t mean readers could be made even more squeamish with some technicolour pimple bursting. As I’ve mentioned before when the comics merged, given the younger audience it was decided the pus had to remain put. But that doesn’t mean the fun is kept bottled up. Here, that old OiNK classic of dressing up the pimple is taken to a hilariously Christmassy conclusion.
Unlike a lot of the Buster regulars, these three only get one strip each this time around and I did hunt down their pages within the book first for obvious reasons. It’s going to be an agonising wait for next Christmas before I can read any more from them (most likely just Tom), so I made the most of my purchase on eBay and read through the rest of the book for more highlights to show you.
The first comes courtesy of Ricky Rainbow and he’s on the final two pages of the book. When Pete crossed over into an issue of Buster to promote the then-weekly OiNK back in March 1988, it hadn’t been too long since Nipper comic had merged into it, bringing Ricky along. I’d particularly liked that strip, even though he only turned see-through in it. Usually he could change colour on a whim or based on his mood and I said at the time I’d like to see more of him. It had the potential to be really funny.
Drawn by James Hansen, here we see him unwittingly change colour because of his temperature for the most part, and it’s really enjoyable. It’s also made something of a theme out of very funny letterbox moments this Christmas on the blog. (See Kids’ Court in the Big Comic Book 1989 review.) It’s madcap fun, bouncing between different predicaments for Ricky with Bruiser always on his tail. I know Nipper was a comic aimed at a younger audience than Buster but Ricky Rainbow fits in perfectly here. He’s one of the best parts in this whole book.
OiNK boasted of Pete Dredge winning the Provincial Cartoonist of the Year award from the Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain
Finally, another OiNK artist pops up with his Young Arfur strip, namely Pete Dredge. Pete contributed to a handful of OiNKs randomly throughout its run including strips like spoof movie anthology The Golden Trough Awards, Master T and Dimbo, his take on Sly Stallone’s 80s action hero. OiNK also boasted of Pete winning the Provincial Cartoonist of the Year award from the Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain in #49.
Young Arfur started out in School Fun comic before making the transition to Buster in 1984. (School Fun was actually conceived by OiNK writer Graham Exton.) Arfur is basically a young version of Arthur Daley from the hit TV show Minder, a minor con man who used the gift of the gab to earn money through various dodgy schemes. Young Arfur has that same gift but instead uses it to get him and his pals out of doing anything they don’t want to do.
As you can see his reputation precedes him. Not that this knowledge helped the teacher any. You could see him as a more charming (albeit that’s part of the con) and chatty, streetwise version of the Roger the Dodger strips in Beano at the time. He’s a fun character and must’ve been enjoyed by Buster readers as he was part of the comic until 1987, five times longer than School Fun’s whole run.
With that, we round off our look at the first Buster Book to co-star some of our old OiNK pals. I don’t need any will power to not look at the next volume because I haven’t bought it yet, but if you have these yourself (or can remember them) don’t tell me what’s to come, I look forward to finding out for myself each Christmas. One final surprise is on the back cover. Instead of a repeat of the front cover image by Tom Paterson, or a funny reverse cover like OiNK’s books, it’s an advert. But it’s one I’m sure anyone around my age will remember (fondly or otherwise) from a lot of our comics back then.
It’s strange to see an advert in an annual but the Big Comic Book also had it this year, as did the OiNK Winter Special released in November 1989. Anyway, that’s enough waffle from me. Pete may have been given top billing out of our three pig pals here, but it’s Tom Thug who has a few more Christmassy mishaps to come, so I look forward to our next festive feast of new OiNK-type material in twelve months!
The following post was originally written forSunday 22ndbutwas held back afterthesad news of Tony Husband’s passing
In the review of OiNK#68 I began by describing how I discovered it was coming to an end and merging into the pages of Buster. I was absolutely gutted, not to mention confused. While over the next few years it felt I had a knack for collecting comics that would end up cancelled quickly, OiNK had been a big part of my life for what felt like a long time at that age. But Buster was weekly and a lot cheaper, maybe this could be the next best thing? Especially with these three OiNK characters making the transition?
So, after asking for my reserved copy of OiNK I went back to the shelves and picked up this issue of Buster. However, something (I don’t know what) stopped me from placing a regular order right there and then for a weekly dose of Pete and his Pimple, Tom Thug and Weedy Willy, despite the former two being favourites of mine. When I got home I decided to read Buster first. I wanted to be excited about something new, a new comic with four times the amount of Lew Stringer’s strips every month.
Despite the fact OiNK was a breath of fresh air in comparison to others, its humour speaking to me like no other humour comic, I was desperate not to say goodbye completely. Perhaps I’d really like Buster, maybe its humour had moved on in the few years since OiNK’s creation, maybe I’d reserve it and have a brand new weekly to look forward to with some faves included.
The fun front cover with the legendary Tom Paterson drawing our OiNK characters was a very positive start although I was initially disappointed they weren’t part of the Buster story that continued on to the back cover. However, the story is really good, Tom’s artwork elevating Mark Bennington’s already funny script to lofty heights with his crazy style, gorgeous (or in this case grotesque) details and of course his trademark smelly sock.
I was also initially a little jealous of Buster readers, who still had the same format as OiNK did in its Golden Age during the final months of 1987. Having said that, after reading this it felt like it had nowhere near the amount of reading material as those issues of OiNK had, nor did it take anywhere near as long to read. Our piggy publication crammed so much more content into the same 32 pages, so even though it was 7p more expensive a whole year before this 28p comic, OiNK was a real bargain!
Towards the back Buster welcomes any new readers making the pilgrimage over from Uncle Pigg’s comic at the top of his letters page with hopes that he can keep them laughing. Let’s see if his wish would come true and begin with a look at the three highlights we’re all here for, and no doubt the first three pages any pig pal would’ve read after that cover strip. First up is Pete Throb.
Pete and his Pimple keeps its title banner so initially everything seems normal, or at least as normal as an OiNK strip ever was. However, once we get going there’s a key difference that may not have sat well with long-time fans. Of course it’s an introductory strip in many regards, which is completely understandable and that’s not the problem here. Have a read of Pete’s first Buster page and see if anything pops out. Or rather, doesn’t.
Right up to that penultimate panel everything is as chaotic and funny as we’ve come to expect from Lew’s Pete, but then he lands on the burglars and squishes them, his pimple flattening for one panel and that’s it. Where’s the almighty explosion? Where are the vats of pus that would’ve stuck the thieves to the ground until the police arrived? Something key to Pete’s success in OiNK was missing. Nothing had been enforced upon Lew, he simply knew he couldn’t show a pimple bursting and covering everyone with pus in this comic.
He wasn’t the only one of Lew’s characters to see a change either. In the monthly OiNKs Tom Thug had made humour comics history by actually leaving school, applying for jobs and even signing on for unemployment benefits. But for Buster time was reversed and Tom became that mainstay of children’s humour comics, the eternal schoolboy. Not that this is a complaint of course, not with quality like this.
I’m surprised Tom knows the phrase “attaché-case”! This felt much more like an OiNK strip than Pete’s, although there was already one little change in that Satan the Cat would go unnamed from now on, ‘Satan’ not deemed appropriate anymore. Also, Tom would only ever look queasy if he felt like being sick, unlike the results we could see in OiNK! There was a reason behind the changes. These popular OiNK stars simply weren’t in OiNK anymore and had to adapt to their new surroundings.
As such, Pete’s pimple would largely go un-popped, Tom would never leave school for a setting the younger audience would better appreciate and his cat’s name would remain a secret for pig pals to keep. Would these changes be acceptable in the eyes of their fans? Well, there’s one more character to check in on first before I share what my opinion was upon reading this comic back in 1988.
Weedy Willy, originally created by Graham Exton, usually written by Mark Rodgers (as he is here) and always drawn by Mike Green needed the least changes in making the transition, although apparently he’s single again after he eventually began dating Dishy Mandy in the second OiNK Holiday Special. With hindsight there’s a moment here where he’s accused of being a pervert though, but we’ll put that down to this being inadvertent and 35 years ago.
All three of these strips were clearly introductory ones and below we’ll look at their next three instalments to see how they settled in, but for ten-year-old me it simply wasn’t enough to justify that slot in my comics list. I was only allowed a certain amount on order at once and Wildcat’s preview issue given away with the last OiNK was very tempting. But ultimately it came down to how I felt at the time about Buster.
I immediately thought, “What?! My OiNK has to end but they’ll start THIS?!”
In the last issue of OiNK Horace (Ugly Face) Watkins described it as “a breath of fresh air in the clichéd world of children’s comics” and apart from a few exceptions (the brill Buster strip, as well as fun with Ricky Rainbow, Ivor Lott and Tony Broke and X-Ray Specs) little was convincing me Buster was any different. Yes, it was a bit more random by this point, after a lot of mergers there wasn’t enough room every week for all the characters so some would pop in and out, but the majority of the humour felt old-fashioned compared to what I was used to. Then I saw this!
As a child this advert really didn’t help. Please remember: I was ten. I saw this and immediately thought words to the effect of, “What? My OiNK has to end but they’ll start THIS?!” The cover even looks unfinished, like it’s lots of bits of paper glued together. Reading this issue now there are some more smiles and laughs to be had but things like Nipper and Dad Mum are atrocious and don’t hold up to the test of time at all. The latter’s whole ‘funny’ scenario appears to be the fact the character is a single mum who likes to do things that apparently are ‘funny’ for a mum to do, like work, go out with friends and have fun! Outdated humour even for the 80s, surely.
Getting only 12 pages of OiNK strips a month wasn’t worth the reservation slot and so I moved over to Wildcat which itself was heartbreakingly short-lived. Until doing this blog I never purchased any more issues of Buster so I’m quite excited to have a look at some new Pete, Tom and Willy strips from the next three issues. OiNK’s title would only appear on these four issues in total and it was never called ‘Buster and OiNK’ like other mergers.
Most likely with WHSmith’s stupid attitude towards OiNK and placing it on the top shelves Fleetway didn’t want to risk that happening to their top title. Despite OiNK’s humour simply being cheeky (more in-line with the kids of the 80s) and the good moral messages it contained, to some groups this didn’t matter so perhaps the publisher wanted to play it safe. The Tom and Willy covers were drawn by Tom Paterson again, and Buster didn’t appear on the cover of the last one but there’s a funny story to tell about that inside, which we’ll get to below.
So let’s take a quick look at the remaining OiNK strips and first up are Pete’s. The first one reuses a joke from one panel of a sports issues of OiNK as a basis for the whole strip and as you can see in the next two we actually have pimples popping! Although, it bursts with much less of the sticky mess we found so funny and the result is shown only in silhouette, and his dog’s explodes more like a balloon filled with air than a pimple filled with pus.
Don’t get me wrong these are still fun but it does feel like the main selling point has been watered down somewhat. This isn’t a fault on the part of Lew, Pete was one of OiNK’s most popular characters so was an obvious choice for the merge in that regard. But the strips from OiNK just wouldn’t have been allowed in Buster, so maybe a different character should’ve been chosen in the end? (Although I’m not sure who would’ve been more suitable.)
I can see why Pete was brought over. However, with an even younger audience how many readers could identify with a spotty teenager? As such the strips feel sanitised and that’s completely the wrong feeling for Pete and his Pimple. Tom fares much better. Yes, the writing on the back of the t-shirt at the end of the first strip below seems tame by OiNK standards but by all counts these are classic Tom through and through.
That slip in the middle strip caught me completely off guard and I’ll admit I snorted with laughter at that one! Also nice to see the little extras we sometimes got at the bottom of Tom’s strips have made the pilgrimage to Buster with his woodworking masterpieces. Taking Tom back to school was an obvious choice. Unfortunately many children come across a bully or two in their lives, but Tom could prepare them by showing the true identity of all bullies. As such, he feels just as much at home here as he did with Uncle Pigg and the rest.
As for Willy, you can see below he’s back to asking Dishy Mandy out but at least it has a happy ending for once. (Actually, given how they just suddenly appeared as a couple in OiNK I’m going to say this is how they actually got together.) In OiNK Willy would sometimes use his weediness to his advantage but we haven’t seen that here yet. No pun is intended but these are some of his weakest entries I’ve seen to date, and I’m not sure if it’s because they’ve been simplified back to what they were at the very beginning or not.
So what happened next? Willy would disappear completely after a few months and even the mighty OiNK megastar Pete would follow suit about six months after the merge (although he did cross over into regular character Thunderclap’s strip). As I said I don’t know if many Buster readers would’ve appreciated him as much as pig pals did. Tom was another story altogether though. He became one of Buster’s most popular characters and would remain in the comic all the way until its ultimate cancellation in 2000.
Lew created brand new weekly instalments for Tom all the way until 1996, over 400 strips in total for the brainless bully over ten years. He even made the cover on occasion, taking the place of title character Buster himself, proving Tom’s popularity with readers of both the 80s and the 90s. Even to this day, anyone who has dealt with online trolls will still get a kick out of the Tom Thug strips.
“We’ll try and make things easy for your first week, Mike!”
Buster to artist Mike Lacey
I’ll finish things off with a Buster strip from the issue with X-Ray Specs on the cover. Tom Paterson took a break for a couple of weeks (given the amount he squeezed into his pages it’s understandable!) and instead Mike Lacey drew the character. Brilliantly, this is also the basis for the plot. I love it when a comics character acknowledges they’re inside a comic and here Buster and Delbert decide to help Mike by having everyone on their best (and easiest to draw) behaviour.
This reads like a practical joke from writer Mark Bennington to Mike so I asked Mark about it. However, he wrote literally hundreds of scripts so it’s only understandable that he can’t recall a specific one, but he did tell me, “It seems to follow my slow build up to a twisted chaotic end style which I liked to do. Sometimes the editor Allen Cummings gave me a couple of sentences on subject matter to follow for the coming issue and I put up a script idea based on that.” Like all of Mark’s work for Buster it’s a brilliant piece of writing and there’s a ton of his work in the Tom Paterson book which will be getting reviewed here soon.
There we go, that’s our look at the beginning of the Buster/OiNK merge complete. The amount of brand new (to me) Tom strips still out there to read makes an attempt to collect them all very tempting. Expensive, but tempting. And that’s not including the fact Specky Hector would return with a multi-part guide to comics after his very funny one in OiNK, and Lew would also draw Vampire Brats, scripted by OiNK co-editor Mark Rodgers. There are some key moments from those years I’ll definitely be covering on the blog though so keep your eyes peeled for those further down the line. Beyond that, you never know…
Don’t forget Pete, Tom and Willy star in the second OiNK! Book and you’ll see if they’re included in the highlights on Christmas Day 2023.
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