Dave Huxley may have only contributed to three issues of OiNK but that didn’t stop the Crickey! fanzine from asking him to talk about the comic back in 2008. Dedicated to the nostalgia of classic British comics, Crikey! kicked off as a quarterly before it quickly became bi-monthy, eventually added more colour and ended up with a proper distribution deal before distributors Borders collapsed, taking the magazine with it.
I’ll admit this is the only issue I’ve read and that’s because I saw the OiNK logo on it while browsing eBay, and the corresponding article is one of the main highlights of the issue. It isn’t an interview, it’s actually written by Dave himself and at times it can be wonderfully insightful. Sadly, it kicks off with the Viz comparison, despite that comic not being mainstream at the time nor an influence on the OiNK creative team. And, Tom Thug a “Viz-like character”?
Interestingly, Dave wasn’t hired by the team to create his first piece, the Mona Lisow (the name given to it by the editors), instead he sent it in unsolicited and they saw in him a potential part of the team. He returned in #43, my favourite regular issue and the second Christmas edition with The Hamformers and there’s a funny story included here about his kids appearing on that one.
Dave says he had more ideas to come after his third and final piece, The Statue of Piggery in #55 but never had the chance to develop them due to OiNK’s cancellation. Although, since his first page appeared in #36 and OiNK lasted until its 68th issue I wish he’d developed them a bit quicker! While it’s an interesting article, unfortunately there’s a glaring error included.
I’m not talking about some of the grammatical mistakes or even the misspelling of Mark Rodgers’ name. While Crikey! had a habit of including factual errors in its articles in its early issues, when someone who worked on a comic (albeit briefly) is the guest writer I suppose you’d expect it to be accurate. Unfortunately, the fanzine’s lack of fact-checking is clear when Dave spins the tale of why OiNK ended up cancelled.
Yes, the Janice and John strip did lead to a complaint being lodged with the Press Council and W.H.Smith (R.I.P.) did top-shelf it, but that strip was published right back at the beginning, in #7. It wasn’t the reason the comic was cancelled nearly two-and-a-half-years later! That myth of the complaint bringing about the end of OiNK did circulate at one time though, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh on Dave either.
However, the fact remains that it’s just not true. I’ve covered the evolution and eventual cancellation of OiNK in-depth throughout its real-time read through. Put basically, when Fleetway took over all of IPC’s comics they placed them into sales groups and if the combined sales of each group wasn’t good enough they’d all be cancelled. But OiNK survived its group’s culling; its sales were impressive to IPC (about 100,000 per issue) but Fleetway wanted more. The publisher changing it to a weekly and then to a larger monthly were well-meaning changes but ultimately they are what led to a decrease in sales, long after the complaint shenanigans.
Also, I was aware of Dan Dare and knew who Mary Whitehouse was, so they were hardly included for mature readers.
Despite these errors it’s still nice to read how OiNK was held in such high regard by one of its contributors many years later, even when he only had a very limited amount of work for it. While it doesn’t apply to OiNK, I do agree with Dave’s final sentiment. It’s something that’s still very much prevalent today.
While we’re here I spotted a few little moments elsewhere in this issue that might be of particular interest to OiNK Blog readers. In an article about Warrior comic V for Vendetta is included (although I think the writer has twisted the story to suit his own politics) along with some of David Lloyd’s artwork. This was between 1982 and 1985, the same time David was producing the gorgeous artwork for the first two Knight Rider Annuals that have featured on the blog.
In a quick look at the short-lived Thunder we have brief mentions of Dusty Binns and The Terrible Trail to Tolmec, drawn by Ring Raiders’ Geoff Campion (also misspelled) and Wildcat’s Massimo Belardinelli respectively, and both artists also contributed to licenced anthology horror comic Super Naturals at different stages.
Elsewhere, there are a few articles about girls’ comics, one of which asks why girls enjoyed them so much? It seems to have been too much to ask that Crikey! hire a woman to answer the question, though. Gil Page, who was still working for Egmont at the time spends much of an article about classic comics bitching about the modern market, which is a bit surprising given his employer. Unfortunately, there’s quite a bit of this sort of thing throughout, which dampens the reading experience. For example, an otherwise interesting article about Commando loses me the moment the writer starts to complain about today’s “politically correct world”. Sigh.
This has been a curious little read. I’ve heard a lot of good things about later issues, especially when other comics professionals came in to write about their work and I can’t fault the ambition of the comics fans who put this together in the first place. While this particular issue hasn’t really been for me, it’s always good to see OiNK get some love long after it was gone.
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