Category Archives: OiNK Merchandise

OiNK Merchandise

PORCiNE PROMOS: OiNK’S MERCH ADS

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Right from the off OiNK was different in every way, even with its fan club. Older readers of this blog will have had (or will have known someone who had) the famous Gnasher furry badge as a child from Beano’s fan club. But OiNK went one better. Not only could we proudly display a piggy pink badge of Uncle Pigg (at a time when boys weren’t meant to like anything pink), we could own a lucky butcher’s foot too!

Throw in some funny stickers, a letter from the editor and a lucky number with which you could win a prize if it was selected in the comic, and the Pig Pack was born! Advertised from the very start in the free preview issue, it cost only £1.00 plus a whopping 12p for postage. Now don’t you feel old? Well, prepare for that feeling to return several times throughout this post as we take a look at the adverts for OiNK’s unique range of merchandise.

In the 80s our licenced (eg. Transformers) and action comics (eg. 2000AD) contained adverts for a plethora of related items to spend our parents’ money on, but humour comics didn’t really. Some had fan clubs or competitions for themed t-shirts, posters etc., but OiNK was determined to be unique. We weren’t limited to the usual stuff and, despite not actually joining the Pig Pack, by buying the comic and some merch I still felt I was in a special club! For the actual club, the comic would theme adverts to match the issues, such as the Skeleton Crew disastrously taking over the comic, or for issues based around crime, Hogmanay, Valentine’s and time travel.

I personally owned two pieces of merchandise back in the 80s and I’ve been lucky enough to obtain them again as an adult. Regular readers will know of the fate of my original OiNK mug (left behind when I was fired from a job at 19) and my OiNK 45 record (left under a skylight window on a hot day!) and how I came to acquire them again (through the very kind Helen Jones for the mug and eBay for the record).

The mug was first advertised in only my second issue as a child (#15) but I didn’t order one for myself until much, much later in the run, just before the comic turned monthly. I remember receiving it and suddenly the logo was different to the comic’s, although I always preferred the original one from the cup and I cherished it for years.

Above is the original mug advert, followed by the one that first appeared in #22, the Magic & Fantasy Issue, although it was also used in following issues. The one on the bottom-left was a one-off inside the second Holiday Special and finally Charlie Brooker’s Transmogrifying Tracey was the star (kinda) of the final advert style created and the one I believe I ordered from.

While the mug was available for the rest of OiNK’s run, the record only had a limited pressing and only available for a short time. There was a little mention at the bottom of a Grunts letters page in #36 telling us of a musical treat to come and on page three of #37 a little hype was built up. I actually own the original art of this thanks to it being part of a page Davy Francis gave me several years back.

This was a lovely additional treat when Davy handed me his classic ‘Neely Dunn’ Cowpat County strip (which you can read in #37’s review). Assembled by co-editor Patrick Gallagher, you can see those musical notes were just marker pen over the top of a photograph and how it was all assembled via various pieces of paper glued together.

The first advert, below, certainly grabbed my attention because I can remember pestering my parents with it! This was as different a piece of comics merchandise as you were ever likely to get and I just had to have it! This was the kind of thing you’d only have seen in OiNK, thanks to the musical talents of Marc Riley (Snatcher Sam), Chris Sievey (Frank Sidebottom) and co-editor and writer Tony Husband.

The same advert would appear the next issue in black and white with a different photograph, then two smaller ads followed before they disappeared from the comic forever. You can find out all about this exciting piece of merch in its own blog post, where you can listen to all three of the songs and even check out the recommended dance moves!

Two OiNK goodies I particularly coveted as a kid but never ordered for whatever reason were items of clothing. The t-shirt appeared very early in the run and would be available for purchase all the way to the end. Just like the club membership and the mug it also received a variety of adverts. Below is the original as it appeared in #8, as well as those from the War Special (#20) and the All-Electric Issue (#23). Bringing up the rear is the one from the final months of the comic and clearly Uncle Pigg wasn’t beyond using emotional bribery to make a buck.

With the gift of hindsight I see there were adult sizes and I curse myself! Not that I would’ve wanted to order an adult size back then, and I doubt my parents would’ve wanted to splash out for two different sizes for me to wear at different points in my life. I may not be able to walk the streets of Belfast proudly sporting that smile-inducing logo but thanks to a fellow pig pal I do finally have the version I wanted as a child, albeit to frame and hang on my wall. You can check that out in a post from Christmas Day 2025.

The t-shirt, pig pack and mug could be seen as the three main pieces of merchandise, seeing as how they were advertised more than any other. They’d often appear alongside each other and I’m sure the page below will be very familiar to any pig pal reading this. (Note the addition of a piggy pink comb now, too!) This was printed in almost every issue over the course of several months in 1987, during what I call the Golden Age of OiNK when it was at its height for me personally.

The second piece of apparel had the best tagline in a clothing advert ever in my opinion. “Get sweaty! Get shirty! Get this sweaty shirty!” is one of those OiNK lines that fans quote to each other today when reminiscing about their favourite comic (alongside, “And the dolphin’s name was Keith” and the OiNK Song chorus, among others). At over a tenner, in comparison to the rest of the items it was expensive for the 80s.

The first time I got to see what the OiNK sweatshirt actually looked like (since our ads were drawn rather than photographed, with the exception of the Pig Pack above) was during Christmas last year when I invited other fans to show off what they still owned. It’s a… unique fashion item. This full-page advert for it first appeared in #42, the Fantastic Fashion Issue funnily enough!

Despite the logo change with the first monthly issue the following year, the sweatshirt, t-shirt and mug would continue to be advertised as-is (the second advert above replacing the original for the sweaty-shirty), with no new merch for the new logo ever appearing. In fact, the final piece of merchandise we’d see popped (no pun intended) up in the final weekly just before the new look would make its logo redundant.

I never saw the bubblegum in my local sweet shop and, just like the sweatshirt, didn’t even see a photograph until that same post from last Christmas in which Patrick himself held up a surviving empty box. I can’t help but wonder, what if OiNK had remained as the popular fortnightly comic from its heyday and had continued on for more years to come. What other merchandise would we have seen Uncle Pigg churn out to fill his coffers?

The fact the Round the Bend TV series was originally planned as an OiNK show fills the imagination with what could’ve been. That was a quality, award-winning series and if it had been tied in with our comic as intended maybe this post would’ve ended up being twice as long! As it stands, there are still plenty of items I’m trying to get my trotters on, but for now I’ll just have to look at these adverts and dream.

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Christmas, OiNK Merchandise, Pig Pals

PRiME PORKY PRODUCTS: PiG PALS & THEiR MERCH

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Merry Christmas everyone!

A few Christmases ago now I received a shoebox in the post in shiny wrapping paper with strict instructions not to open it until Christmas Day. It was from Helen Jones, partner of the late OiNK co-editor Mark Rodgers. I remember my mum was also eager to know what she’d sent me and when I finally got to open it she laughed while I grinned from ear-to-ear. After decades I was the owner of an OiNK mug once more!

Helen knew of how I’d accidentally left my own OiNK mug at a previous workplace in my late teens and that I’d been hunting for a replacement for years. She still had Mark’s mug in a display cabinet and very kindly sent me it for Christmas! That and the OiNK 45 record were the only pieces of piggy pink merchandise I owned as a kid and the latter was warped by the hot sun very soon after I got it. Thankfully I was able to buy a mint condition replacement for the latter on eBay a couple of years back and there’s a blog post in which you can listen to all three of its songs.

Reading the comics again as an adult I’m surprised I never had more of Uncle Pigg’s bits and pieces. If it were today I’d definitely be lapping up everything I could get my trotters on (and there’s an exciting Christmas update further below!), but perhaps having to go through parents curbed that somewhat and then OiNK’s cancellation put paid to any more collecting. But earlier on this year I got to thinking about other pig pals who had been luckier. What if they’d held on to it all?

I reached out to some OiNK fans through social media and asked them if they’d like to show off their merch on the blog. It was a silly question! Who wouldn’t like to boast about having some of this stuff? First to reply was Neil Clarke who has kept a wealth of OiNK pieces in mint condition for three decades. This could be down to the fact that he was a bit older than the rest of us careless kids.

“I got into OiNK as I was a big fan of The Fall and Marc Riley played with them,” Neil told me. “I was into punk music when I was 12 or 13 and OiNK came out when I was 20ish!” Not only that but his brother was a bit of a pig pal too. “My brother Ian won a drawing competition in OiNK and received this bag (like you, I’m jealous of it), so I got him rummaging up in his loft.”

To make you just as jealous as me, here are some photos of Neil’s collection including said bag, his Pig Pack membership club pack (including the letter from Uncle Pigg) and even a photo of the time he met the creator of Harry the Head, Marc himself.

Not only that, as you can see from his not-at-all-smug photo he’s wearing the one-and-only OiNK sweatshirt! That’s the holy grail of OiNK merch right there. Who can forget the “Get sweaty! Get shirty! Get this sweaty-shirty!” advert? Looking back, I really can’t fathom why I didn’t ask my parents (or Santa) for the t-shirt. I’d have loved that! I still would. Hence my daily email from eBay updating me on anything in their clothing selection with the word “oink” included these past several years.

Neil wasn’t the only person to show off the latter piece of pig apparel. When Jackie McCree got back in touch with me she told me she had the t-shirt but during recent renovations it had been put into storage… somewhere! Bless you for going to all the trouble Jackie. Saying that, you can just tell she’s got a huge grin behind this t-shirt, can’t you? Show off!

“I was a big supporter of OiNK,” Jackie told me as a way of curbing my jealousy. “Bought the merchandise, joined the pig pals, and bought extra comics to give to people and leave in doctor/dentist waiting rooms. If I remember correctly my friend Aly Fell submitted a comic strip to OiNK and they used it. I didn’t know Aly at the time but we’ve been friends for decades.” Might have to look into that!

It’s at this point I’ve got that special Christmas Day update!! Jackie very (very, very) kindly packaged up her never-worn OiNK t-shirt and offered to send it to me! I couldn’t believe it! It even came gift wrapped. Naturally, given how much I love both OiNK and this time of year, I didn’t open it until today.

As a kid we received our presents from Santa first thing in the morning but presents under the tree never got opened until after Christmas dinner, and that traditional carries on to this day. So it’s been a long wait but after three-and-a-half-decades a few hours more were nothing. I can’t believe I’ve finally got it! I never, ever thought this would happen so thank you so much Jackie and Merry Christmas to you!

Okay, so I can’t exactly wear it (it’s a child’s small) but I’ll be sourcing a frame and getting this up in my writing room after the holidays, that’s for sure!

Next up is camera shy Steve Finch who has the mug, the pig pack paraphernalia and also a rare piece of OiNK memorabilia in the shape of the promotional folder used by IPC Magazines around the time of the comic’s launch. In fact, it was Steve’s folder that he kindly let me use in one of several posts on the blog detailing the pre-pig days.

Steve also has an original copy of the piece of OiNK gear that’s received the most coverage on the blog to date. Still in its box is his OiNK computer game from CRL. It’s even for the best computer of the 80s, the Commodore 64! (Even though I didn’t get my C64 until 1991. I’ve apparently always been a retro head, even when I was retro.) Now for any young readers that thing sitting in front of the box is called a ‘cassette’.

If there’s one OiNK-themed item even trickier, nay impossible, to get our hands on today it must surely be the bubblegum. What? OiNK had bubblegum? It did indeed. It was only ever seen in one issue as a competition prize in #62, the final weekly before the big revamp. This was a sticky treat with a use by date so you’re not exactly going to see any on eBay, but that’s not to say there isn’t a remnant of this particular piece of comic history somewhere…

That somewhere is the house of OiNK co-editor Patrick Gallagher. Thanks so much for taking part Patrick, I just hope all of the actual gum is long gone and there isn’t anything too scary growing inside that thing. Bright pink (of course) bubblegum and only 2p each? I know I’ve turned 47 four days ago but now I feel old.

“I need to find my Weedy Willy hat.” That’s what pig pal Sue Hall told me when she was rooting around her house looking for her Pig Pack membership goodies and her old school folder covered in one or two OiNK stickers. Sue’s handiwork has appeared on the blog before, when she somehow built the impossible-to-build cut-out Street-Hogs Road-Hogg from #11!

Kevin Tuson is a man who not only has a large OiNK collection to show off, he’s a man who knows exactly how to show it off. I asked everyone if they could supply a photo of them with their merchandise and Kevin certainly agreed! I’m not saying there’s a smugness to his pose but, well, there’s a smugness to his pose. With the complete comics collection, the free gifts, the Pig Pack membership goodies and more, including several letter correspondence from OiNK (which we’ll take a look at some point in the future), I can’t blame him.

That last photo is of Kevin’s son, Sacha. Taken about ten years ago when Kevin quickly needed someone who would actually fit inside the child-sized t-shirt for a photo, I’m sure the now-22-years-of-age Sacha will be ecstatic that his dad sent in this photo for publication on the OiNK Blog.

To round things off we move from OiNKtown to Beanotown with Danny Pearson, current writer for the legendary comic who reached out to me a while back to tell me he’d found a piece of merchandise for OiNK’s spiritual sequel, something I’d been trawling the auction site for to no avail. Created by OiNK’s Mark Rodgers, Patrick Gallagher and Tony Husband, TV show Round the Bend also had a one-off comic special. This is like hen’s teeth on eBay today, so cue a bit of well-deserved smugness from Danny. (Love the background too, bonus points for that.)

That’s us, folks. I thought having a little look at some of these items with fellow pig pals would make for a nice Christmas Day treat, given how some of us may have received these as gifts when we were children (or after I turned 40 in my case). I’d like to thank everyone who took part for showing us their OiNK merchandise and thereby sharing their personal memories.

I hope everyone reading has been having (or have had) a lovely day so far, that you’ll go heavy on the turkey and roasties, polish off at least three bottles of Schloer and enjoy your afternoon nap before your turkey sandwiches for tea. Come back in a few days for more Christmas-like feels when I take a look at the toys and games (real ones) advertised in OiNK. More 80s fondness to come!

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OiNK Merchandise

YOUR SINCLAiR #27: SLOW PORK

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There I was, thinking I’d pretty much covered the OiNK computer game as much as I could have when I spotted the name of our favourite comic on the cover of this issue of Your Sinclair from 1988. One quick eBay purchase later and here we are, exactly 36 years to the day of its release and ready to check out another contemporary review of the game.

Previously we’ve seen how Commodore 64 magazine Zzap!64 and multiformat magazine Computer + Video Games thought it was a fun game and represented good value for money, with three very playable mini-games for the price of one full game. The problem was that it basically had nothing to do with OiNK. However, reviews were still generally very positive and so was I when I eventually played it decades after its release. So how did the Sinclair Spectrum conversion released six months later stack up?

As you can see, YS’s design was a bit basic to say the least and it’s rather sparse in the screenshot department (even for games it rewards big scores to like Gryzor), but from this one uninspiring picture of Tom Thug’s game we can see it’s a million miles away from the original C64 version. It’s not just the graphics that suffer either, it runs very slowly by comparison and while the C64 version loaded everything in at once, here each of the mini-games needs a few minutes to load individually.

This continues the general feeling that it had very little to do with the comic but as a game in its own right it was fun to play

Duncan McDonald’s review was written when the game was first released at full price (usually a tenner on cassette, around five pounds more for disk). Like most games of the time on these machines it would be rereleased in a smaller cassette box as a budget game for a few quid about a year later. The main complaint here is that each of the games already feels like a budget game rather than part of a full price release, but bundled together it’s not bad and is quite fun, hence the decent score overall.

This continues the general feeling about the game, that it really had very little to do with the comic but as a game in its own right it was fun to play and good value for money. You’ll also see here that Andy Capp’s game was reviewed on the same page, which is quite fitting since he’s very loosely linked to OiNK. When Buster comic was first released the character of Buster was billed as Andy Capp’s son, and as we know OiNK merged with Buster when it was cancelled. Nice little coincidence there.

As normal when checking out these magazines I decided to take a look at the rest of the contents and this Street Life double-page was right up my alley. As well as the obligatory sales charts it also takes a look at the 80s culture readers may have been interested in. Yes, there are a lot of daft space filler things here too but there’s some interesting contemporary snippets.

There’s a comics chart, although it’s focussed on specialist stores importing American titles rather than UK comics. Alongside this is a chart of the most popular arcade games back when such venues were everywhere and a review of two new movie releases, one of which would go on to spawn two awful sequels, a television series I loved and a comic series which was printed in Havoc in the UK and reviewed right here on the blog.

“[The graphics] are simply amongst some of the best I have ever seen on the ol’ pregnant calculator.”

Tony Worrall

Two other pages which may interest comics fans are an advert and review for a Dan Dare computer game, Dan Dare II: Mekon’s Revenge. To say the screenshots on the advert are small is an understatement. Maybe they’d have been fine for me at the time but to these 46-year-old eyeballs they’re so tiny they tell me nothing about the game whatsoever, the details lost to me. I do like how the advert has a 1955 date and price as if it’s a Dan Dare comic cover.

It appears Tony Worrall is a bit of a fan of the game. It may not look like much compared to today’s graphics, or even those found on my beloved C64, but for the Spectrum (which a friend of mine owned at the time) it does look ace and sounds like it would’ve been quite fun to play. If you read the review and find the sight of thumb-sucking mini-Mekons a funny idea check out the first screen shot closely and look at the two cryogenic chambers, you should be able to make out the animation. Fun stuff.

When I looked back at my first ever magazine, namely Commodore Format #14, I showed you a large double-page advertisement from Datel Electronics, a company renowned for quality hardware accessories for the home computers of the 80s and 90s. The CF adverts were slick, the accessories wowed teenage me and I ended up collecting much of what they offered in just the first couple of years of my Commodore ownership. But a few years previous, the same couldn’t be said of their Spectrum ads.

That’s not really fair of me to compare the two, over the next four years new developments in Desktop Publishing saw leaps forward in magazine design and the advertisements changed with the times. For this fan of retro gaming and computing it’s interesting to see what the Spectrum range offered in terms of add-ons, although it does appear to be somewhat limited to devices which would give these British computers access to things their competitors already had built-in.

As the end of the 80s approached a new breed of 16-bit machines was beginning to make its mark, the Atari ST being the first. The Commodore Amiga would soon be advertised all over the magazines aimed at the 8-bit owners and many would be enticed away, so it was quite the feat that Future Publishing’s Your Sinclair (they bought the title in 1990 from Dennis) continued until 1993, Amstrad Action until June 1995 and Commodore Format until October 1995, just six months before the release of the 32-bit Sony Playstation!

I simply adored my Commodore 64. I also had great fun playing a friend’s Amiga, but it was always Atari’s machine which fascinated me the most out of the 16-bits. I think it’s a lovely machine and nicer aesthetically than the Amiga, but I think it was mainly due to a friend’s music set up that I rightly or wrongly thought the ST was the better computer.

He had a guitar, a keyboard and some massive speakers all hooked up to his ST and what he could do with it was phenomenal. This friend was a particularly adept musical genius as far as I was concerned, but the ST was known for its music creating abilities and what he produced in the 90s in front of us in no time at all thanks to that computer wowed us. Plus we played Worms and Lemmings afterwards. Some great memories thanks to the Atari ST.

John is being sarcastic, using the language of what we’d call ‘incels’ and ‘trolls’ today to take very deliberate aim at toxic male views of the world

Page 98 is the last before the back cover and it’s an article called Backstabbin’ by freelance writer John Minson about the subject of girl gamers. Firstly, remember this is in a magazine from 1988, a time when everything for children was very explicitly split between what was for boys and what was for girls, with no overlap. Thankfully that’s changed a lot but at the time computer games were seen (incorrectly) as the exclusive domain of boys.

When you start reading this article you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a patronising piece aimed at placating any female readers. However, keep reading and you’ll see John is being sarcastic, using the language of what we’d call ‘incels’ and ‘trolls’ today to take very deliberate aim at toxic male views of the world (in this case the world of home computing). The fact Your Sinclair was edited by a woman (Teresa Maughan) should tell you there’s more to this than you initially think.

It’s disappointing that something like this would ever have needed written in the first place, but at the same time it’s quite a delightful surprise to see it in Your Sinclair of all places, and way back in 1988. It rounds off a fun look at another retro computing magazine, a genre I never thought I’d be covering when I started this blog, but one I’m enjoying immensely. Don’t forget there’s a lot more coverage of the OiNK computer game on the blog already, just click on the link below to go to the full menu.

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THE OiNK! 45: THE ViNYL FRONTiER

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Back in 1987 a unique piece of merchandise for a comic was announced in the pages of OiNK. In issue #37 we were treated to this full page advertisement featuring Marc Riley as petty thief Snatcher Sam and Chris Sievey in his role as celebrity superstar Frank Sidebottom. They’d come together to record The OiNK 45, a single-sized vinyl record available only through mail order in the comic.

Back in the premiere issue OiNK had launched itself onto the unsuspecting public with a free flexidisc, a floppy piece of pink see-through plastic containing two songs, namely the imaginatively titled The OiNK Song and The OiNK Rap. Marc produced and performed both and they proved a hit with the kids and an annoyance to the parents of said kids, which I’m pretty sure was the idea. Now they’d been rerecorded at Drone Studios by Marc and Frank with engineer Paul Roberts, alongside a brand new song.

When I saw the advert for the first time I immediately begged my parents to write a cheque for the record. I remember the agonisingly long wait for it to arrive and then my mum and dad wished it hadn’t. I played it almost non-stop for a few days, being told several times to turn it down. Let’s just say it wasn’t to everyone’s taste. As I said, annoying readers’ parents may have been the idea behind the songs in the first place.

I’d missed out on the original flexidisc first time around so had no idea two of these were new versions of previous songs. I remember loving The OiNK Psycho Rap (as it was now called) as a kid on The OiNK 45, written by Tony Husband and Marc, and when I finally got my hands on #1 decades later for the blog with a mint condition flexidisc I’ll admit I was confused as to why I’d liked it so much! The answer is that the newer version here is completely different and a whole lotta fun. The words are almost the same but it’s more professionally put together. While I’m still not going to blast it at get togethers with friends, it may find its way on to my HomePod.

Fortunately for my parents, but heartbreakingly for me, just a few weeks after it arrived back in 1987 I ended up playing it for the very last time. I’d taken the record out of the hifi in my room and placed it on my bed without its sleeve while I listened to something else. It ended up being a sunny day so off I went outside to play with friends for the afternoon. When I came back I found out to my horror what happens when a vinyl record sits under a skylight on a day like that.

It was badly warped, looking like a disused napkin someone had tossed aside. I was crushed. My parents refused to buy me another, telling me it was a lesson to learn (in reality it had brought peace to the house once more) and, having not yet made a cassette recording so I could take the songs outside with me, that was the last I listened to it. Only now have I been able to hear these versions (and the third song) for the first time since then, 35 years later.

This past summer I was finally able to track down a copy of the record and I’ve waited until now to listen to it as a special festive treat for pig pals. This should be interesting with my now-adult ears! First up, the cover art was compiled by Marc Riley and the photographs on the back and on the adverts were taken by OiNK’s resident photographer John Barry under co-creator/co-editor of the comic and co-designer for the project (alongside Marc) Patrick Gallagher’s direction.

There’s a reference to Mike Gallagher brewing the tea too. This was Patrick’s brother who played sax at the studio sessions (he was also in Frank’s Oh Blimey Big Band) as well as making the refreshments, clearly. Patrick tells me altogether they recorded roughly 50 takes of all three tracks but ended up using the first of each! All that remains now is to place the vinyl carefully into my record player and crank the volume up. We’ll start with the new versions of The OiNK Psycho Rap and The OiNK Song (written by Mark Rodgers and Marc). You’ll be glad to hear the latter is still sung by high-pitched pigs.

The OiNK! Psycho Rap written by Tony Husband and Marc Riley

The OiNK! Song written by Mark Rodgers and Marc Riley

Lyrics page from #1 by Patrick Gallagher

Unfortunately there were no lyrics sheets with the record so young me had a hell of a time understanding those piggies, however the lyrics were printed in the first issue. Only a few words have been changed here and there for the rap, so feel free to use that photo above to follow along.

Apologies that I have no fancy equipment to record the songs in lossless quality (or whatever it’s called), you’ll have to make do with my video recording it with an ever-tiring outstretched arm.

“What the heck you think you’re doing, you?”

Frank Sidebottom, The OiNK Get-Together Song

On the B-side is the brand new song, The OiNK Get-Together Song. Chris sings along with Marc in the previous songs and Frank even makes a small guest appearance in The OiNK Song when he realises he’s on the wrong track and asks the listener to turn the record over. This next song is twice as long and sees him in his usual place as lead singer, with Little Frank constantly asking when he’ll get to contribute. It’s billed as a song starring characters from the comic, however the reality is much different (and funnier) than you might expect.

The OiNK! Get-Together Song written by Frank Sidebottom (Chris Sievey)

In my head this song had included various impressions of characters but instead we’re introduced to them playing instruments or making lots of loud background noise. Of course it would be this! Highlights include it descending into chaos on more than one occasion, especially when Billy Bang and the Street-Hogs get involved, Frank and Little Frank’s arguments getting more and more aggressive and there are cameos from some long forgotten characters such as Billy’s Brain and ‘Ed Banger.

My own personal favourite moment is when Frank messes up and just readily admits it right there in the song!

It’s a genuinely funny record and I’d heartily recommend splashing out the few quid it costs on eBay when it pops up, but let’s just say I think I can understand where my parents were coming from when they refused to buy a replacement once they’d escaped it. Brilliant stuff and very typically ‘OiNK’. No other comic could’ve done this. If you do decide to buy it for yourself just be warned, the sax in The OiNK Get Together Song will be stuck in your head from now until the end of time, whether you want it in there or not.

Above you’ll see Mike Gallagher as part of Frank’s band in a photo Patrick sent me, alongside an image of the original test pressing of the vinyl shared by Tony Husband on the OiNK Facebook Group. The final photo features the children of the studio owner and a very tanned/rosy/burnt Marc Riley and Patrick Gallagher, who may have just come back from holiday according to Patrick himself.

The OiNK 45 and the mug were the only pieces of merchandise I had as a kid so it’s great to own them both again. This has genuinely been a whole lot of fun to revisit. It was another contributing factor to what I refer to as the Golden Age of my very favourite comic of all time.

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Commodore Format, OiNK Merchandise

PiG TALES PART TWO: COMMODORE FORMAT #3

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Last month I got to show you how Future Publishing’s superb Commodore 64 magazine, Commodore Format gave away a game on its covertape called Pig Tales, and how this game was actually the OiNK computer game, which had originally been released in 1987 across all 8-bit formats (image below from an eBay seller). Despite not having much to do with the comic, its playability and value for money was generally praised at the time but it just didn’t sell. So a short three years later it was a freebie on the cover of CF.

In case you haven’t seen the previous post, it contained the full instructions for the OiNK game and one month later Commodore Format was back with a guide for those stuck in the misadventures of some of the comic’s most popular characters. So that’s what this post is all about. Plus, just like last time I’m throwing in some contemporary features and adverts from the magazine to place it in its time, just for fun.

Every month our computing and videogames magazines would contain hints, tips and cheats for a huge variety of games. Without search engines, if you were stuck you just had to sit tight and hope your monthly read contained some help for you. Today I stay away from such websites that offer things like this, but the younger target audience of these magazines lapped these things up, as did I at the time. Some of the most popular forms of help were game maps.

In the section of the mag called GameBusters, staff writer Andy Dyer and editor Steve Jarrett painstakingly compiled detailed maps for the Tom Thug and Rubbish Man sections of the OiNK game respectively, which in turn were drawn up by designer Lam Tang. There was no need for help with the Pete and his Pimple section, it was a bat and ball game. It just required practice. So if you’ve got a copy of the game and would like to get that bit further (and have no patience) here are the full guides from this issue.

Ignore those black and white maps down the side, those are for a different title altogether. As you can see Tom’s zombie crushing section is all one big area to traverse while Rubbish Man’s is divided into six increasingly difficult zones. (Also, see the rather self-congratulatory game programmer include his name in a level!) Throw in Pete’s game and it’s a bit of a miracle it was a single load, not taking up any more than the computer’s measly 64k of memory (actually less when system memory is taken into account). For contrast the images on this blog are 1Mb on average, roughly sixteen times that size.

I’d actually like to give that Rubbish Man section a go again!

You can’t fault the team’s work here. Every little detail is included and not one screenshot is used, it’s all been drawn from scratch from playing the game themselves. No, the team didn’t receive a copy of the maps from the game publisher, at the time writers of these kinds of magazines had to basically play these games for hours and hours and assemble the guides themselves. Given how this issue contains eight pages of such help for the young players it’s an insane amount of work every month.

I’d actually like to give that Rubbish Man section a go again! If you’ve missed any of the coverage of the game on the blog you can check out a retrospective from Retro Gamer, a preview from an issue of Zzap!64 containing a cameo by Snatcher Sam, a special interview with OiNK’s editors in Crash magazine which also came with a special free edition of OiNK, there’s a full review of the game from Zzap and of course the previous issue of Commodore Format. Now let’s have a quick retrospective look over some things that caught my eye on other pages of this December 1990 issue as I prepared the above scans.

Back in the early 90s when other computer companies such as Sinclair and Amstrad found their 8-bit systems struggling the Commodore 64 was still selling well as an entry level computer. In the back of it was a cartridge port which had been underused throughout its already lengthy lifetime. New cart chip technology now enabled developers to use extra memory along with their ability to instantly load to produce advanced graphics, sound, more content and more complex gameplay. Commodore even released a console version of the 64.

With these the Commodore could easily contend with new kids on the block the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Master System. I often found (and still feel the same) that my favourite games on the 64 were miles better than the (admittedly great) console games. But Commodore, in their infinite wisdom, weren’t exactly marketing geniuses and the only places you’d see these advantages of cartridge technology detailed were in Commodore 64 magazines, read by people who already owned the machines. Without the manufacturer doing a good job the game publishers’ flash adverts above looked the part but had minimum impact.

Don’t get me wrong, gaming technology began changing very quickly in the 90s and incredibly the C64 still continued to sell very well for another couple of years. Commodore Format itself was eventually cancelled in 1995 only a few months before the first PlayStation magazine began! But with these advertising spreads above Commodore wasn’t exactly inspiring excitement, were they? In fact, they would go bust in 1994, taking the Amiga and its ever-developing range with it.

“You can hold conversation with people who may choose to help you or decide to chop your head off”

‘Going On-line’, Andrew Hutchinson

I always felt there was real potential to stave off the fate of the C64 if the company had really got behind the cartridge format on the proper computer instead of that silly console idea. Nintendo and Sega didn’t have to worry. The big push never came and when the console failed (as anyone could’ve predicted) publishers left the entire format in droves. Oh well, this short period of time still produced some of my very favourite computer games of all time and that’s not just the rose-tinted glasses talking.

Finally for this post there’s a feature I just had to show you all, written by future CF editor Andrew Hutchinson. Given this issue was published in 1990 and was for the Commodore 64 it might surprise you to see an article about going online! It would be the late 90s before our household had access to the Internet via AOL and a PC, but we were still in time for the extortionate monthly fees and even more extortionate per-minute charges mentioned below. Ah, the old days, eh? Yep, they very much were not better.

That pullquote on page 61 was about playing RPGs online, but could easily apply to Twitter today.

The excitement around the ‘Information Superhighway’ was intense in those years and looking back on it now it’s all very quaint of course, but every big revolution has to start somewhere. It’s strange to think how dependent our everyday lives have become on the technology that back then was seen as an expensive luxury only. Aside from the brilliant writing and the fact it was a damn fun magazine, the enthusiasm is another reason why reading actual retro magazines will always be superior to those from today that look back. It’s a lot cheaper too!

Anyway, that just about wraps up the OiNK Blog’s coverage of the OiNK computer game. I’ll take another look at Commodore Format next year when I reread the first magazine (of any title) I ever bought for myself, #14, which coincidentally enough is the same issue number of OiNK that had been my very first comic. Look out for more OiNK merchandise posts in the future.

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PiG TALES PART ONE: COMMODORE FORMAT #2

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Commodore Format was a very special publication for me, although it wasn’t until #14 that I discovered it. I’m writing a few posts for the OiNK Blog about it because in one of its earliest issues there was a certain porcine program on the covertape, the cassette packaged every month with full games and demos of upcoming releases for readers’ Commodore 64 computers. On sale 32 years ago this month I’ve something special to show pig pals.

Attached to the cover of the second issue of CF (as we fans called it) from October 1990 was a cassette tape inside a little cardboard sleeve that included a highly playable Pac-Man clone called The Blob, a demo of forthcoming RPG Lords of Chaos, an intricate and complex space trading game called Empire and a game that according to the instructions pages went by the name ‘Pig Tales’. Described as “an everyday tale of small pink pigs attempting to put a magazine together”, the premise might sound familiar. As well it should.

I missed this back in 1990 when the magazine was originally launched but around 2010 I decided to purchase a C64 to relive those days and I began collecting Commodore Format all over again. As I started to read each issue I’d load up the cassette to see which games worked and which ones needed replacements. I did so before reading any of the instructions (that would come later once I knew which games I could actually play and which had succumbed to the ravages of time). Imagine my shock when Pig Tales stopped loading and a shoddily drawn OiNK logo appeared.

This was over a year before I even began the old blog site. I hadn’t read any OiNKs in many years, the final few remaining issues from my youth securely packed away in a box somewhere, so this was a very pleasant surprise that immediately took me down that particular memory lane for the very first time. I knew a little about the game via the Lemon 64 site (above), basically that it had very little to do with the comic and because of this had a bad reputation, although users were of the general impression it was still a good game in its own right. I gave it a go and was pleasantly surprised. It’s a great little game with a lot of playability packed in, with just a sprinkling of not-very-good OiNK-related images.

Previously on the blog I’ve included the Zzap!64 review of the game from 1987 which was generally positive and I backed this up with my own thoughts on the game, which you can read here. Unfortunately, with so many other amazing games and childhood favourites to play through I only loaded the OiNK game a few times so I’m in no position to write a detailed review. (The C64 was sold off again a few years later.) But it was fun and rather addictive, and you can’t really ask for any more from a free game.

It was surreal to see Uncle Pigg in digitised form suddenly pop up on the small portable CRT TV I’d acquired for the Commodore. Yes, the game itself was still called ‘OiNK’ when played, it was only inside the magazine (and the tape cover) that it was referred to as ‘Pig Tales’. A fan site has stated this was because Future Publishing had the rights to the game but not the name, which seems like a very strange set of circumstances given how they can’t be separated. It’s still called ‘OiNK’ on the screen and the character names are used in the magazine. (At the time of writing I’ve yet to confirm this rights issue.)

Within the instructions the game is likened to the creation of Commodore Format and the press puppets from Spitting Image, which were a series of pigs dressed in trench coats and trilbies but at no time is the comic itself mentioned. How quickly they forget, eh? This issue was published only six months after the final ever issue of OiNK, the Summer Collection.

In the next issue Commodore Format would include a guide to the OiNK game including maps and tips

Three years might seem like a quick turnaround for the game to go from full price, to budget rerelease, to being included on a covertape. While we know it didn’t sell that well, this speedy transition wasn’t uncommon and I remember amassing quite the collection of excellent games through the magazine, including ones which were top rated and had sold very well. OiNK could sit right alongside them as a fun, quirky little retro game.

Commodore Format wasn’t finished with OiNK though. In the next issue they’d include a guide to the game including maps and tips to help readers finish Uncle Pigg’s “magazine”. I’ll show you them next month but I want to finish off this post with a few select images from this issue to place it in the context of the year it was released, beginning with an advertisement for a new game which readers of my Havoc reviews will know quite well.

While the movie didn’t deserve the hype, the game certainly did (although clearly no one proof read their advert). RoboCop 2 was released on cartridge on the C64, meaning it loaded instantly and had more memory available for better gameplay, graphics and sound. It was a brilliant game and much more enjoyable than the lacklustre film it was based on. Elsewhere in the issue, modern day videogame players might be interested to see this next double-page spread when CF’s editor Steve Jarratt headed off to the Consumer Electronics Show to see what the world of interactive entertainment had in store for us over the coming year.

Finally, there’s an interesting three-page feature about the history of the Commodore 64 computer. Commodore Format was released at a time when more powerful machines were gaining traction but Future, which was already publishing Amiga Format and ST Format, saw an opening in the market. The C64 was still seen as the perfect starter computer (it certainly was for me in 1991 the following year) and there were also those younger siblings who were getting C64s handed down to them. All potential readers.

The only competition was Zzap!64 which focussed mainly on games. Commodore Format took less than a year to surpass that giant in sales, quickly becoming the world’s best-selling C64 mag. CF spread its net wider and included retrospective gaming features to get new owners up to speed, interviews, technology articles, as well as programming and graphics tutorials. It was a meaty read and an instant hit.

The C64 Story detailed the life of the 8-bit up to this point, including its predecessor, its development, spin-offs and its success story. Elsewhere in these early issues were several series of articles rounding up the very best games in different genres, but in this particular feature they decided to warn readers away from wasting their money on certain titles with ‘The All-Time Top Ten Naff C64 Games’. Oh I do miss the fun of Commodore Format!

I may have sold off my C64 collection but my Commodore Formats remain. I just can’t bring myself to get rid of them (not least because I’m in later editions, but more on that in a future post). They have such great memories attached to them and they’re still a brilliant read. If you’re into your retro gaming I’d highly recommend hunting any of them down on eBay. For now, that’s your look at OiNK in this issue, I’ll be back with the game guide in #3 of CF on Thursday 10th November 2022.

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ZZAP!64 #28: PiG PLAY REViEW

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Recently on the blog we’ve seen the preview of the OiNK computer game in Zzap!64 #26, then the special feature in Crash magazine #42 and its free OiNK comic. We’ve also had the Retro Gamer article which contained an interview with the programmer of the game. It was an exciting time for pig pals who owned one of the 8-bit computers back in 1987, that’s for sure. But what of the finished product? Was the game worth the hype?

On sale this day 35 years ago Zzap!64 #28 contained the answer. Just a quick note about this issue first of all and a brilliant little detail on the cover. Staff writer Julian Rignall recently shared on Twitter that a previous competition winner’s prize was to appear on a cover of the magazine, immortalised by artist Oliver Frey. That’s reader Karen Wild just in front of the “4” on the logo! Another detail is the mention of Bond movie The Living Daylights further down the page, although inside it’s just the article already published in Crash last month. Rather cheeky of publisher Newsfield, that!

“This is another poor licensing effort, however when viewed in its own right, OiNK has a lot to boast about.”

Steve Jarratt

Anyway, moving on and the OiNK review itself takes up just over a full page and in keeping with their normal format there’s a descriptive guide to the game breaking down the individual elements, with the opinions of whether those elements were any good or not kept separate, divided up between the three members of the team who played it. There’s also one screenshot of each of the mini-games (but unfortunately none of the Uncle Pigg screens) and a summary box which breaks everything down into individual percentages.

The review does a good job of explaining each of the mini-games and as you can see they really don’t have anything to do with the comic at all, save for maybe Rubbish Man’s sprite. I can’t help question why the Pete’s Pimple game didn’t have a pimple-coloured ball and why was it battling against aliens? Why not pimple cream or bullies like in the accompanying strip in the free comic? Why does Rubbish Man fire lasers and not cold custard or rotten mash potato? Why in later levels is he being attacked by rubbish? The Tom Thug game makes no sense whatsoever! Two of the reviewers at least share these thoughts, but as a game in its own right their opinion is somewhat more positive. Here’s the review.

Identified by initials on their illustrations, reviewers Ciarán Brennan and Steve Jarratt (who would go on to launch rival mag Commodore Format, my C64 read at the time which you’ll see some OiNK content from later in the year) both reported that the game plays very well and is excellent value for money for the price, it’s just not really an OiNK game. I think it’s clear third reviewer Paul Sumner hadn’t read OiNK though, and is coming from the perspective of a general game about creating a magazine or comic.

Although an attempt is made to include some of its humour in the panels of the electronic comic the player completes by playing the games, it’s clear from the comments here it didn’t really worked. The initial idea was to include panels from the actual comic and some were written by OiNK’s three editors Tony Husband, Mark Rodgers and to a lesser extent Patrick Gallagher. However, these were cut back to text only and then trimmed down even further by programmer Jon Williams so the jokes were lost in translation.

We could’ve had a barmy platform game, fighting off Mary Lighthouse and her protesters on our way to the newsagent

For me, the big takeaway here is that the game’s bad reputation isn’t justified. Among pig pal circles it’s usually ridiculed as being an appalling game, unplayable and basically a complete disaster. Yes, for pig pals it was a disappointment; we could’ve had a barmy platform game, taking control of various characters each with a unique ability linked to the comic as they ran around OiNKtown fighting off Mary Lighthouse and her protesters on our way to the newsagent, just off the top of my head. Instead, as confirmed in the interview in Retro Gamer, the programmer wanted to make specific mini-games and saw this as an opportunity to do so, rather than developing a game from the licence. Unfortunately, with only a handful of exceptions, this was par for the course with licences back then.

But the game itself, taken on its own merits, is very good. Check out another set of review scores, this time from C&VG (Computer & Video Games) magazine, printed in OiNK #34.

I completely concur with the reviews here. I played it a couple of decades after its release (I didn’t have my own Commodore 64 until Christmas 1991) when I began collecting the C64 as a retro system around 2010. I found the game on an old Commodore Format covertape. It was great to see the OiNK logo and Uncle Pigg on the screen when it loaded. Yes, I had that initial disappointment as someone looking for an actual OiNK game, but when I got into it I had much fun. It was very addictive, each mini-game was very playable and Rubbish Man’s in particular had that just-one-more-go appeal.

It may not be an actual OiNK game per se, but that’s the only reason I played it in the first place and I discovered a wee gem as a result.

I never finished it to see if there was a proper ending involving the characters (I doubt it) but I’d definitely like to set the record straight. It was a great little game and good value for money, three good games for the price of one in fact. Unfortunately OiNK fans didn’t buy it because of its lack of OiNK content, and those who didn’t read OiNK didn’t buy it for obvious reasons. But if you have a C64 (or a ZX Spectrum or Amstrad CPC) and enjoy a spot of retro gaming, you could do a lot worse than tracking down this oddity of OiNK merchandise, it’s quite common to see it for a few quid on eBay. Trust me, gameplay-wise you won’t regret it, and isn’t that the point of a game?

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This is a somewhat unique addition to OiNK’s run and one I missed out on at the time, despite it being briefly advertised in #32. I can only blame my young self’s lack of attention span for that one. Given away free with #48 of ZX Spectrum computing magazine Crash, this 16-page freebie (the pages are smaller than usual, made to slide inside the A4 Crash) contained all new material from a variety of OiNK contributors. As a tie-in with the new computer game it was an original idea and a smart move, potentially a great way of bringing new readers over to the comic.

I’ve already covered the magazine’s OiNK article which contained an interview with co-editor Tony Husband and a special Frank Sidebottom page, so let’s take a look inside the comic that came with it. We’ve a superb Ian Jackson cover to begin, with Uncle Pigg playing the game on a Spectrum computer which leads to a strip inside featuring him and Mary Lighthouse (critic) in a take on Max Headroom. But it’s across the page from this that things take a turn for the weird.

Lew and Mark decided the strips would work best if they reflected the gameplay

Lew Stringer’s Pete and his Pimple and Tom Thug strips feel a little off and originally I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Pete’s strip has a different name and basically his pimple goes on a bouncing spree (complete with dog-like yelping noises), flattening some bullies in the process. It’s a bit tame compared to normal, and in Tom’s strip he’s driving about in a ‘Thugmobile’ shooting bovver boots out of a cannon at invading zombies! It’s a dream of course. He awakes to say he’s doesn’t know why he’d dream that but his bedroom is full of zombie posters and toys, something never mentioned before in OiNK. How bizarre.

Don’t get me wrong, both are enjoyable strips, however there’s a reason they feel very different than normal. Lew and co-editor Mark Rodgers decided they’d work best if they reflected the gameplay in the OiNK game. But since that didn’t really reflect the comic (and instead was made up of mini-games with the characters shoehorned in) their strips in turn don’t really reflect their usual hilarious outings. Pete’s game was a Breakout clone, bouncing a ball (his pimple) to break bricks, for example. I’m also not quite sure why Pete’s pus is suddenly green, although Patrick Gallagher did confirm they did the colour separations and not Crash.

There are some funny moments here, like the sound effects used in Pete’s strip being classic comic titles such as ‘Pow!’ and ‘Wham!’ and of course the word ‘Crash’ is used as much as possible! David Haldane’s Rubbish Man is the third and final strip of a character featured in the game and unfortunately it’s pretty poor, with Boy Blunder playing the game while our hero dispatches some random vegetable villains in the background. None of his smelly powers (or even his smell) feature at all, so as a pig pal it just feels rather bland.

“He defeated the dreaded Three-headed Politician of Gassbagg!!”

Mutant Space Barbarian Magic Warriors of Doom

Much better is the double-page spread in the middle of the comic drawn by J.T. Dogg. Written by Mark Rodgers the title Mutant Space Barbarian Magic Warriors of Doom sums up some of the ludicrous names we were subjected to for some of the less-than-great gaming titles back in the 80s. It centres on an arcade machine with somewhat magical powers. Perhaps inspired by Tron, it’s a much more colourful affair with Dogg’s excellent artwork.

With its fast-paced humour, daft ending and some 80s satire it’s the best introduction to OiNK possible for Crash readers. That ending in particular had me laughing. With all of that build up, the heroic deeds and all of Mike’s victories, for it all to be torn down in a couple of sentences and the whole world to fall into despair as a punchline is great stuff. Classic Mark, really. Billed as “An Interactive Comic Strip” for the computer mag, in reality it boils down to a competition for the readers to send in suggestions of what poor Mike saw that turned him into a pile of Angel Delight.

The address for this competition is OiNK’s, meaning the winning entrants would be published in the comic instead of the magazine. We’re almost at a simply superb contribution from Frank, but first here’s a quick look at some of the other highlights. Mary Lighthouse (critic) isn’t too happy with Uncle Pigg’s simulation of her in that Max Headroom-inspired strip, you can see part of Tom Thug’s strange dream based on the game, Harry the Head scares a show off on the school computers and this issue was the perfect place for a reader’s Groovy Graphics.

Mary Lighthouse written by Mark Rodgers, drawn by Ian Jackson
Tom Thug by Lew Stringer
Harry the Head by Marc Riley

Up next Frank Sidebottom has a text-heavy (which suits the magazine) double-page spread and it contains an extraordinary amount of work on the part of his alter ego, Chris Sievey. From the introduction that pokes some fun at the Sinclair ZX81 (accurate though, so he’s done his research) to his piece about the “fiddly bits inside computers” and his funny facts about the machines (and neighbours) that includes praise for Clive Sinclair’s infamous C5 personal cycle, it’s a delight to read.

It also contains some actual working type-in programs for ZX Spectrum users. These little gems are not only working programs, they’re funny in their own right. Complete with cut-out cassette covers which hilariously had nothing to do with what was on the screen (but none for Little Frank‘s game, naturally), one ‘game’ would basically select a random point on the screen and you had to use your cursor to find it in a trial-and-error fashion. The other was a linear romantic story where all you’d do is hit a key to read the next line and it’d give you a couple of choices to get slightly different compliments about what a nice young woman you are.

Oh and Little Frank’s program prints “l.f. is better than f.s.” at random points on the screen. Silly and pointless, but that in itself was the whole point.

To round things off for potential new OiNK readers what else could be on the back page but a GBH madvertisement? The 80s was a very exciting time for what would become a multi-billion pound industry worth more than the movie and television markets! Everything was brand new and younger people in particular jumped at the chance to become part of it, creating their own games from home, just like a lot of the mainstream games were back then. GBH clearly saw an opening in the market for ripping people off.

The pictures for this were taken by OiNK’s resident photographer John Barry and that lady at the computer (that contraption is so funny in itself!) is John’s wife at the time, Ike Walton. Thanks to co-editor Patrick Gallagher for the info. Unfortunately the names of the children and that wonderful old man have been lost to the mists of time.

If you’re interested in tracking down this unique little issue of OiNK it also includes Billy Bang, Horace (Ugly Face) Watkins, Mr Big Nose, Burp and Hugo the Hungry Hippo. While I do believe some strips would’ve been a much better introduction for their characters and the comic if they hadn’t tried to tie themselves into the game, I completely understand why they chose to do so. It’s still a funny wee comic and a unique edition that no OiNK collection is complete without.

Quite a few posts make up the blog’s coverage of the OiNK game, beginning with the preview in Zzap!64, an in-depth look at the Crash magazine this comic was bundled with and a Retro Gamer article from 2021 containing an interview with the game’s creator. Still to come on is the Zzap!64 review of the game itself and later in the year a couple of issues of Commodore Format in which they gave the game away free but under a different name, then detailed how to beat it.

But probably most excitedly for established pig pals who picked this issue up were the first images of two things coming later in 1987, in a promo by Patrick. Stick with the blog, folks.

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COMiNG UP: FREE CRASH EDiTiON

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Coming up in a couple of days is a very unique little edition of our favourite comic, the free OiNK Crazy Computer Comic! Only available free in an issue of ZX Spectrum computing magazine Crash, it was a 16-page sampler with all brand new strips and features, released to tie in with the new computer game (which was a tie-in with the comic). I’ve already covered the excellent OiNK feature inside the magazine so up next is the main event. Below is a scan of the only time it was promoted in OiNK.

As a kid this passed me by so it’s a shame it wasn’t given a proper advert at the time, more of us may have picked it up. But I’ve now corrected this oversight and some highlights I’ll be showing are a rather different Pete and his Pimple, another gorgeous J.T. Dogg strip, a GBH Hardware catalogue and a simply jam-packed spread by Frank Sidebottom! You can see these and more in the full review.

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CRASH #42: A SPECTRUM OF PiGGY PiNK

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In 1987 “The Mag That Saves Your Bacon”, Sinclair ZX Spectrum computing magazine Crash (which ran for 98 issues between 1984 and 1992) approached IPC Magazines about interviewing the OiNK editors regarding the comic for a special preview of the forthcoming computer game. During these conversations the idea of producing a special edition of the comic to give away inside Crash came up. Co-creator/co-editor Patrick Gallagher told me the magazine’s publishers Newsfield were receptive to the idea, very open-minded about what it could contain and paid the OiNK team to produce it. That issue of Crash went on sale today 35 years ago.

So, with a special feature and an extra edition of my favourite comic of all time I just had to track this down on eBay. This is the only issue of Crash I’ve ever read. I found myself reading more than just the OiNK related pages too and have included some highlights I found particularly interesting below. First up though is the interview and a special page from Frank Sidebottom. The comic itself I’ll keep for a review post of its own, which you’ll be able to read in a few days. So what exactly would an issue of Crash involve? Here’s the contents page, with a little guest appearance from a certain explosive personality.

What it means by “it’s not really page 59″ is the fact the free comic was in the centre of the issue so if you opened at page 59 it would plop out. The title of the interview is another reference to George Orwell‘s Animal Farm, which OiNK parodied in #30, on sale at the same time coincidentally enough. In the editorial Roger Kean kicks things off by pointing out the free comic and the article, noting this is the first time they’ve ever teamed up with another publication.

Graeme Kidd‘s article is longer and more in-depth than the one featured in Zzap!64 the month before. While the Zzap preview had told the origin story of OiNK, Crash spoke with Tony Husband directly and there’s some wonderful pieces of information for pig pals. Zzap mentioned the initial idea had been for a fanzine, here Tony is able to elaborate on the reasons behind that. The initial chance meeting in a local library between Patrick and Mark Rodgers (both working on Whizzer and Chips without knowing each other) is also mentioned, a tale I’ve heard before briefly but again there’s more detail here.

“It’s a success story the comic’s creators hardly dreamed of.”

Graeme Kidd, Four Legs Good

There are some little factoids for fans such as OiNK’s sales, the dummy issue being met with a divided opinion at IPC Magazines but ultimately championed by the people who would make the call (Youth Group Managing Director John Sanders and ‘John Painter’ is an error, that should be Bob Paynter Group Editor of Humour Comics), the original strategy in its creation and how the idea of putting together a small, weekly comic was changed to a larger, fortnightly one. Of course, that weekly format is the one OiNK would eventually turn into (much to the annoyance of some).

There’s a funny moment when we find out a certain comics publisher wasn’t too happy with OiNK spoofs of their characters (one example mentioned can be seen in #18‘s review) and a horrific episode for a young reader whose mum showed just how hypocritical those who think they’re morally superior to others can really be (like certain scaremongering tabloids). At the end there’s a very quick preview of the game which, after painting a fascinating picture of the comic, shows us probably the most uninspired screenshot possible.

To see the original Janice & John strip Tony mentions check out #7‘s review and for OiNK’s response to the complaint make sure to read #28‘s!

Over the page from this piggy pink spread we get a little something extra from Frank Sidebottom in the shape of a guide to computers, which is really a competition page with rather wonderful prizes. If I’d known Crash had a free issue of OiNK and the chance to win original artwork, t-shirts, mugs etc. I’d have been all over this as a child, even if I wouldn’t own my own computer for another four years.

I must add a little caveat here. This doesn’t look like Frank’s usual handwriting and it’s been signed “Topbottom”. I initially thought he’d been in a rush to complete it for Crash’s deadline and that was the reason for the change in style slightly, but some fans believed it wasn’t his work when I initially shared this post on social media. I checked with Patrick who can’t remember if that was the case, but he’s certain Chris (Sievey, the man behind the mask) wouldn’t have knowingly let anyone else do it, especially if it meant copying his OiNK work. So I’m going to say it was him.

Just wait and see Frank’s contribution to the OiNK pullout comic, it’s proof indeed of just how much he’d put into his work for kids.

So that’s OiNK’s contribution to the magazine itself and strangely enough I can’t find evidence of the all-important game review in any following issue. Does this not bode well for the quality of the finished product? No, even if the game had been absolute trash the magazines of the time would’ve reviewed it and given it an appropriate score. But from my extensive research into the rest of that year’s issues (and those from 1988 as well) it just wasn’t reviewed by Crash. However, Zzap!64 did so watch out for that soon.

The debut of the brand new 007,
Timothy Dalton!

Back to Crash and as I said the free comic will be getting its own review post (as well it should) but I wanted to highlight two particular features in the magazine that stood out for me personally in this delightfully retro read. I’m a big fan of both James Bond and Nintendo, so first up was news of not only the next Bond computer game but also the brand new movie it was based on, The Living Daylights and the debut of a brand new 007 which is always an exciting occasion.

That actor of course was Timothy Dalton, who is still my favourite in the role to this day. His second movie, Licence To Kill is not only the best Bond film in my opinion it’s also my second favourite movie of all time (behind only Jaws, in case you were wondering). Unfortunately, with MGM going bankrupt a year or so later the movies paused until the mid-90s and by that stage Dalton wanted to move on. But The Living Daylights is a superb film and here Curtis Hutchinson took a look at its stunt work. Special mention must also go to that gorgeous Oliver Frey cover above! That would’ve made for an excellent poster but alas it was only ever to be found in A4 size and covered with text.

There’s also an advertisement for the game, which like a lot of our gaming adverts back then didn’t include a single screenshot. The Spy Vs Spy game was also a favourite later on when I got my Commodore 64, based upon characters from Mad Magazine, itself one of the influences behind OiNK’s sense of humour and satirical edge.

I do love a good contemporary retro article about new releases in the things I’m interested in. It’s always fascinating to look back at how they were written about at the time. The next thing I want to show you is another such example. As a kid I remember friends getting so incredibly hyped over new Nintendo consoles but I only became a fan later down the road with the Game Boy and GameCube machines. These days I’m fanatical about my Nintendo Switch and so this was a very enjoyable read about “Mattel’s Nintendo”. Mattel helped Nintendo with distribution in the UK but it was wrongly labelled as their machine and simply called “a Nintendo” by many at the time.

What’s lovely and quaint here is how the ZX Spectrum range of computers are compared very favourably to the flashy new Japanese console by Crash’s whole team. Of course this is a Spectrum magazine and so it was always going to be that way. I remember later issues of Commodore Format in the mid-90s comparing the ageing machine (which I still adored and used even then) favourably against the latest gaming tech. Bless. This article in particular is like a snapshot of the industry at the time. Oh, and for those Nintendo fans reading, the news pages carried information on a price cut to the system already but it must’ve been too late to edit the article. The two bundles had been chopped down to £99.99 and £155.00, which was fierce competition for the home computers of the day!

This has been a surprisingly magical trip down memory lane, one I’ve enjoyed immensely. Don’t forget about that Zzap!64 preview of the game and a Retro Gamer article from 2021 has also featured on the blog, containing an interview with the man behind the game. But we’ve not quite finished with this edition of Crash, as the free comic is still here waiting to be seen by blog readers. I’d assume for many it’ll probably be the first time you’ll have seen it too. It’s blog review will be here in a few days. After that the Zzap!64 review of the OiNK computer game itself will reveal how good/bad it turned out, which you’ll be able to read from Saturday 9th July. Later in the year I’ll have some articles from my own teenage favourite, Commodore Format to share later with you too. Plenty to het stuck into then. Bye for now.

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