This post is being written for OiNK’s Pre-Release section of the blog, and this is about as pre-release as you can get! We’re going right back to 1978, in fact. Back to OiNK co-creator and co-editor Mark Rodgers and writer Graham Exton’s university years and a special project they created, certain parts of which may be of particular interest to you pig pals out there.
“The Literature Degree that Mark and I were studying for at Leeds Uni had a publishing module, so we figured it would be fun to do a comic,” Graham tells me. That comic was Germs, the title an anagram of their initials (Graham’s middle name is Stafford). Looking back, it’s a fun little insight into the developing talents of both before they got their breaks in the comics industry, and you can read the whole thing in this post thanks to Graham.
Graham is very honest about what he thinks of the end result. “We did everything wrong, like drawing a whole page on A4 paper (not Bristol Board), not using scripts, lousy lettering, and cramming in so many pages we couldn’t break even when we sold it on campus,” he says. “Mark’s mum came to our rescue by charging 50p a copy to each customer at the British Legion she ran, then taking them back when they were ‘finished with’. She was brill, Our Shirl.”
Shirl wasn’t the only parent to help out. “My mum did the typing for the contents page on her fancy word processing computer,” recalls Graham. “Probably Ventura or some such. She had to figure it out herself as no one knew what a word processor was. It was the most professional part of the comic! So, like Ian Dury’s Clever Bastards we had help from our mums. We learned a lot about publishing, which was great for Mark in particular.”
Eight years before OiNK hit shelves (six years before the team completed their dummy issue for the publishers as a proof of concept), there are hints within Germs of what was to come when they’d once again have the same level of creative freedom. While reading it you can tell that unique OiNK humour is in there, albeit in an early guise. There are plenty of spoofs, very random moments, strips referring to themselves as comic strips, even the way some of the titles are drawn feels familiar.
Mark and Graham were learning their craft, a craft they would both excel at, culminating in the comic we all love so much to this day
However, that’s not all. There are a few actual precursors to specific OiNK strips in here. The Mad Monk from #28 actually appears here in pretty much the same form, albeit drawn by Graham instead of Davey Jones. There’s also The Jolly Wedding, another one by Graham that would transform into a smaller three-panel strip drawn by the legendary Tom Paterson in The OiNK! Book 1988.
There are more too. “I liked Mark’s Police Vet strip [which would be developed further for the first book and #64], which involved getting a stuck Rhino out of a tree by chucking a brick at it,”says Graham. “Mark liked my Mad Monk strip, and had Davey Jones illustrate it for OiNK. Mark may have plundered a few others. There was one about a beach encounter where someone got hugged to death [turned into a page drawn by Lew Stringer in OiNK]. You can tell Mark and I grew up in the 60’s, when Bax and Ken Reid were at their wackiest and most violent.”
Yes, it’s rough around the edges but Germs should be seen in the context of when it was created, as Mark and Graham were learning their craft, a craft they would both excel at, culminating in the comic we all love so much to this day. There are some little treasures here though. Personally, I giggled at the array of different copyright notices, the depiction of an “Asst. Director”, all of the brill Bermuda ‘Narna (“Yoo hoo”) and the rendition of the 1812 Overture!
Dig in and pig out, pig pals.
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