This third selection from OiNK cartoonist Davy Francis’ shoebox of goodies didn’t inspire confidence when I began flicking through them. Masses of football, porno adverts and supposedly comedic breasts and phalluses met the eye in the pages of Sweet FA, while The Sunday Sport’s name on the front of UT produced a similar level of dread. But I took a deep breath, delved deep and found some little gems from some of our favourite OiNK cartoonists.
First up is UT, created by none other than Kev F Sutherland. Beginning as a parody strip in another publication, UT became its own title in September 1991. While it rode the wave of Viz copies, Kev’s intention was to attract some top established comics talent and produce strips that were less about shock value and more about actual comedy. However, financial backing was required and Sunday Sport’s publishers ended up footing the bill, creating the harsh contrast of quality strips printed opposite pornographic adverts for videos and sex chat lines.
“That was my dilemma”, Kev told me recently. “They wanted a magazine to carry that sort of ad, and I wanted to make Mad Magazine but funny.” It appears, however, that this dichotomy was harmonious enough behind-the-scenes at least. “To an extent,” says Kev. “In fact, thinking about it, I can’t remember any interference.”
One strip I really like in UT feels a bit autobiographical, with the magazine’s editor (Kev in real life) battling a stereotypical porno publisher pushing for overly disgusting contents, taking the hand out of the very company financing it. You can see it above in the opening spread to the dummy copy of #1, which somehow ended up in Davy’s possession and is full of blank pages between samples of strips.
”UT was organised between me, Sunday Sport and the printers in Bristol”, explains Kev. ”I went in there in person a lot, and the dummy copies were part of the development process. Once they turned the machine on and started the presses rolling there was no point in just doing one copy, so quite a few were made. I suppose they were used to show to advertisers and newsagents. I may only have one left here myself but I once had more.”
There’s definitely some humour in UT that we rightly wouldn’t want to see today that seems to be squarely aimed at the Sunday Sport readership. (Teenage Lesbian Nymphomaniac Mutant Bimbo Surfers is just one example of many strips that paint lesbians as sex mad, probably because Sport readers wanted to believe they were.) It’s very much a product of the 90s adult comics market despite Kev’s grander plans. While for the most part it’s intelligently written and very funny, I feel it’s let down somewhat by that kind of strip named above and the relentlessness of its very adult advertisements.
It’s frustrating because when it stops pandering to that audience it can be genuinely brilliant. For example, Kev’s Blunderbirds is a fantastic Thunderbirds parody with an accident prone rescue team. (I love how that downed jumbo jet is freed!) I was also very happy to see a continuation of Kev’s Meanwhile… from OiNK. Speaking of OiNK, it wouldn’t be Davy’s shoebox without some fun pages from him and fans will enjoy his more OiNK-like silliness rather than the penis-shaped rudeness of Electric Soup.
David Leach’s Conan spoof, Arthur Pilkington, Chartered Barbarian is great fun, even if it does remind me of Jeremy Banx’s Konan the Accountant from OiNK, and Battler Britain is an incredibly funny, fast-paced riff on the “jolly good show” kind of British comic heroes the then-adult audience may have grown up with. It’s drawn by Malcolm Douglas, aka OiNK’s very own J.T. Dogg. Despite not having the production values and paper quality to reproduce it that OiNK had, it’s still lovely to look at and at times feels like a World War II-set Ham Dare!
I admit I also laughed at UT #2’s declaration on the front page that it was “Not as funny as it used to be”. Published over a year-and-a-half, UT consisted of eight regular issues and two reprint specials. I find it hard to recommend to OiNK Blog readers given the Sunday Sport contents prevalent in each issue, but if you can get past that tabloid nonsense there are a lot of laughs to be had here.
Moving on to Sweet FA, a bi-monthly football comic-magazine that boasts of ”Bringing the game into disrepute” on its covers. Davy’s shoebox contains a handful from volume one and the first five issues of volume two, but I can find little-to-no information on it anywhere so I’m pretty much going by what I have in front of me. Named in its list of main contributors is Lew Stringer despite football not really being his thing (his words to me). Unfortunately, he can’t remember who wrote the scripts he drew, which included one of the few highlights in here, called Tightarse.
Also contributing (although not anywhere near as much as Lew) are Davy Francis, J.T. Dogg and Jim Eldridge, who drew some of the Knight Rider Annuals in the 80s and who I’ve interviewed for a special post about the books this Christmas (2026). Much like UT this was intended for a particular audience. Pretty much the same audience, actually.
While volume two’s back issues page warns that “Volume 1 issues are not suitable for children”, it’s not like the later ones are! However, the earlier editions contain much more Sunday Sport-type content with photographs of naked (and nearly naked) women and they have a sleazy tabloid Page 3 feeling about them. There was even a free gift (thankfully lost) of postcards featuring bikini-clad women that required the reader to lick them to remove their clothes!
Add in the fact the title is all about football and this really isn’t my cup of tea at all. So apologies if footie fans want to see more highlights than the three I’ve plucked out, but with every single strip focussing on the game all of the joke references are pretty much lost on me. I’m not the ideal person to choose the best examples of Sweet FA’s contents. This series of posts isn’t about that though, it’s about showing some new content from OiNK’s cartoonists and I can do that okay.
Flicking passed atrocities such as Sporting Lesbians, Football Bimbo and a ‘joke’ headline that asks, “Should birds be allowed to play football?”, while reminding myself of how far we’ve come since then I discovered Jimmy Armchair by Davy. At the time not everyone had access to satellite or cable television, with many stuck with the five terrestrial channels. Jimmy was one of those people who’d take advantage not only of owning such a device, but also of his friends’ eagerness to watch the game.
J.T. Dogg draws Sweet FA’s take on Ripley’s Believe It or Not, now named after a contemporary footballer and very much skewed towards the “Not” in the title. These feel like a spoof version of fellow OiNK cartoonist Steve McGarry’s football fact-files, and even I was able to crack a smile and have a giggle with this one despite not knowing who these people were. Plus it’s always nice to see some artwork from Malcolm, his detailed style coming across nicely even in black and white here.
There’s just the one part left in this series and I’m hopeful it’ll be a Gas! Quite literally. While I haven’t peered inside its pages yet, I’ve heard good things about Gas comic and the amount of content in it from OiNK contributors, so here’s hoping for more humour along the lines of our favourite comic next time. We’ll wrap up Davy’s shoebox in shiny gift wrap in a couple of months during Christmas 2026.
