Tag Archives: Frank Sidebottom

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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Obituaries

REMEMBERiNG FRANK SiDEBOTTOM

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On 21st June 2010 the sad news broke of the passing of musician, comedian, artist and comic cartoonist Chris Sievey, better known to the wider world as the papier-mâché headed Frank Sidebottom. Upon reading the news I hunted out my few remaining issues of OiNK to read his contributions. I enjoyed them so much I began collecting all the other issues of the comic, and the rest is history. All thanks to Chris. All thanks to Frank.

Chris was born on 25th August 1955 and over the course of the 70s and 80s was the frontman of his band The Freshies (he’s second from the right above). However, during the 80s he developed the character of Frank, an aspiring pop star with his famous nasally voice who portrayed himself as living the celebrity lifestyle when in reality he was living at home with his mum in Timperley. A regular star of kid’s TV in the 80s, I was very aware of him when he popped up in my third issue of OiNK, #16.

“Chris was laborious with his artwork,” OiNK co-editor Patrick Gallagher told the Dazed website. “He could have made it easy for himself by colouring in flat colours, but instead he used this stipple effect done with a felt tip pen. He would take three hours to paint a page which would usually take 15 minutes, but he liked detail and he would always go the extra mile.” That extra mile was always appreciated by this pig pal.

“Having Chris on board was great because it meant that as well as his unique artwork, we also had a real life character [Frank] to front the comic. We had someone out there publicising OiNK who was gaining more recognition,” says Patrick. Indeed, at the time it felt like readers were part of a secret club that those who only saw him on TV weren’t aware of. A secret club that gave us insights into his home life, celebrity friends and musical career. Even his school days.

His contributions to OiNK would vary wildly and included comic strips, celebrity gossip columns, hand-written computer programs, elaborate D.I.Y. board games and even a cut-out zoetrope. With the huge variety of pages he could create, and all so intricately put together, it was clear he put in a lot of time and effort for us young readers and that he enjoyed working on OiNK.

Frank’s stand-up comedy was family friendly, even if it was very random and ‘out there’, and he’d go on to be a semi-regular on Saturday morning TV shows No.73, Motormouth and What’s Up Doc?, as well as creating his own Frank Sidebottom’s Fantastic Shed Show. After retiring the character of Frank, Chris would continue producing work for children on shows such as Bob the Builder and Pingu.

He was good friends with Patrick and they even moved in together when their marriages broke up. Fellow OiNK cartoonist and musician, Marc Riley would often work closely with Chris on OiNK, producing many photo stories starring Frank and Snatcher Sam together, as well as recording the OiNK 45 record. He also starred on four OiNK covers. Two were drawn by Chris and Frank popped up in photo form on the other two occasions, once with Mark and another with Her Majesty. Sort of.

“We needed a shot for our honours and awards issue, so we thought Frank being knighted outside Buckingham Palace would be perfect for this,” continues Patrick. “I had this Queen mask with me and I’m looking for someone to put it on so Frank could get down on his knee for the photo. Only one kid would do it so we had him with the Queen’s face on and Frank being knighted. He [Chris] paid twenty quid for it but obviously it was worth nothing. Frank got ripped off. Sometimes adventures with Chris became nightmares.”

The cover with Marc led to a strip inside too, which perfectly showcases their humour when they got together.

Patrick would also play bass in Frank’s Oh Blimey Big Band (far right in the photo below) alongside Jon Robson on keyboards who would go on to write the Frank movie starring Michael Fassbender inside the head, playing a new character based on our Frank. According to accounts Chris was very pleased with the script. Then in 2019 the Kickstarter-funded Being Frank documentary film covered Frank’s entire life and also included Patrick talking about Chris’s OiNK work.

Chris sadly died of cancer in 2010 at the age of 54. When it was revealed he died with very little money to his name fans gathered together to raise funds to give him a proper funeral, raising over £6,500 in a few hours and a total of over £21,500 in the end. In his home town of Timperley a Frank statue was also erected in his honour and he’s still there, standing with his thumb up in the middle of the high street.

As a kid, Chris’ work on OiNK as Frank Sidebottom was a highlight of the entire run for me. There was just nothing like those pages in any other comic. There’s still no one else like him in the world of entertainment.

OiNK OBiTUARiES

Annuals, Christmas, No.73

NO.73: COME ON iN

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This hardback book cover brings back memories of many a childhood Saturday morning in front of the telly, hence why this post is being published on a Saturday morning. No.73 was a fictional house in an unknown street where Sandi Toksvig played the tenant Mrs Ethel, surrounded by a cast of young up-and-coming talent, including Neil Buchanan who would go on to present the insanely good Art Attack in later years. A certain papier-mâché-headed OiNK superstar also popped up now-and-again and thus you have the reason for this book’s inclusion, despite the fact it contains no comic strips.

Sadly the book also doesn’t contain any Sandi. I loved her on the show, although I always knew her by her real name (she was one of the main writers too) and I don’t remember the fact she played a character. Her ad-libbing (often as herself and not in character) and dead pan humour was brilliant and to this day I’ll pretty much watch anything with her in it (QI has never been better). Being a fan of Sandi’s all started with No.73, however this book was produced in 1987 and she had departed the series in 1986 after four years as the lead.

Now, those who have been paying attention will know this isn’t the first time No.73 has been mentioned on the blog.

This montage was taken from Frank Sidebottom’s time filming during the show’s final year, when it was renamed ‘7T3’ and had an American Wild West theme (which I remember being terrible), although Frank is seen here taking part in a very British James Bond spoof. As I mentioned in #52’s review I loved seeing Frank pop up on No.73 and in my head he appeared at the breakfast table or in the shed many times. Imagine my surprise when I found out he only appeared in nine episodes!

Anyway, I said there’d be a special post to come later in the year and here we are at last. Just before Frank’s double-page spread the book shows readers how to make their own space observatory but, like a lot of such things on the show, it was more of a spoof of what you’d see on traditional children’s shows. As such, take a saucepan, shove a football in it and sellotape a pair of binoculars on top and you’ve got a rotating observatory! Neil is star gazing in the garden of the house when he hears a certain nasally voice.

The book has 64-pages and every single one is illustrated by Don Seed, except for the next two that is. Unfortunately Frank’s pages, which are very similar to those he was producing for OiNK at the time, are reduced to fit in pictures of Neil (who played an exaggerated version of himself on the show) and Dawn Lodge as played by Andrea Arnold (now OBE).

“I was born ‘Francis Sidebottom’ on the 1st of the 4th at 11:37am. I know this because I was wearing my watch at the time and it has a little button to show the date and the month.”

Frank Sidebottom (Chris Sievey)

Andrea is now a filmmaker, has won an Academy Award, and more than one Jury Prize at Cannes as well. Amongst all of her other work she also directed all of the second season of Big Little Lies. As for Neil, alongside Art Attack I remember enjoying Finders Keepers and Motormouth as a kid, and his art was so good he even had to deny he was Banksy in 2020. Anyway, back to the star here.

This acts as an introduction to Frank for those who had seen him on the show and wanted to know more about him. It includes staples of his OiNK contributions such as Timperley (and its Post Office), Little Frank and his celebrity lifestyle. For the latter we get a superb reason why none of his celebrity friends ever seemed to visit him.

I love the volume he dares turn his music up to in his mum’s house when she’s not there and let’s not overlook that fantastic shed of his. This often featured in OiNK, he had his own TV show based around it and here we get a little list (he did like lists in OiNK) of the things he does in there. This leads on to the next spread in the book from Dawn, who has one or two ideas of her own.

Well, I say one or two…

I think this is a great follow up and it even mentions Little Frank in there too.

It was great to see two new Frank pages after getting to the end of OiNK’s regular run in October because, yes, I’m missing him already. The man behind the mask, Chris Sievey, gets a mention in the credits at the start of the book, although the four main cast members only get thanked so I’m assuming they didn’t write any of this themselves. Seeing as how they played fictional characters (or fictional versions of themselves) I guess there was no need to get them involved.

“You’re a mucky lot mankind, it’s time you grew up and started cleaning up after yourselves. Mother Nature’s got her work cut out coping with you as it is.”

There’s a large list of contributors with no indication of what each brought to the book, however it’s edited by Richard Morss who was a writer on the final two series (seven and eight) of No.73, the seventh being the one on TV when this book was released and the final to actually feature the house itself. The long list of contributors includes regular guests from the series such as animal experts and magicians etc. It was a varied show!

Unlike other Saturday morning programmes No.73 told ongoing storylines and character arcs over the course of each series which formed the backbone of everything else, even celebrity guest appearances were worked into these scripts rather than having straight interviews. There was even a fictional film company called Front Door Productions within the setting which was responsible for the sketches and video shoots spoofing whatever was popular at the time.

Long-time character Dawn helped out at the local vet’s and was a vegetarian, which was something not represented very well in the 80s, especially on children’s television. Her healthy lifestyle would be very on-trend today so you could say it was way ahead of its time. In fact, having someone follow an exercise routine and be a vegetarian was deemed so noteworthy we were treated to a day-in-the-life diary!

Kim Goody was, like Neil, playing an exaggerated version of herself on the show. Kim is a singer and songwriter, although the song she’d recorded at the time and talks about here (the show being a hopeful springboard to success) was a Tina Turner song and one I personally recognise as an Aswad and Ace of Base tune. It was not successful (as she candidly tells us here) despite her popularity with the viewers.

Nowadays, Kim has a composition and publishing company and owns Soho Square Studios, a post-production company. She’s married to former The Hollies band member Alan Coates and together they wrote the music for many BBC productions including those pounding BBC News scores. The final member of the team was Nick Staverson who played the character of Harry Stern, who I have absolutely no recollection of.

Harry appears the most throughout this book and seems to be a bit of a clichéd harmless idiot character. The actor portraying him doesn’t appear to have had as much success as the rest of the team, with his only real credits to date being No.73 itself, something called Fish Tank and a charity Telethon. He appears on this next spread with Neil and Dawn in one of the many pieces with an environmental or animal theme.

Alongside the spoofs of The A-Team and James Bond, the magicians, Frank Sidebottom, pop music, games and general chaos No.73 also drove home some important messages to its captive audience, messages which are sadly still needed just as much (if not more so) today. Watching No.73 was like watching several children’s shows at once and in particular during its Sandi years it was also incredibly funny and clever.

What’s here is an interesting snapshot of 80s children’s television in general

Obviously it’s been decades since I saw it; Saturday morning children’s magazine shows aren’t exactly repeat fodder. All I have to go on are my rose-tinted memories and this book. Judging by the book the variety had remained but the humour had changed after Sandi left. There’s none of the sarcasm and clever wit here that I remember, although when viewed as a variety programme what’s here is an interesting snapshot of 80s children’s television in general.

There could be moments when a book like this could feel very of its time, if you know what I mean. Thankfully, No.73 was created by a bunch of very nice people who seemed very progressive in how they lived their lives. So, the difference between Chinese astrology and that more often used in the UK being referred to as “theirs” and “ours” may make me cringe a little today but that’s literally the only time anything remotely like that happens in the whole book. It’s also a fun spread to read.

Anyone who knows me will know how much I love cats, so it’s a bit disappointing to find out that not only was I not born in a Year of the Cat, but that the animal would not suit me at all. I was pleased enough with being a snake… until I was called a skinflint! Oh, and if you’re wondering what all of the random words and phrases are along the bottom of every page, there’s a huge quiz at the back with so many answers they’re spread throughout the book, each one listed by their page rather than question number. It’s something a little different and that pretty much sums up No.73.

If you grew up with the programme I’d heartily recommend tracking down this book for a wonderful trip down memory lane. Its humour stands up well today, and while there are no comic strips I think a lot of it reads quite like OiNK, with its randomness, spoofs of more traditional children’s entertainment, digs at 80s culture and of course there’s a bit of Frank. This blog is all about reliving childhood favourites and this is as close as I can get with No.73. Reading this has been a blast.

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CHRiSTMAS 2023

OiNK Comic Reviews

OiNK! #68: HiNDMOST HOG

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The following post was originally written for Sunday 22nd but was held back after the sad news of Tony Husband’s passing

Co-editor Patrick Gallagher has a vague recollection of OiNK #68 being held back a bit to better coincide with the publication of the first merged Buster comic. It was definitely a week late when this issue arrived in my local shop in Northern Ireland. Now on rare occasions a comic could be a day or two later getting over here (or up to the farthest areas of Scotland). According to some in England I’ve spoken to in research for this post they recall receiving their #68s on the Thursday or Friday so this seems to track. When it finally did arrive few of us were prepared for what it contained (unless you had read the previous week’s Buster.)

I certainly wasn’t aware of the merge at the time so, in the early evening of Saturday 22nd October 1988 as the cold, dark night drew in I ran to the newsagent just before dinner for the umpteenth time that week to (hopefully) buy what I thought would be the latest issue. As always, before going to the counter to ask for my reserved copy, I scanned my eyes over the comics shelves. I saw the piggy pink logo… twice. I could see Pete, Tom and Willy peering out at me from behind the new issue of OiNK! What was this?

For a second I thought it was some kind of promotional thing. After all, this and the other comics I’d begun collecting by this stage were all still going strong and those my brother or friends read seemed to last forever, such as Beano, Transformers, Roy of the Rovers etc. I’d never seen a comic cancelled before and after two very happy years I just assumed OiNK would go on and on too. It was my first comic, so I didn’t know this kind of thing happened!

I picked up a copy of OiNK from the shelf, its gorgeous Frank Sidebottom cover (one of my favourites of the whole run) in all its glory and I noticed the banner across the top which soon gave the game away. Surely this couldn’t mean what I was beginning to think it meant? I began flicking through it to see if there was any indication inside and lo-and-behold on page four where the letters page would normally be was a message from Uncle Pigg, drawn by Michael Peek.

My heart sank. Our esteemed editor may have been cheery at the prospect of an early retirement and he tried to keep his loyal readers chirper with the news of the Buster merge, the already-released second annual and the promise of a holiday special the following year (a lifetime away for a ten-year-old), but that wasn’t enough as far as I was concerned. So as I went to ask for my last reserved OiNK I also picked up a Buster, hoping for the best. You can read all about what happened with that in its own post also published on the blog today.

Now, 35 years later as an adult this message is all the more heartbreaking because this is actually the best of the monthly OiNKs by far. There’s not a single reprint in sight, the team using up what they could of the leftover material they’d have kept for the following issues. Plus we had our 12th free gift! Stapled to the middle pages was a tiny 16-page preview of Wildcat, so I really came back from the shop with three different comics. The gift was a welcome surprise actually, as the cancellation had distracted me from the news of it on the cover.

OiNK began with IPC Magazine’s first preview comic, so now 68 issues later it felt like things had come full circle. In fact, I’ve described before how this felt like OiNK passing the baton which, after I read this superb freebie, I was more than willing to let Wildcat take up. This was particularly welcome after Buster disappointed me, so something good had come out of this after all, just not in the way I’d initially hoped. Wildcat was a superb comic and I’ve already covered it on the blog, where you’ll find a full review of this freebie.

On page two was a small note that the regular Wildcat comic would have pages the same size as OiNK’s, even though this was mentioned on the back of the preview. Alongside it our final issue starts off strong with some cracker (no pun intended, really) mini-strips such as Kev F Sutherland’s take on another Rotten Rhyme and the first of this issue’s Wally of the West strips by the always funny Ed McHenry.

Only a few of the contributions mention the fact this is the final issue, while a couple more don’t reference it directly but clearly knew it was the end. For example, Chris Sievey’s Frank Sidebottom doesn’t say anything about it but does sign off with details of where readers could see him on TV, listen to him on the radio or meet him in person before saying thanks and that he’ll see everyone soon. Which he did, as he never seemed to be off children’s television at the time.

Taking over a double-page spread Frank really does squeeze in as much as he possibly can into a strip about his school days. There are no less than 33 individual panels across just two pages! Not only that, look at the amount he draws into each of these tiny little rectangles, such as his mum’s kitchen floor, cooker and sink when all he needed to show us was him running out the door. Also, before you read this if you have a pair of old fashioned 3D glasses please do try them on at a certain point here and let me know how you get on! Haha.

We all knew that despite Frank being a superstar he still lived at home with his mum so I love the ending which, intentionally or not, is a callback to an earlier episode of Frank’s which referred to him going to bed at 9 despite being an adult. Having the final caption as a never-ending cycle back to the beginning feels like the perfect way for him to wrap up the final regular contribution to OiNK he crafted.

From one OiNK star to two at once. Two cartoonists decided to create something similar to each other’s, a visual gag only achievable in this medium and one where OiNK was the perfect place to try it. So Charlie Brooker’s Freddie Flop and Brian Luck return for their final appearances and, suitably for the last issue, the randomly-appearing Mr Plinge returns for one last time and with a twin sister in tow alongside (or rather above) a one-off Mr Girth.

Placed nowhere near each other in the issue, the joyous surprise at seeing the same gag played out after enjoying it so much the first time is a delight. It reminds me of my embarrassing moment in the hospital waiting room when I discovered a second Herbert Bowes strip in the first OiNK Holiday Special! Thankfully this time I was reading alone.

For their final regular attempt to extort as much money as possible from people the gangsters at GBH pulled out all the stops with a middle-page spread of the ultimate luxury in holiday travel, on a cruise. Thomas Crook was a name used already by Simon Thorp in previous Madvertisements but this is surely the funniest of the lot. I love the sheer audacity to list off all of the gags! This kept me giggling for a good while in both 1988 and 2023 and is one of my favourite GBH entries from the entire series. Please take your time and savour every little bit of this one.

My favourite parts of this have to be the lifeboat drill, the scales, the ship’s “washing machines”, where the food is served, the stabilisers(!) and best of all the fact that this isn’t a cutaway, it’s noted that the ship itself actually has a huge hole along its side. Simon’s Madverts were always so packed with little sight gags for us to find and I love how his last one labels them all, making sure no one misses a single one. Still a regular Viz contributor to this day, I’m really going to miss his OiNK pages.

#68 is a fitting, funny and fantastic send off

Fittingly, one of the pages that mentions this is the final issue is co-editor Tony Husband’s Horace (Ugly Face) Watkins in which he laments the end of the comic (as do watching aliens) before he and Mandy decide to cheer up by getting married. Tom Thug’s strip begins with him telling us he’s received some terrible news and we think it’s about OiNK, but actually he’s just been offered a job. A job he ultimately fails at on day one, naturally.

Children’s television presenter and artist Tony Hart and his plasticine pal Morph are the subject of a spoof in the shape of The Amazing Adventures of Murph and in a three-page Pete and his Pimple strip he’s daydreaming about being a superhero called Zit Man. Thankfully his arch nemesis Mister Squeeze trips over his own words, quite literally, in the nick of time and falls into his own death trap. Ingenious stuff.

Horace Watkins by Tony Husband
Tom Thug by Lew Stringer
Adventures of Murph written by Charlie Brooker,
drawn by Ed McHenry
Pete and his Pimple by Lew Stringer

Of course it wasn’t the end for two of these characters, however it’s rather strange there’s no Weedy Willy strip in this final issue when he’d join Pete and Tom in Buster.

Meanwhile, Kev F Sutherland must’ve created a lot of content for forthcoming issues because it appears it’s all been collected together here. Just like Ian Jackson and Jeremy Banx before him, Kev’s work is synonymous with OiNK in my eyes and here he has eight strips in total to his name across a whopping ten pages. His Meanwhile… series was always a highlight so I couldn’t let this issue go without including at least one, and it’s one which got a memorable roar of laughter out of me at ten-years-of-age.

It seems if OiNK were to continue one of Kev’s Three Scientists from #66 was going to be making an Alfred Hitchcock-esque cameo in every issue. Did you spot him above? In this issue Kev brings us not only this and the Rotten Rhyme above but also his take on Jack & Jill and Who Killed Cock Robin?, spoofs of 80s car commercials and weather forecasts, and last but by no means least the brilliantly titled The Plop Factory – The Studios of Britain’s top record producers Sock, Bacon and Waterworks.

The final strip I’m going to show you (although not the final image) from all 68 regular OiNKs should really be a large, multi-page affair, shouldn’t it? Some big, grand gesture to round things off with. Nope. One of the biggest laughs in this issue comes from a tiny little quarter-page strip of Ed McHenry‘s Wally of the West. A simply perfect example of the mini-strips crammed into each issue and how OiNK could generate a ton of laughs from content of all shapes and sizes.

With a lack of Uncle Pigg or the plops and very few pig-themed strips and spoofs, would new readers to OiNK Monthly have been confused as to why the comic had the name it did? However, for seasoned pig pals such as myself these final six issues have each been mammoth specials crammed full of content, with the bonus of some bigger than usual entries for a handful of our favourites. So if you ever hear a pig pal rubbish these monthlies, I say they should really reconsider them, especially #68 which is a fitting, funny and fantastic send off.

There’s a ton of OiNK content to come on the blog over the next few years at least, I promise

But unfortunately a send off it is. Fleetway’s well-intentioned reboot hadn’t had the effect they’d wished for, but by no means were OiNK’s sales plummeting as much as some have commented. As co-editor Patrick Gallagher recently told me sales were down across the board and OiNK’s were by no means the worst. But with Fleetway having now forced two revamps they called time on the comic, although it wouldn’t be the last to fall as they continued to chip away at the titles they’d purchased from IPC.

If OiNK had continued in its best format as a fortnightly under IPC, who were very happy with the sales figures and the press coverage it was creating for them as a publisher, could it have lasted longer? Perhaps. We’ll never know. For now this final issue wraps up with the first of a new series. Judging by the old OiNK logo this was created by Michael Peek when it was still a weekly and, with this being the last page (save for a Fleetway Annuals advert on the back) Patrick added a little sign-off gag with the speech balloon.

This is by no means the end of OiNK on its own blog! There’s a wealth of extra features for our favourite comic already on here and a ton of OiNK content to come over the next few years at least, I promise. Actually, the read through itself isn’t even finished yet with four more editions to come over the next two years and yes, I’m going to make you wait for each of them, just as I have to wait until their real time release dates to read them. The first of these will be The OiNK! Book 1989’s review which will be published on Christmas Day 2023. Perfect anarchic post-dinner laughs, I think.

Now, I wonder what happened to Uncle Pigg on that tropical island…

iSSUE 67 < > BUSTER MERGE

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COMiNG UP: OiNK! #68

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The following post was originally written for Thursday 19th but was held back after the sad news of Tony Husband’s passing

Back in #60 of OiNK the reservation coupon held a hint that changes were afoot, a hint that would only be picked up on with hindsight. Likewise, looking back on last month’s issue the same coupon told a tale by its very absence, replaced as it was by one for 2000AD. At the time we had no idea what was about to happen. Well, unless you also collected Buster and had seen the news up to seven days beforehand. Instead, for us the next issue was all about that Frank Sidebottom cover!

I love Frank’s (Chris Sievey) retort when Little Frank asks him if he was ever small like him and the little bit of extra information about when we could pick up our copy on the day (albeit the issue actually came out between five and seven days later, more on that in the review). Having Frank on the cover meant his strip was to be the main highlight of the next big, fat porker of a monthly OiNK and as a kid I couldn’t wait! You can see what all the hype was about and if it was justified (it was) on Sunday 22nd October 2023.

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