A good few years back a Twitter account grabbed my attention and the attention of many who were worried about where the world was headed, what with 2016 being the year of Brexit and Trump. Christopher Spencer, who goes by the name Cold War Steve online, is an award-winning Birmingham artist who uses his iPhone and iPad to create collages depicting politicians, celebrities and royalty in satirical pieces that helped lighten the mood for many across the country in what they felt were dark times. (Many of his pieces featured EastEnders actor Steve McFadden in character as Phil Mitchell looking on in disgust.)
To mark our extra Bank Holiday for the Coronation, Steve has created a huge piece of art for display in London and made it available for purchase as a large foldable postcard. The outer parts highlight the kind of work he is known for, with a savagely funny portrayal of those in power in the UK. However, in the middle is a positive look at the best this part of the world has produced. Right at the front of this celebratory section, arms raised and leading the pack, is none other than Frank Sidebottom!
Taken from his own website, Steve describes his latest artwork as follows.
“The exclusive triptych artwork was put together over the last few weeks as Chris took himself off Twitter and back off booze. It marks the Coronation of King Charles III and our national obsession with being ruled over by dubious individuals and their weird families and the total crisis in leadership of our absolutely pathetic and self serving establishment political class. But it is mainly a celebration of what we should really be reminding ourselves about our country, the true collective creativity, beauty in diversity and fundamental goodness that makes Great Britain really actually pretty great.”
That last sentence in particular sounds very OiNK-like.
This huge display is free to view day and night in East London and you can check out Steve’s website for directions if you’re in that part of the country and wish to pop by. If not, you can always purchase the large postcard version. I say postcard, the main image in the middle is about the size of an A4 piece of paper so it’s rather larger than your average Blackpool ‘card.
“The must-have free-standing affordable art-piece for this year’s celebration of the King and Queen finally getting their proper crowns and all the inherited land they stole from the people centuries ago. We’re fantastically excited to see them in their gold carriage, I think it’s going to cheer everyone right up.”
It’s available for £15 including postage and £5 of this will go to CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably), a charity that’s taking a stand against suicide. As their website explains, “This means standing against feeling hopeless, standing up to stereotypes and standing together to show life is always worth living.” Especially in these difficult times it’s a great cause and you can help.
I believe this is something Frank would’ve been completely behind.
You can visit Cold War Steve‘s website to check out this piece, the man behind it, see his full archives and visit his shop. He’s also on Twitter and Instagram and is prolific. So, follow him and you’ll know when the news is getting you down you won’t have long to wait before Steve shares something to cheer you up and, most importantly, show you that you’re not alone.
For the last time in the regular comic let’s take a look at that classic logo as big, big changes are afoot.
Looking a lot like the cover to Shoot! magazine or Roy of the Rovers comic, probably deliberately spoofing them, comes our last weekly OiNK and this front page starring Horace (Ugly Face) Watkins by Tony Husband. Inside, Horace’s strip would run to a whopping four pages in our final 24-page issue, rounding up his football drama with a happy ending and the promise of “Great new adventures of the ugly boy wonder in OiNK! Monthly”. Yep, we’ve reached that time of OiNK’s real time read through.
There’s no indication on the cover of any “great news for all readers” inside, although Uncle Pigg does hint that there’s something big, fat and glossy coming up and, if readers hadn’t already scanned through the comic to the back page they’d have assumed he just meant something along the lines of another Holiday Special. In fact, if readers did read the comic from beginning to end without looking at the rear page that final panel in Horace’s strip may have made for quite the shock!
Back to the rest of the issue for now though and our final regular Burp (sounds like something we’d see our doctors about.)
As good as ever and that rat-like creature in the final panel had me in stitches reading this today, however as the final Burp I think last week’s reads better, what with it being a double-page strip and leaving him (and all of us!) stranded in the 50s and having to live life out to the 80s again. (Maybe it was created as the last one?) Yes, Burp and his cartoonist Jeremy Banx do return with a mammoth story in The OiNK! Book 1989 but that would’ve been created long before this point, so as far as Jeremy was concerned this was his final OiNK page.
As a child it sounded like we were going to essentially get a huge Holiday Special every single month!
I asked co-editor Patrick Gallagher about Jeremy’s absence from the monthlies and Ian Jackson’s reduced contributions by this stage too. “Ian and Jeremy were also very busy on their other work outside of OiNK and since we had a healthy stockpile of other artists’ material building up, we were never short to allow them a break,” he told me. “Also, at that time, we had no idea that OiNK was going to fold, so always expected [Jeremy’s characters] might return later on.”
So long Burp and thank you for all of the laughs Jeremy! As I’ve mentioned before on the blog, his Burp strip in the second annual ended up teaching me a thing or two about growing up as I headed towards my teen years. You’ll have to wait until Christmas to find out what! For now, from one long-term regular bidding adieu to one of the newer characters also making her final appearance, and she’s saved her best for last. It’s Charlie Brooker’s Transmogrifying Tracey.
What’s so brilliant about this for me are the reader voices, especially when one of them questions the gaping plot hole I’d spotted too. This may be Tracey’s final appearance but it wasn’t Charlie’s. Mr. Brooker’s OiNK career would go from strength-to-strength in the months to come, his name popping up on more pages than ever. We definitely have that to look forward to. Being able to transform into anything may sound like Tracey’s strip had limitless potential but Charlie brings her time to an end, and I think that reader’s question points out how it could’ve become a rather repetitive strip, so instead we’re left with fond memories of her time in the comic.
Looking over some of the other highlights of the issue and you can see how Uncle Pigg’s announcement in Grunts on page two may have had readers thinking something other than what was ahead. GBH takes the marketing slogan of Allison’s bread adverts in the 80s to the extreme and after all the drama of memory loss, stalkers and nuclear monsters Horace (Ugly face) Watkins‘ football serial comes to its conclusion with something even more horrific. Then, Lew Stringer answers a question we really should’ve asked by now.
GBH Health Foods by Charlie Brooker and Eric ‘Wilkie’ WilkinsonHorace Watkins by Tony HusbandPete and his Pimple by Lew Stringer
Pete and his Pimple has been with us since #15 but not once have we considered the ramifications of his existence on the wider world. Sounds very serious, doesn’t it? Who cares about the clean up, the putrid mess left behind on the streets of Oinktown and the health hazard of having large amounts of greasy, slimy pus all over the pavements? As it turns out Albert Piles cares. He follows Pete around, shovelling up all the pus as Pete dances away spot-free without a care in the world, then he takes it to become glue for holding pages together at… well, I’m sure you can work it out.
There’s no Frank Sidebottom strip or showbiz gossip column this issue, but what we get instead is a very memorable page indeed, one which I can remember seeing for the very first time 35 years ago. This superb full-page mini-poster of Batbottom and Bobbins (the later being his go-to phrase for anything he found to be a bit rubbish) is completely charming and completed using Chris Sievey’s usual felt-tip pens. Oh, I mean, it’s not Chris at all, nor is it Frank and Little Frank, the identity of those responsible for this page are clearly a secret.
Lovely stuff. I love the sheer silliness on display here and not just the main picture. The fact the pin-up being on Page 17 is deemed important to mention, making sure the reader knows they’re not from Timperley, and the knowingness of the captions on the bottom-left that we’ll never see them again. Frank would of course continue with his crazy, random OiNK pages all the way to the very end. In fact, he’d be the cover star of that fateful, final issue!
One of my favourite additions to the weeklies has been the inclusion of some lovely full-page strips containing no dialogue and very few panels, like large mini-strips if you’ll pardon the contradiction. These started off with co-editor Tony Husband’s very funny series of such pages, but as the Horace Watkins strip started to take up more space and more of Tony’s time another cartoonist began creating his own. Up stepped Ed McHenry with such creations as Ringo Pig in #50 and of course the return of Eric Plinge seven days ago in #61.
This one has got to be my favourite of Ed’s. It’s a gorgeous page too and beautifully coloured, especially when you see it on the printed page. It has such character in every panel and a genuinely funny surprise. These simple full-page strips became a fixture in the weeklies and I think being in a slightly smaller comic made them stand out all the more. No other humour comic would’ve dedicated such space to what is essentially a quick gag in a 24-page comic.
Of course, with double the amount of pages from next issue onwards will we see a plethora of these? Or will we be treated to new and exciting variations of OiNK content that we haven’t seen before? Some of the OiNK team really do take advantage of the larger canvas, as you’ll see in the months ahead. Let’s wrap up this issue first though with a Madvertisement from Kev F Sutherland, featuring a jingle that’s used to this day for Fairy Liquid, although not quite with these words.
Well here we are at page 24 and the shape of things to come. You’ll remember in #54Uncle Pigg ran a reader’s survey and the change from next issue came off the back of that. As co-editor Patrick Gallagher told me in that issue’s review, Fleetway were making enquiries about turning OiNK monthly already and the aim of the survey was to see if the readers liked the idea. Clearly they did. As a child this back page did excite me, but then again I always liked ‘new looks’ in my comics and it sounded like we were going to essentially get a huge Holiday Special every single month!
At the time I liked the new logo (just like the original it was also designed by Patrick) but as an adult I do wish they’d kept the one we’d had since the beginning, it had more character to it and felt like it summed up the feel of OiNK more than the new one. But that’s just a bit of a quibble, I’ll leave my opinions about the monthlies until I actually read and review them. I do remember from childhood that after a couple of issues they’d really take advantage of the page count, a bit like how it took a little while for the team to settle into the weeklies, in fact.
So Uncle Pigg gets the final word in the final weekly. It’s all change next issue but at least we haven’t got a full month to wait for that huge porker of an issue. Each of the following OiNKs would go on sale on the third Saturday of every month in 1988, beginning in May. This means we’ve only 16 days to wait for a month’s worth of fun! I’ll see you back here for OiNK #63 on Sunday 21st may 2023 for all of those “sophisticated” smelly jokes.
This gorgeous cover by renowned illustrator Paul Sample is sadly his only contribution to OiNK but what a contribution it is. There are a lot of intricate details my young eyes loved pouring over when this came with me on an Easter family trip to the Scottish highlands in 1988, whiling away the long train journey from the Stranraer ferry. Among the sea and adoring OiNK fans look harder and there’s a ‘Porkman’ instead of a Walkman, Crackling Oil and a rather dark strip on the OiNK Uncle Pigg is reading. It looks extra gorgeous on the large, glossy paper after the comic moved to matt with #36 last autumn.
This is also a wraparound cover poster and I’ll show you rest of it, complete with another comical shark, Icarus and even the sun itself getting in on the OiNK sensation, at the end of the review. The way the crowds are swarming the comic’s logo adds to the feeling of a Holiday Special crammed full to bursting. Inside, the first half in particular is stuffed full of reading material, really giving us superb value for money for a measly 70p. This would actually be the last special of any type with no reprints, so let’s enjoy it!
We get introduced to the comic with a big Uncle Pigg panel written by co-editor Mark Rodgers and drawn as ever by Ian Jackson. While it’s nice to see such an introduction again I can’t help but be disappointed that there’s no strip featuring him and Mary Lighthouse (critic) like we had last year, but then again they stopped a while back in the regular comic. Beneath this is a funny little one-off strip written by Howard Osborn and drawn by Mike Green and thus the tone is set for the special.
I was very happy to see Hadrian Vile’s Hollydaye Albumm here
I’m going to dedicate a full post to one of the main highlights of this issue soon. There are lots of little artists’ profiles, each taking up a quarter of a page. They’re all created by each individual cartoonist and the information in them isn’t exactly reliable, let’s just put it that way and it’s also fun to see how they draw themselves. There are ten altogether and I simply couldn’t have choosen which ones to leave out if I was going to select some for this review, so watch out for that additional post containing them all.
In the previous regular OiNK review (#56) I lamented the fact Hadrian Vile’s diary had more or less come to an end by this point in the comic’s lifetime so I was very happy to see his Hollydaye Albumm here. It’s not a full diary, however it’s a special version for the holiday issue and a fun read. His long suffering dad is front and centre and again is Hadrian’s unintended victim over and over as they set off on their trip to France. A trip we end up seeing nothing of in the whole strip. As always he’s written by Mark Rodgers and drawn by Ian Jackson.
The best thing about this is there’ll be aspects of it that’ll feel familiar to most readers, even if it’s exaggerated somewhat. Although I’m not sure how many families would’ve taken photos of these incidents back in the 1980s. Not when we had a limited number of photographs we could take on our cameras, paying to get them developed. Today though, it’d be much more likely, with the photos likely ending up on social media. Maybe Hadrian was just a trailblazer.
Weedy Willy began life in OiNK as a regular character in the earliest issues, however after several months he would only pop up every few issues or so and even then as mini-strips most of the time. You wouldn’t know he’d been reduced to semi-regular status in this Holiday Special though, with two strips only a few pages apart. The first is a full page while the second, funnier one is this half-page, the winning joke coming from a cowpat!
Written by Keith Forrest and drawn by the master of the thin ink nib, Mike Green, this issue really brings Willy back to his former glory. In the first strip (written by Vaughan Brunt) we even find out Mandy and Willy are now a couple! In that first story he gets the upper hand thanks to his weediness while above the joke is on him, but just in a silly way, not a cruel way. That cowpat being so particularly chuffed in the third panel genuinely made me laugh out loud too.
The biggest highlight of this issue has to be Frank Sidebottom’s board game, Frank’s Timperley Bike Racing Game. The board takes up the centre pages but several pages earlier up pops two pages rammed with rules, player pieces and cut out cards. As always Chris Sievey has clearly put a lot of thought and work into his latest creation. The game is well thought out, unlike a lot of comics games which usually feel like filler. This one feels suitably special.
I actually like the sound of the game, with the players speeding back and forth across the board trying to hit a specific selection of squares given to them by the random shuffling of the shopping list cards. There’s a good bit of strategy to go along with the luck of the dice rolls, with players choosing the order in which they’ll attend to your list and the routes they’ll take. Chris’ attention to detail even stretches to telling the kids plain card backs should be used to ensure there can be no cheating.
I do have one complaint though. Surely buying a copy of that week’s OiNK should’ve been on every list? Oh well, you can always make more or make that part of the rules yourselves. It might just be me, but some of these (rather random) shopping list items also bring back some happy childhood memories! No, I never had to phone Paul McCartney but bike clips, puncture kits and returning videos? Yes. Just remember to rewind those tapes first. The board itself has had just as much attention paid to it.
From the train to the sunbather on the barge, from people hanging their washing up to the roads having drains, Chris has clearly poured over every inch of these pages as he usually does, adding in as many tiny little details to capture the imaginations of the young readers as possible. Also, you just know that lots of things on this board will have been based on actual buildings Chris knew from his real life. You can see why I think this is the ‘fantastic’ headline feature of this OiNK.
Let’s take a quick snack break, shall we? The snacks this next Madvert is aiming its sights at were a childhood favourite, but it’s been proven that our tastebuds change over time and mine appear to have turned against these little pillows of… well, I’ll let this next highlight describe them to you.
Honestly, I don’t know what I ever saw in them! (Nothing apparently, according to Kev F Sutherland.)
Jimmy Flynn (the boy who “Jumps Out of his Skin”), who had a mini-series at one point in the comic, gets an origin story taking up a few separate pages, yet main character Horace (Ugly Face) Watkins only gets one page and it’s a simple three-panel gag strip rather than what we’re used to. Other highlights (below) are better, such as Moth Person in Hijack at 2000 Feet, 13 1/2 Inches taking pot shots at people I’m sure a lot of us really can’t stand on public transport, followed by Tom Thug living up to the clichéd English holiday maker I’m sure we all can’t stand either.
Charlie Brooker brings us the multi-part Sam Mackay Private Eye, the first part of which is full of visual gags based on typical private eye story wordplay, but unfortunately the other chapters don’t match this first page. Billy Bang gets his one and only full-page strip and his one and only in full colour. Finally, David Haldane’s regular look at the strange world we live in takes on Strange, Bizarre Folks Customs of our Funny Old World and it’s some of his funniest yet.
Moth Person by Davey JonesTom Thug by Lew StringerSam Mackay Private Eye by Charlie BrookerBilly Bang by Eric ‘Wilkie’ WillkinsonFunny Old World by David Haldane
When we went on long family trips there were always puzzle magazines brought along to kill time on various planes, trains and automobiles. At such a young age very few of them kept my attention for long, unlike OiNK. Luckily, OiNK had its own puzzle master in the form of Ed McHenry, who’d contributed many a puzzle to the regular comic by this stage. However, here we get a larger than normal selection with a full double-page spread of impossible conundrums.
As ever, everything looks incredibly easy on the surface. The reality of course is that the actual answers are not what you’d expect. The fun with these became trying to work out what the completely ridiculous correct solution actually was. I don’t think I ever got one of them right. This particular spread starts off strong with The Sea Wall conundrum, while my favourite is number seven because given time you might just be able to work it out, depending on how loony you are I guess!
There have been a few occasions over the past year when Jeremy Banx has taken the random and often surreal nature of his Burp strips and given us more wordy, narrated instalments. These heightened the alienness of his existence and the unpredictability of his pages, while also adding in the vast unknowable universe and the apparently untamed imagination of the OiNK cartoonist! Told solely through elaborate narrative captions rather than speech bubbles and slapstick (along with unique out-there visuals), check out Burp’s vacation planet from #41 as the perfect example.
The strip in this edition gives us the best of both worlds, the first page playing out like a typical Burp strip for the most part. Well, not that there’s anything like a ‘typical Burp strip’ but you know what I mean. Then from the final panel on that page we see it change into something else entirely, somewhat like the creatures at the heart of the tale. Just like the example I gave above, the wonders of the universe are laid out and then suddenly juxtaposed against the silly alien we’ve come to know and love.
While this issue isn’t quite as full of classic strips as the first Holiday Special, this is a very worthy follow-up and I can remember being very entertained by it on that family trip all those years ago. It feels extra special now we’re used to reading the 24-page matt paper weeklies. Although, in a couple of months the regular comic basically becomes a monthly Holiday Special so I wonder if these extra editions would’ve become bigger too if the comic had continued. As it stands, the two Holiday Specials so far are among the best examples of OiNK the comic had to offer.
To round off I just have to show you that wonderful wraparound cover poster by Paul Sample. My copy has curled a little at the spine over the years since it was first printed but you can still get a sense of the lovely image as it continues over the staples and on to the back page, where you can see those extra details I mentioned at the top.
OiNK BLOG - CLASSiC COMiCS iN REAL TiME 