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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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OiNK! #67: FiSHY RUBBiSH

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This is a really stinky, smelly, rubbish issue of OiNK. However, as pig pals will attest that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Instead, it’s rubbish with a capital ‘R’ because David Haldane’s Rubbish Man is back after a long hiatus. Originally appearing in every comic, special and book, Rubbish Man disappeared when OiNK when weekly with #45, however David continued to contribute to every issue with his uniquely bizarre sense of humour.

Not intending to do things by halves, Jimmy Bung (our hero’s alter ego) takes up a whopping ten pages of this issue, his adventure split up into five double-page spreads and as you can see by the cover it has a rather famous guest star in the shape of then American President, Ronald Reagan. And a slime monster. Naturally. I love the ‘Reagan In Arms Trouble’ headline, mimicking the newspapers of the day. Interestingly (or coincidentally) the three characters who’d be making the transition to Buster comic in a month are all mentioned on the cover, and watch out for a special blog post next week about that top corner announcement!

We kick things off right at the top of page two with Kev F Sutherland’s Here Comes Rhymin’ Simon, a one-off character whose name suggests the joke will be based solely on how he speaks. However, we should know by now never to predict a strip by Kev. My point is proven when the story actually takes a dig at the push for ‘Made in Britain’ in the press at the time, something Spitting Image also masterfully took the hand out of. Even at my young age (back then, not now) I can remember my friends and I making jokes about those little stickers.

A strong satirical start that this kid definitely appreciated at the time and a few pages later Marc Riley’s Harry the Head returns to top form too. Harry’s strips were always at their best when they were full pages and individual stories. The lengthy adventure serial he had for a few months in the fortnightlies didn’t really work for me and, while his mini-strips in recent issues have been funny, reading this next page reminded me of how strong his entries were right back at the beginning of OiNK.

While having Harry stitched up inside Barney could have made for some (possibly rather disturbing) fun, the end made me chortle. As if Harry being a disembodied head wasn’t a dead giveaway, slapping on a joke shop disguise is just so ridiculous with an already ridiculous character I couldn’t help but laugh. It’s nice to see Marc back to writing for Harry too.

After what felt like a Lew Stringer special last month, the prolific cartoonist returns to a more regular workload. There’s a one-page Tom Thug which rings true, in which we see Tom taking on the true persona of all bullies including the online troll variety. Then Pete and his Pimple’s three-page strip starts off with this imaginative photo collage as he travels into the far-flung future to seek out a pimple cure after a suggestion from reader Matthew Browning of Kent.

A nice little 2000AD reference there too.

The story is a good ‘un if you can track down the issue, with Pete arrested in a world where anyone with spots is jailed for everything that’s wrong with the world, after the government has run out of other minorities to blame. Just to nail the point home, when a robotic claw grabs him it’s named ‘Claws 28’ after Margaret Thatcher’s draconian anti-LGBTQ+ Clause 28 from the late 80s. It’s yet another example of Lew’s social commentary that’s both very funny and unfortunately still very relevant.

Time to see what that front cover was all about and in a distant galaxy we meet the crazy baddie (aren’t they all?) Dr. Blip, the last of his race, and his two henchmen The Glove Puppets From Hell. In order to hold all of planet Earth to ransom for fifty squillion, zillion pounds and a copy of Dire Straits’ latest album he’s kidnapped Reagan and sent the largest monster Rubbish Man has ever faced. How large? Well…

Jings, Rubbish Man! I do believe you’re right! That would’ve been one helluva cliffhanger had the original idea for this strip as a weekly serial been realised. Hinted at back in #52, the plan was for this to be a five-part story but it’s clear David ended up creating it for the monthly format; there are no titles at the beginning of each part (unlike The Street-Hogs in #65 which had been partially drawn before the shift to monthlies) and it all feels very spaced out, like it was created for a larger format.

Below is the page where Reagan is kidnapped by one of Dr. Blip’s hideous monsters just as he’s on the telephone to our smelly hero. The panels are huge and every double-page spread feels like one page of David’s usually packed pages stretched out. The art is gorgeously coloured (a rare thing for Haldane in OiNK) and the grotesque creature is suitably (comically) horrific and very random as per David’s humour, but there’s just not as much to read as we’ve come to expect.

There’s something else missing too. Where’s the mouldy custard squirting out of Rubbish Man’s nostrils? Or the mushy peas spraying out from his fingertips? Or his super garlic breath? While it’s a funny and imaginative strip, apart from one solitary smelly foot none of his powers are present. They were the whole point of the character and why he was so beloved by the children reading the comic.

Instead, all of the gross out humour is reserved for the stomach of the planet devouring beast and hordes of undigested carrots. Or rather, a “hungry horde of psychopathic, semi-digested, blood-crazed diced carrots”. It may not feel like a classic Rubbish Man story but I can’t fault the imagination on show and where else would you find a superhero not only swimming through a swamp of ear wax, but also commenting on how this isn’t his first time.

The story comes to its conclusion when Reagan utters some magical Presidential words told to him by his wife Nancy earlier that day (“Jumpin’ Jellybeans!”) and turns into President of the United States Man. Yes, really. With a simple, single superhero punch Dr. Blip (himself modelled on a certain 80s English politician) is defeated and Rubbish Man takes care of the Glove Puppets from Hell he’d been forced to wear in equally easy fashion. Of course there’s just one more issue to mop up.

Or not, as it turns out.

With the new target audience of teens and students it’s strange to see the absence of the smelly and unhygienic nature of the character. (Surely they’re an even more perfect group of readers for him!) As it stands it’s a fun strip which I think needed about half the space it took up here and I can only imagine the extra laughs it could’ve contained had it been written as five individual strips in the weekly OiNK. As an epic adventure for this particular character it could’ve been so much more.

This was his penultimate strip, with a similarly lengthy story to come in the OiNK Winter Special next year, then there’s a reprint in the OiNK Summer Collection the year after. He doesn’t even pop up in the forthcoming OiNK! Book 1989 (see further below). It’s such a shame because he was a real highlight of those early issues, my favourites to this day still being the colourful Kentucky Fried adventure from the very first issue and the multiple laughs to be had in #9’s bonkers entry. Farewell for now Jimmy, it’s been a whiffy blast. Meanwhile…

This Meanwhile… from Kev F reminds me of a smaller strip by Vaughan Brunt and Mike Green from #31 and just like Vaughan’s debut this was also repeated umpteen times in the school playground to anyone who’d listen. Nice little cameo by one of Kev’s Three Scientists from last month’s highlights, too. From a spoof of one classic comics superhero to a spoof of another classic comic’s adventure strip, this time of the British variety.

Danny and Penny Cretin were overjoyed when their uncle built them an amazing mechanical fish

The Iron Salmon, Lew Stringer

Back in the 60s Beano would have a couple of adventure strips in amongst the silliness and OiNK cartoonist Lew Stringer’s favourite was The Iron Fish, a tale of two young children who owned a fantastic metal submersible in the shape of a giant, dynamic-looking fish in which they’d have various adventures. A couple of decades later and Lew teamed up with artist Andy Roper to bring life to The Iron Salmon, a rather more cumbersome and sorrowful-looking vehicle.

The two children may have the same forenames as their Beano originals but their surname was changed to one Lew felt better suited the rather wet personalities of Beano’s pair. While the adventure strip had them poke their noses into things to save the day, here their nosey nature causes disaster after disaster, neither of them having the intelligence or self-awareness to know they’re the ones causing all of the problems to begin with. This is great fun.

Andy’s art is perfect for spoofing classic comics. He did so with OiNK’S take on Rover‘s and Victor’s Tough of the Track and of course let’s not forget his main contribution to our comic, the phenomenal Spectacles of Doom. The fact the original Iron Fish’s headlights looked like ferocious eyes is brilliantly transformed into big cute ones instead, with a further set of headlights making it look even more gormless. Sadly no longer with us, you can see more highlights from Andy’s time on OiNK including his Scruff of the Track, in his obituary.

You can also check out Lew’s posts about The Iron Fish on his old Blimey! blog, including some of the earliest ones he read as a child, its reinvention for Buddy comic and even a real-life version, The Seabreacher!

As a kid this was the first monthly I spotted strips (as opposed to the posters, which I’d missed the first time) I’d originally read a year or two earlier. This disappointed me but was by no means a deal breaker. Including those posters there are eight pages of reprint material here, more than the previous issues but on the back page came news of something glossy and new! The OiNK! Book 1988 had been so incredible the previous Christmas I’d eagerly awaited its sequel. Now, word finally reached pig pals of the 1989 volume.

It was great to see the old logo again. As a kid I hadn’t realised I’d actually missed it until I saw this superb J.T. Dogg cover. His illustration made up for the disappointing news it contained 16 less pages than the previous book, especially disappointing given the regular comic now had 48! As a result, the book having only 16 more pages than the comic it was advertised in felt rather stingy when I originally saw this advert. I could only hope it wouldn’t disappoint on Christmas Morning. We’ll find out in a few short months.

We’ve missed you Mary, and we’ll miss everyone very soon

There’s a surprise return to strip form for one more character before I sign off this review. I’ll end on that but first the Next Issue page (which you’ll see in its own post on Friday 20th October 2023) contains a gorgeous Frank Sidebottom cover which sadly adorns what would be the last issue of OiNK. I can’t believe we’ve come this far already. Don’t worry though, there’s a ton of OiNK content still to come, both in the immediate future and for years yet on the blog.

For example coming next week is that post promised above, on Sunday 15th October you’ll see how Buster comic announced the merge to come the following week, then on Sunday 22nd October you’ll have two reviews to read, one for OiNK #68 and another for the first four Busters starring three of our favourite characters. Then it’ll feel like no time at all until The OiNK! Book 1989 is reviewed on Christmas Day. For now, as we approach the end it feels fitting to have Mary Lighthouse (critic) back in the pages again, here written by F. Jayne Rodgers (co-editor Mark’s sister), her sole contribution and drawn as ever by the irreplaceable Ian Jackson. We’ve missed you Mary, and we’ll miss everyone very soon.

iSSUE 66 < > iSSUE 68

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KNOW YOUR OiNK!: CARTOONiSTS’ PROFiLES

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This is a nice little bonus post even if I do say so myself. Although I can’t take any of the credit, that must go to ten of OiNK’s top contributors who each decided to tell us a little bit about themselves in the second Holiday Special, released in March 1988. Sprinkled throughout the issue were fun little quarter-page profiles containing a self-portrait of some sort and a description of the cartoonist or editor in their own words.

The last part of that sentence is key. Don’t be expecting any actual real information here. This is OiNK after all. If you chose ten of its talented team and asked them to tell the readers something interesting about themselves do you really think they’d waste that opportunity with actual facts? Or would you prefer they took the chance to use their unique senses of humour to have a laugh instead? It’s a no brainer. Let’s kick things off with the three people responsible for OiNK in the first place, shall we? Here are the comic’s creators and editors. These were the people in charge!

I particularly like Patrick Gallagher’s pen name and his unique way of presenting his age, and it’s hilarious to have the incredibly talented Mark Rodgers’ profile presented as so amateurish. Tony Husband’s artistic depiction of himself is so funny but poor Paul Husband! If you take a look at the very first OiNK, the special preview issue, you’ll see he doesn’t actually look like Horace (Ugly Face) Watkins. If readers had wanted to see what all three of these individuals really looked like they would’ve had to check out the article in Crash magazine from the previous year.

As a kid I never knew of Crash (or the unique free edition of our comic tucked away inside that issue), so as far as I was concerned these profiles were the closest I was going to get to really knowing those who made us laugh so much. As a kid I had no idea it was Patrick and Mark who had appeared in photo stories such as Castaway and Star Truck previously. The latter also starred Tony albeit behind an evil alien (chicken) mask,  but we never knew who they were in those strips. That’s what makes these silly not-so-fact files so funny of course; this is how readers would imagine the amazing talent behind the comic. It’s just a shame we didn’t get more!

Ian Jackson is synonymous with OiNK and did appear in a photo story alongside Mark way back in the Valentines issue but, like Tony, he was behind expensive (not really) alien special effects. In fact it was only two years ago, not long after I started this website, when John Freeman‘s Down the Tubes website published a spotlight article about Ian that I finally found out what the person behind Uncle Pigg, Mary Lighthouse and Hadrian Vile looks like.

This imaginative profile not only sums up his wacky sense of humour with far-fetched nonsense, he also manages to highlight the truth about being a cartoonist

Marc Riley appeared as another anonymous kind-of-actor in Star Truck but was probably best known for portraying Snatcher Sam during the first year of the comic and The OiNK! Book 1988. The grisly world of punk rock he refers to is The Fall, the band he was a part of for four years between 1978 and 1982 before forming The Creepers. Of course, Frank Sidebottom needs no introduction or indeed a silly drawing! We all knew him from countless children’s television appearances already and the man behind the papier-mâché, Chris Sievey, was always so brilliant with his fans that of course he’d take any opportunity to give them a chance to get in touch directly.

Below is David Haldane’s profile, he of Hugo the Hungry Hippo, Rubbish Man and Torture Twins fame and this imaginative profile not only sums up his wacky sense of humour with far-fetched nonsense, he also manages to highlight the truth about being a cartoonist! Then Steve Gibson, who’d go on to produce a range of very adult comics after OiNK brings us a depiction of himself that’s really rather disturbing and perfectly illustrates (no pun intended) his art style. If you’re interested in a full-page strip of that Judge Pigg he’s drawing then check out the review for #58.

Quite a few years ago now, perhaps about a decade back I had the pleasure of meeting Davy Francis a few weeks before Christmas and had the chance to purchase some of his original OiNK artwork which currently takes pride of place on my wall. I didn’t even know he lived in Belfast like me until I was at a film festival earlier that year, and while chatting about comics to someone and mentioning OiNK they told me they knew Davy. An absolute gent with a brilliant sense of humour and an incredible caricaturist his contribution here keeps to the theme of telling us absolutely nothing about him and instead giving us a good chuckle.

Like Ian and David, Davy works his usual signature into his profile so readers can instantly recognise who this is and then we finish the Holiday Special off with Davy’s good friend Ed McHenry. The drawing in Ed’s is in my mind probably the most accurate, based on my completely unknowledgeable assumptions about cartoonists’ work areas. I really like how he’s tried to incorporate as many of the little random details from his description into the drawing too, it’s packed full of little sight gags and details. Absolutely classic Ed.

A few months after the special one more profile appeared in one of the monthly issues, OiNK #66. While it got my hopes up there’d be more in future issues this was sadly the last but it’s a nice little bonus. Especially since it’s by one of my favourite cartoonists of all time and was in an issue where he contributed almost a third of the contents! Lew Stringer is very much a child of the 60s and plays up to that here, beginning with the profile number being made up of three key 60s movie/TV/comic series. I just wish I’d thought of his excuse for why I sucked at school sports!

There we go. Don’t you feel completely informed about who made the funniest comic of all time? Me neither. Or maybe we should. The details may not be entirely accurate but they portray the sense of humour OiNK encapsulated, the craziness and imagination that captivated us and the combination of comic talent that was like no other. These great profiles inside the second OiNK Holiday Special may not have been an introduction to these cartoonists, but they could very well be the perfect introduction to OiNK itself.

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UNCLE PiGG’S CRACKLiNG TALES: VOLUMES OF FUN

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In the issue of OiNK on sale now (at the time of writing) back in 1988 a special competition was published in which pig pals could win a set of two new books called From the Pages of OiNK!: Uncle Pigg’s Crackling Tales, new entries in publisher Knockabout’s Jester range. These were novel-sized collections of strips from the first couple of dozen issues of our favourite comic. The competition in #64 also acted as the only advert they’d ever receive. They passed me by as a kid and I only found out about them again a handful of years ago.

I’ve read online from certain quarters that apparently they were of very low quality, that all the reprints were very badly reproduced and that they felt like cheap cash-ins, but nothing could be farther from the truth! So today, at the point in OiNK’s real time read through when they were first announced to the readers I’ve decided to take a closer look at both books, while showing you just how good they actually are.

Given the rough matt quality of paper used for novels these feel like OiNK has been given the Big Comic Book treatment. Novel-sized and with 100 pages each, volume one contains a whopping 53 strips and the second has even more, with 63 classic funnies. They both come with new introductions, the first from Uncle Pigg and both books finish with a little promotion to buy OiNK every week using the design from the OiNK 45 record (the comic was still weekly when these were put together but monthly by the time they were released).

Uncle Pigg’s introduction is full of his usual boasts and I like what the initials after his name really stand for. Rhyming off the achievements of the comic up to this stage makes it all the more saddening to know that at the time of their release we were only a handful of issues away from the end! Also, while he tells the reader to watch out for her, unfortunately Mary Lighthouse (and Uncle Pigg himself) is nowhere to be seen in strip form.

But it’s the person who wrote the introduction to the second book that’s a real surprise. It’s none other than Alan Moore himself (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Batman: The Killing Joke). Yes, that Alan Moore has written his own personal introduction for this OiNK collection. While it’s great to find out such a legendary comics writer was a fan, initially I thought it was a shame he seemed to get some facts wrong and didn’t seem to have gotten the point about a character. Thankfully Lew Stringer has clarified the latter.

It did read like Alan had missed the point about Tom Thug somewhat in his comparison to Dennis the Menace, which would be completely wrong; Tom was just a bully and always the loser and butt of the jokes. “Alan Moore’s comment about Tom Thug is tonue in cheek of course,” Lew has says in his comment below this post. “He certainly gets what Tom’s about as he compares him to a fascist movement.”

Mad Magazine’s satire and the wish to make something relevant to kids of the 80s inspired OiNK

While some did liken OiNK to Viz after it was released, its three creators certainly did not take their lead from Viz, a myth that particularly irks me as it takes away from its (and their) originality. Viz had no influence on the team’s creation whatsoever. Mad Magazine’s satire and the wish to make something relevant to kids of the 80s inspired creators Patrick Gallagher, Tony Husband and Mark Rodgers. That last important point Alan correctly points out.

I asked Patrick about the books and Alan’s inclusion. “From what I remember, when we were working on the Crackling Tales books, we were also really busy dealing with the early stages of the TV side of things, which, initially, was to produce OiNK! for TV,” he told me. “I think we allowed [publishers] Knockabout to produce the Crackling Tales covers to our specifications but we provided everything else. I also think that Knockabout was the contact for Alan Moore.”

These are excellent additions to anyone’s OiNK collection

So what makes up both books? There’s a star strip in each, with 12 Burp strips by Jeremy Banx in the first volume and a ten-part Horace (Ugly Face) Watkins story by Tony Husband in the other. Things kick off with the very first Burp strip in fact and after reading his misadventures all the way through to the final weekly by now, these early editions feel so different. That’s not to say they’re any less funny than they were originally of course. Both characters are perfect ways to highlight OiNK’s uniqueness.

As you can see the strips are printed sideways which makes more sense when you think about how much smaller these pages are than the comic’s; if they’d been printed normally they’d be far too small to enjoy properly. With 100 pages the books aren’t thick enough for this to get in the way of the strips and their middle panels are still easily read, even spaced out a little more when the art allows. This makes for a decidedly different reading experience, which let’s face it suits the OiNK perfectly.

Alongside Burp and Horace you’ll find a selection of other regulars such as Tom Thug, Weedy Willy, Cowpat County, Zootown, Hugo the Hungry Hippo, even the likes of Lashy the Wonder Pig and a Butcher Watch are included. Also here are some others who never made it past the first year of the comic, like Maggie Pie, Pete’s Pup and Kid Gangster. There are also a selection of one-offs like Jeremy’s excellent Curse of the Mummy and Mrs Warsaw-Pact which I found so funny back in #13 and #10 respectively. Absolute classics!

As you can see from these photos of one-off Scruff of the Track and a Cowpat County the reproduction is superb even on this very different paper, all of the intricate details of Andy Roper’s and Davy Francis’ artwork still as crisp as they were on OiNK’s much larger glossy pages. It’s great to see things like Scruff here too, especially for readers who had come to OiNK much later and could use these books to catch up on some of what they missed. I expected these to be made up solely of the regulars still in the comic at the time of publication, so I’m glad to see I was wrong.

Below you can see the smaller strips look just as good with anything between two and four of them fitting in when spread across this format. Some of my favourites from the whole run are here too such as Henry the Wonder Dog by Davey Jones and Ian Knox’s Roger Rental He’s Completely Mental, who I’ve been really missing from the comic for a while now. The regulars also have a chance to share this space, their half-page entries sitting alongside their larger strips elsewhere, as you can see in two from Lew Stringer here.

When OiNK was printed on gloss paper (up to #35) greyscale colouring was something unique for us to enjoy, with other humour comics printed on newsprint of much lesser quality they were unable to produce the same result. Even when it changed to matt paper initially it was of a good enough stock for artists such as Lew to continue with this style (although it did stop when the comic went weekly for a while due to the paper). Pete and his Pimple above may not look quite as good as they did originally but I don’t think it looks bad at all for this paper.

So where did all those criticisms of the reproductions come from? There are some examples of strips losing detail in the transition to these books, although across the combined total of 116 only three strips suffer from this. One is below and unfortunately it’s a really rather good Burp strip. I’m not sure how this was okay for the publishers, maybe it just slipped through by accident, but to write off these books because of three such instances is just silly.

It’s great to see Willy here too in some of his earliest adventures back when he was guaranteed to pop up in every issue. His earliest pages were definitely among his strongest (not an adjective Willy was used to) and it’s been great to see him back on form these past few months in the read through ever since the second Holiday Special. Reading those and his starring role in these books, it’s clear he was a good choice to make the transfer to Buster later in the year.

Some other pages I was very happy to see reprinted were an early Tom Paterson contribution when it was still a possibility he could’ve been a regular cartoonist for Uncle Pigg, there are a few Christmassy strips which made me very happy indeed including a classic entry from The Sekret Diary ov Hadrian Vile, it was great to see Pete’s Pup again from the late Jim Needle, a character who really should’ve stayed around, and the first appearance of Tom’s Toe poking fun at conventional comics still grabs your attention thanks to his cartoonist being none other than John Geering!

Meet Mister Cheese by Tom Paterson
Hadrian Vile written by Mark Rodgers, drawn by Ian Jackson
Pete’s Pup by Jim Needle
Tom’s Toe written by Tony Husband, drawn by John Geering

These books appear on eBay quite regularly for a few quid each and for anyone who wants to relive some of their favourite childhood comics but doesn’t know which issues to choose from, or who likes the fact they can do so while storing them easily on a book shelf, these are a must. Unfortunately, there would be no more volumes in the series. “I don’t think we had any concrete plans to produce any more Crackling Tales books,” Patrick says. “That would have been dependent on how the first couple sold. But by the time that information might have come through, OiNK was probably history!”

Sadly that was most likely the case. I doubt these got much of a promotional push by Fleetway by this late stage in OiNK’s lifetime, especially seeing as how it had basically been rebooted as a monthly ‘magazine’ for teenagers by now. As it stands though, these are excellent additions to anyone’s OiNK collection, or even for your book collection as a great round up of OiNK’s crackling sense of humour.

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OiNK! #64: WAKA-WAKA-WiT

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The second of our monthly OiNKs brings a surprise cover star in the shape of Police Vet, a character who had appeared before in The OiNK! Book 1988 in a funny take on 70s police dramas, with a pre-Ace Ventura slant of an officer who only investigates missing pets etc. While it’s easy for us to look back on the 80s and have a well meaning giggle, here we have the 80s and its excesses taking the hand out of the decade that preceded them. So it’s a retro look at a different retro time and I think it’s great fun.

On the inside cover is the most blatant example of how OiNK had been rebooted for an older teen audience. Mark Rodgers’ script for the latest Rotten Rhymes completely baffled me at the time. I was only ten-years-old and firmly inside the original target bracket for the comic. Reading this now, as funny as it is it would suit another publication more, inside OiNK it just feels out of place. I know that’s the way the comic was heading but it’s jarring after 63 issues of hilarious children’s comics. They had been suitable for all but now this was aimed way over the heads of the loyal fans who’d been pig pals since the start, for the first time excluding a part of the audience.

It reads like a cross between Austin Powers and Ace Ventura which is quite the feat when neither existed yet, with a liberal sprinkling of Starsky and Hutch thrown in for good measure

The rest off the issue is more like the OiNK we knew and loved. The main event is the six-page Police Vet story written by Mark and drawn by cover artist Eric ‘Wilkie’ Wilkinson. Beginning with its own version of a Shaft-like theme tune we soon shift to some pretty awful (read: funny) puns as our hero gets his assignment. This reads like a complete strip and not a serial originally meant for several weeklies pasted together. The monthlies will have a mixture of these kinds of larger strips (edited serials and tailor-made). This could also have been made for a future special or annual and brought forward for the new format. As such it changes the pacing of this particular story and is all the better for it.

It reads like a cross between Austin Powers and the aforementioned Jim Carrey movies which is quite the feat when neither existed yet, with a liberal sprinkling of Starsky and Hutch thrown in for good measure, particularly in Police Vet’s nonchalance of being in an exciting car chase. The best bit for me is how he deduces Foxy isn’t a real woman because she was too much of a bad stereotype, only for the culprit to be the most stereotypical French person imaginable. Brilliance.

We even have an example of the 70s laughing at the fashion of the 80s! It’s a shame we never got to see the character return, as after this he’d hang up his platforms for good. Maybe it was for the best before the joke wore thin. To perk me up from knowing that was the end of Police Vet is Misplaced in Space on the very next page with a very surprising special guest artist, following the likes of Dave Gibbons in #49 and Kevin O’Neill in the first special and book. Pencilling Davy Francis’ script here is none other than John McCrea (Hitman, The Boys: Herogasm, 2000AD).

Another local (to me) talent like Davy and OiNK’s Ian Knox, John was born in Belfast and good pals with Davy, who approached him about contributing to the comic. Renowned for his 2000AD strips in particular his body of work is quite staggering and in 1988 he added a page of OiNK to that list. Written and then inked by Davy, John brings a unique look to the strip. Especially unique because he didn’t normally do humour comics work. What a treat to see these two completely different talents combine their styles inside my favourite comic. OiNK really was one of a kind.

I have a vague recollection of news bulletins in the 80s being filled with something every night that seemed to unite mainland Britain in anger, and which Spitting Image took great delight in poking fun at. It didn’t affect the populace of Northern Ireland but that didn’t stop me from knowing just enough to enjoy this next piece written by Howard Osborn. I am of course talking about the Poll Tax. OiNK taking its role as a children’s comic very seriously for a moment here to educate us on the latest piece of legislation.

As I mentioned in the preview for this issue there’s a page in here that would end up being read out in the House of Commons. No piggy prizes for guessing correctly this was it. OiNK would actually tell its readers about this in a future issue so we’ll check back in on what happened when we get there. I wonder what Howard thought of that! It feels very current too, especially the digs it takes with points five, six, seven and the final sentence. Unfortunately some things just don’t change, eh?

A couple of quick Lew Stringer highlights next. A quite monumental moment was approaching for Tom Thug, something that had never happened before in children’s funny comics. Reminding me somewhat of how The Sekret Diary ov Hadrian Vile saw his mum go through an actual pregnancy before his new baby sister appeared in the story, Tom would actually leave school and go out into the adult world. But he still has to finish his final year of course. Then in Pete and his Pimple, with the Zitbusters from #41 back a lucky reader got to see themselves as the person who saves the day! Sort of. Well, basically how Lew imagined they might look anyway.

Tom Thug and Pete and his Pimple by Lew Stringer

This issue leans more towards the text-heavy pages than normal and there are more examples of the partnership that seems to have blossomed between young writer Charlie Brooker and the unique art of Steve Gibson on these pages, specifically Doctor Jonathan Swiller’s Home Health Check-Up. The character is a parody of Dr Jonathan Miller, a physician who also happened to be a director, author and actor, and was well known in the 1980s.

The following self-diagnosis test asks the readers to answer honestly so they can get a free and easy assessment of their overall health. With only eight questions in total, to get the thorough diagnosis we’re expecting surely these questions will really probe deep, right? Not quite, no. Starting with the insanely easy and making its way to the ludicrous in no time at all, this is genuinely very funny and, even though I never knew the person this was based on, I remember finding it just as funny as a child. Sometimes the silliest ideas just work.

Charlie’s work as both cartoonist and writer in OiNK is a highlight of the whole run for me. He contributed a lot for still being at school, appearing on no less than five pages out of the 42 pages of new content here (#6’s Watery Down and two of the OiNK Superstar Posters are reprinted). Speaking previously with co-editors Patrick Gallagher and Tony Husband on separate occasions both praised Charlie’s work, remembering how the amount of his contributions kept rising, so impressed were they with what he was producing.

Before I show you a handful of the issue’s great mini-strips we’re off to the sunny climes of the Bahamas once more after we visited there in #61 for the GBH Desert Island Survival Kit. Clearly co-editor Mark Rodgers, his partner Helen Jones and writer Graham Exton felt the gorgeous setting and opportunities it provided were ripe for more than one OiNK moment. This issue we find ourselves on a golden beach (albeit in black and white) as bored Robina finally finds what’s been missing in her life in Castaway, a “Heart-Wrenching Photo-Story”.

I think this is all the funnier knowing now that’s real-life partners Helen and Mark. Playing on the expectations of those typical love photo-stories found in women’s weekly magazines (which have been a target since the very beginning of OiNK) I love how Helen’s acting is deemed to need a large arrow telling the reader what she’s portraying, plus her goofy look in the panel below. This must’ve been so much fun to produce.

The characters of When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth sign off with one of their best entries

While the issue has its fair share of text-heavy pages and the like it’s also got a particularly good selection of mini-strips sprinkled throughout. Below are the best of the crop. A recent addition to the regular OiNK team that’s becoming just as prolific as Charlie is Kev F Sutherland whose Rotten Rhymes version of Polly Put the Kettle On is classic OiNK. Marc Riley’s Harry the Head is still in mini-strip form from the weeklies and appears to be staying that way with this acknowledgement of the new look.

Davy Francis’ Doctor Mad-Starkraving (a spin-off from Davy’s Greedy Gorb) tells a great gag that in hindsight is actually the most obvious time travel joke! It’s just that no one had thought it up yet. An instant classic gag from Davy then. Finally, Marc’s zany characters in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth make their final appearance in a new strip (they’d return next issue but as a reprint before disappearing) and they sign off with one of their best entries.

There’s one more page I’ll show in a special post next week. It’s a competition to win a couple of books of particular interest to pig pals and I’ve been able to procure them in time to have a closer look at, so watch out for that post.

While OiNK would take another issue or two to truly settle into its new guise this issue has still been a belter. As more and more gets created with the new look in mind we’d see bigger and better strips from all of our favourites and some truly memorable moments that are among the very best OiNK produced. The Next Issue promo in this issue elicited real excitement too when it signalled the return of The Street-Hogs at last in ‘Malice in Underland!’ You’ll see that promo in the preview post on Thursday 13th July 2023, swiftly followed by the review of #65 itself on Sunday 16th. 

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