Weedy Willy and Roger Rental, He’s Completely Mental are two of my most fondly remembered OiNK characters. I’m sure I’m not alone in that. We’re all familiar with their strips and art styles; Mike Green for Willy and Ian Knox for Roger. But that wasn’t always the plan.
Graham Exton went to university with one of OiNK’s three creator/editors, Mark Rodgers and I’ve previously shown the Germs comic they produced as part of their course. Graham was very heavily involved in OiNK in the early days, helping create characters, strips and the overall sense of humour as the dummy issue was put together in 1984 for IPC Magazines, the contents of which would be used for the Preview Issue two years later. Graham would contribute heavily to the early issues of the regular comic before moving to live in the Bahamas, which reduced his comics work somewhat. (Hey, it was the 80s, before the internet so seamlessly brought us all together no matter how far apart we were to adore each other’s cats.)
Graham created The Plops amongst others, including the aforementioned Roger and Willy. Not only did he create these two icons of OiNK, he also drew their strips when cartoonists were still being assembled. Ultimately, he’d be one of the comic’s main writers when it launched, for these two characters and plenty more. For OiNK’s 40th anniversary Graham has given me his kind permission to show pig pals those early, unpublished strips from the days when OiNK was first being put together. Some are still in their unfinished pencilled state, while a few of the Willy strips are complete and inked.
You’ll notice quite a difference between these and the characters we were eventually introduced to. Weedy Willy looks more like a regular boy, it’s his words and actions that give us the information (and the gags) on how weak and cowardly he is. Roger isn’t even called Roger! Barmy Barney was the precursor to Mr. Rental. As Graham explained to me, “I think it was Mark’s decision to use Mike Green’s weedy, spindly style for Willy rather than my more Baxendale-ish one. Similarly, Ian’s wacky style seemed better suited to the character [of Roger].”
The name Stuart Fellows also pops up in one strip, a name unfamiliar to me. “Stuart is an old pal from the Leeds days,” says Graham. “I expect he chipped in for that story. Most of our mates contributed ideas and scripts. You’ll see Keith Forrest’s name on Roger Rental stories, for example.”
Some of these early ideas of Graham’s would make it into OiNK in his scripts for Mike. A strip about Mandy’s recently deceased cat would be reworked and included in the Preview Issue and the introduction of Flash the dog, who now looked like it wouldn’t be too long until he joined Mandy’s cat, was used in the first regular issue. “The dog was named after a friend’s (school friend Rob) mangy mutt. Mike’s version was certainly weedier than mine, which is sort of generic IPC/Baxendale style.“
This was followed up in #2 with a reworking of a photography story. You can see Graham’s original completed strip and the full page from OiNK below to compare.
Graham would continue to contribute to OiNK via fax but less often, ultimately stopping altogether. “I continued to write Sweeny [Toddler for Whizzer and Chips] in South Andros, but dropped all the others on account of teaching,” he says. “Gums was the last to go. (I loved writing Gums. Such a narcissist prat!)” On that we can agree, I love that stupid ol’ shark!
“I continued to write and draw and started Tatertown when I was between jobs in Freeport, Grand Bahamas,” Graham continues. “That really improved my art, and I learned how to use Photoshop to colour the strips. Now I’m teaching comics colouring in my computer classes! One of my tenth grade girls is completely into it and coloured one of my Sweeny newspaper strips that never got published.”
Thanks so much to Graham for all of the great information and of course these original scans. I’ve always said I’d love to see the Creating OiNK section of the blog expand now that the full real time read through is complete, so this insight into the creation of these characters and their misadventures is gratefully received. I hope you all enjoyed it too, may there by many more to come.
This is the first Buster Book I’ve ever read and it’s surprised me straight away, but not in the way you may think. The Buster Book series has been added to the blog because of OiNK star Tom Thug. He continued in the pages of Buster weekly all the way to its end over a decade after OiNK’s cancellation. I thought buying the remaining annuals in the series from the moment Tom appeared would be a fun addition to the blog every Christmas. New Tom Thug is always a treat after all!
Knowing Weedy Willy and Pete and his Pimple were also in this edition I was looking forward to large multi-page strips or special stories of some sort, the likes of which we’d have seen in the OiNK books or the Beano and Dandy annuals every year. Surprisingly however, apart from a few exceptions this book feels more like several editions of the weekly wrapped in a cardboard cover.
The first and last 14 pages are of a lovely and smooth, higher quality paper stock, with some of the strips in full colour, but the rest of the 112 pages in total are the same matt paper as the Big Comic Books, mostly in black and white with the occasional two-colour strip. Also, apart from 2-page Buster, Ricky Rainbow and Chalky stories in those outer pages, and a 4-page BeastEnders inside, all the strips are the same length as they would be in the weekly comic.
Once you hit those inner matt pages it just doesn’t feel as special anymore. So yes, I was surprised when I compared it to its contemporaries but the main reason we’re here is for the OiNK strips (and perhaps a couple of other little treats too). The first of our piggy publication’s characters we bump into is Weedy Willy, as ever written by Mark Rodgers and drawn by Mike Green.
This wouldn’t feel out of place in OiNK itself. The simplest of tasks were always an epic struggle for Willy and going to see a slushy movie was no different, complete with the obligatory snow for the Christmas annual, albeit five snowflakes. It still counts. Surprisingly, it’s Pete and his Pimple who gets the full colour treatment on the deluxe paper rather than our next star.
The yearly annuals are written and drawn so far in advance of publication (and publication is a few months before Christmas, although they were always Christmas presents), Lew Stringer’s strips for this particular book – released in 1989 – would’ve been created soon after OiNK’s cancellation in 1988. While both characters were fan favourites, Pete was probably the more popular of the two in OiNK and Buster’s editor may have thought that would be the same in Buster.
You see? More snow and ice. Of course these books were for Christmas! I’d loved to have seen the impact into that tree, though. Maybe we would have in his original comic, but it’s still a fun strip. As the months rolled on Tom’s popularity soared in Buster while Willy was quickly dropped and poor Pete went the same way a few months later. In the years that followed Tom became one of the comic’s standout stars, getting full colour pages to himself and he even appeared on the cover. But for now, a single black and white page must suffice.
Pete, on the other hand, is in glorious full colour (coloured by John Michael Burns – thanks to Lew for the info). Alas, this doesn’t mean readers could be made even more squeamish with some technicolour pimple bursting. As I’ve mentioned before when the comics merged, given the younger audience it was decided the pus had to remain put. But that doesn’t mean the fun is kept bottled up. Here, that old OiNK classic of dressing up the pimple is taken to a hilariously Christmassy conclusion.
Unlike a lot of the Buster regulars, these three only get one strip each this time around and I did hunt down their pages within the book first for obvious reasons. It’s going to be an agonising wait for next Christmas before I can read any more from them (most likely just Tom), so I made the most of my purchase on eBay and read through the rest of the book for more highlights to show you.
The first comes courtesy of Ricky Rainbow and he’s on the final two pages of the book. When Pete crossed over into an issue of Buster to promote the then-weekly OiNK back in March 1988, it hadn’t been too long since Nipper comic had merged into it, bringing Ricky along. I’d particularly liked that strip, even though he only turned see-through in it. Usually he could change colour on a whim or based on his mood and I said at the time I’d like to see more of him. It had the potential to be really funny.
Drawn by James Hansen, here we see him unwittingly change colour because of his temperature for the most part, and it’s really enjoyable. It’s also made something of a theme out of very funny letterbox moments this Christmas on the blog. (See Kids’ Court in the Big Comic Book 1989 review.) It’s madcap fun, bouncing between different predicaments for Ricky with Bruiser always on his tail. I know Nipper was a comic aimed at a younger audience than Buster but Ricky Rainbow fits in perfectly here. He’s one of the best parts in this whole book.
OiNK boasted of Pete Dredge winning the Provincial Cartoonist of the Year award from the Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain
Finally, another OiNK artist pops up with his Young Arfur strip, namely Pete Dredge. Pete contributed to a handful of OiNKs randomly throughout its run including strips like spoof movie anthology The Golden Trough Awards, Master T and Dimbo, his take on Sly Stallone’s 80s action hero. OiNK also boasted of Pete winning the Provincial Cartoonist of the Year award from the Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain in #49.
Young Arfur started out in School Fun comic before making the transition to Buster in 1984. (School Fun was actually conceived by OiNK writer Graham Exton.) Arfur is basically a young version of Arthur Daley from the hit TV show Minder, a minor con man who used the gift of the gab to earn money through various dodgy schemes. Young Arfur has that same gift but instead uses it to get him and his pals out of doing anything they don’t want to do.
As you can see his reputation precedes him. Not that this knowledge helped the teacher any. You could see him as a more charming (albeit that’s part of the con) and chatty, streetwise version of the Roger the Dodger strips in Beano at the time. He’s a fun character and must’ve been enjoyed by Buster readers as he was part of the comic until 1987, five times longer than School Fun’s whole run.
With that, we round off our look at the first Buster Book to co-star some of our old OiNK pals. I don’t need any will power to not look at the next volume because I haven’t bought it yet, but if you have these yourself (or can remember them) don’t tell me what’s to come, I look forward to finding out for myself each Christmas. One final surprise is on the back cover. Instead of a repeat of the front cover image by Tom Paterson, or a funny reverse cover like OiNK’s books, it’s an advert. But it’s one I’m sure anyone around my age will remember (fondly or otherwise) from a lot of our comics back then.
It’s strange to see an advert in an annual but the Big Comic Book also had it this year, as did the OiNK Winter Special released in November 1989. Anyway, that’s enough waffle from me. Pete may have been given top billing out of our three pig pals here, but it’s Tom Thug who has a few more Christmassy mishaps to come, so I look forward to our next festive feast of new OiNK-type material in twelve months!
The following post was originally written forSunday 22ndbutwas held back afterthesad news of Tony Husband’s passing
In the review of OiNK#68 I began by describing how I discovered it was coming to an end and merging into the pages of Buster. I was absolutely gutted, not to mention confused. While over the next few years it felt I had a knack for collecting comics that would end up cancelled quickly, OiNK had been a big part of my life for what felt like a long time at that age. But Buster was weekly and a lot cheaper, maybe this could be the next best thing? Especially with these three OiNK characters making the transition?
So, after asking for my reserved copy of OiNK I went back to the shelves and picked up this issue of Buster. However, something (I don’t know what) stopped me from placing a regular order right there and then for a weekly dose of Pete and his Pimple, Tom Thug and Weedy Willy, despite the former two being favourites of mine. When I got home I decided to read Buster first. I wanted to be excited about something new, a new comic with four times the amount of Lew Stringer’s strips every month.
Despite the fact OiNK was a breath of fresh air in comparison to others, its humour speaking to me like no other humour comic, I was desperate not to say goodbye completely. Perhaps I’d really like Buster, maybe its humour had moved on in the few years since OiNK’s creation, maybe I’d reserve it and have a brand new weekly to look forward to with some faves included.
The fun front cover with the legendary Tom Paterson drawing our OiNK characters was a very positive start although I was initially disappointed they weren’t part of the Buster story that continued on to the back cover. However, the story is really good, Tom’s artwork elevating Mark Bennington’s already funny script to lofty heights with his crazy style, gorgeous (or in this case grotesque) details and of course his trademark smelly sock.
I was also initially a little jealous of Buster readers, who still had the same format as OiNK did in its Golden Age during the final months of 1987. Having said that, after reading this it felt like it had nowhere near the amount of reading material as those issues of OiNK had, nor did it take anywhere near as long to read. Our piggy publication crammed so much more content into the same 32 pages, so even though it was 7p more expensive a whole year before this 28p comic, OiNK was a real bargain!
Towards the back Buster welcomes any new readers making the pilgrimage over from Uncle Pigg’s comic at the top of his letters page with hopes that he can keep them laughing. Let’s see if his wish would come true and begin with a look at the three highlights we’re all here for, and no doubt the first three pages any pig pal would’ve read after that cover strip. First up is Pete Throb.
Pete and his Pimple keeps its title banner so initially everything seems normal, or at least as normal as an OiNK strip ever was. However, once we get going there’s a key difference that may not have sat well with long-time fans. Of course it’s an introductory strip in many regards, which is completely understandable and that’s not the problem here. Have a read of Pete’s first Buster page and see if anything pops out. Or rather, doesn’t.
Right up to that penultimate panel everything is as chaotic and funny as we’ve come to expect from Lew’s Pete, but then he lands on the burglars and squishes them, his pimple flattening for one panel and that’s it. Where’s the almighty explosion? Where are the vats of pus that would’ve stuck the thieves to the ground until the police arrived? Something key to Pete’s success in OiNK was missing. Nothing had been enforced upon Lew, he simply knew he couldn’t show a pimple bursting and covering everyone with pus in this comic.
He wasn’t the only one of Lew’s characters to see a change either. In the monthly OiNKs Tom Thug had made humour comics history by actually leaving school, applying for jobs and even signing on for unemployment benefits. But for Buster time was reversed and Tom became that mainstay of children’s humour comics, the eternal schoolboy. Not that this is a complaint of course, not with quality like this.
I’m surprised Tom knows the phrase “attaché-case”! This felt much more like an OiNK strip than Pete’s, although there was already one little change in that Satan the Cat would go unnamed from now on, ‘Satan’ not deemed appropriate anymore. Also, Tom would only ever look queasy if he felt like being sick, unlike the results we could see in OiNK! There was a reason behind the changes. These popular OiNK stars simply weren’t in OiNK anymore and had to adapt to their new surroundings.
As such, Pete’s pimple would largely go un-popped, Tom would never leave school for a setting the younger audience would better appreciate and his cat’s name would remain a secret for pig pals to keep. Would these changes be acceptable in the eyes of their fans? Well, there’s one more character to check in on first before I share what my opinion was upon reading this comic back in 1988.
Weedy Willy, originally created by Graham Exton, usually written by Mark Rodgers (as he is here) and always drawn by Mike Green needed the least changes in making the transition, although apparently he’s single again after he eventually began dating Dishy Mandy in the second OiNK Holiday Special. With hindsight there’s a moment here where he’s accused of being a pervert though, but we’ll put that down to this being inadvertent and 35 years ago.
All three of these strips were clearly introductory ones and below we’ll look at their next three instalments to see how they settled in, but for ten-year-old me it simply wasn’t enough to justify that slot in my comics list. I was only allowed a certain amount on order at once and Wildcat’s preview issue given away with the last OiNK was very tempting. But ultimately it came down to how I felt at the time about Buster.
I immediately thought, “What?! My OiNK has to end but they’ll start THIS?!”
In the last issue of OiNK Horace (Ugly Face) Watkins described it as “a breath of fresh air in the clichéd world of children’s comics” and apart from a few exceptions (the brill Buster strip, as well as fun with Ricky Rainbow, Ivor Lott and Tony Broke and X-Ray Specs) little was convincing me Buster was any different. Yes, it was a bit more random by this point, after a lot of mergers there wasn’t enough room every week for all the characters so some would pop in and out, but the majority of the humour felt old-fashioned compared to what I was used to. Then I saw this!
As a child this advert really didn’t help. Please remember: I was ten. I saw this and immediately thought words to the effect of, “What? My OiNK has to end but they’ll start THIS?!” The cover even looks unfinished, like it’s lots of bits of paper glued together. Reading this issue now there are some more smiles and laughs to be had but things like Nipper and Dad Mum are atrocious and don’t hold up to the test of time at all. The latter’s whole ‘funny’ scenario appears to be the fact the character is a single mum who likes to do things that apparently are ‘funny’ for a mum to do, like work, go out with friends and have fun! Outdated humour even for the 80s, surely.
Getting only 12 pages of OiNK strips a month wasn’t worth the reservation slot and so I moved over to Wildcat which itself was heartbreakingly short-lived. Until doing this blog I never purchased any more issues of Buster so I’m quite excited to have a look at some new Pete, Tom and Willy strips from the next three issues. OiNK’s title would only appear on these four issues in total and it was never called ‘Buster and OiNK’ like other mergers.
Most likely with WHSmith’s stupid attitude towards OiNK and placing it on the top shelves Fleetway didn’t want to risk that happening to their top title. Despite OiNK’s humour simply being cheeky (more in-line with the kids of the 80s) and the good moral messages it contained, to some groups this didn’t matter so perhaps the publisher wanted to play it safe. The Tom and Willy covers were drawn by Tom Paterson again, and Buster didn’t appear on the cover of the last one but there’s a funny story to tell about that inside, which we’ll get to below.
So let’s take a quick look at the remaining OiNK strips and first up are Pete’s. The first one reuses a joke from one panel of a sports issues of OiNK as a basis for the whole strip and as you can see in the next two we actually have pimples popping! Although, it bursts with much less of the sticky mess we found so funny and the result is shown only in silhouette, and his dog’s explodes more like a balloon filled with air than a pimple filled with pus.
Don’t get me wrong these are still fun but it does feel like the main selling point has been watered down somewhat. This isn’t a fault on the part of Lew, Pete was one of OiNK’s most popular characters so was an obvious choice for the merge in that regard. But the strips from OiNK just wouldn’t have been allowed in Buster, so maybe a different character should’ve been chosen in the end? (Although I’m not sure who would’ve been more suitable.)
I can see why Pete was brought over. However, with an even younger audience how many readers could identify with a spotty teenager? As such the strips feel sanitised and that’s completely the wrong feeling for Pete and his Pimple. Tom fares much better. Yes, the writing on the back of the t-shirt at the end of the first strip below seems tame by OiNK standards but by all counts these are classic Tom through and through.
That slip in the middle strip caught me completely off guard and I’ll admit I snorted with laughter at that one! Also nice to see the little extras we sometimes got at the bottom of Tom’s strips have made the pilgrimage to Buster with his woodworking masterpieces. Taking Tom back to school was an obvious choice. Unfortunately many children come across a bully or two in their lives, but Tom could prepare them by showing the true identity of all bullies. As such, he feels just as much at home here as he did with Uncle Pigg and the rest.
As for Willy, you can see below he’s back to asking Dishy Mandy out but at least it has a happy ending for once. (Actually, given how they just suddenly appeared as a couple in OiNK I’m going to say this is how they actually got together.) In OiNK Willy would sometimes use his weediness to his advantage but we haven’t seen that here yet. No pun is intended but these are some of his weakest entries I’ve seen to date, and I’m not sure if it’s because they’ve been simplified back to what they were at the very beginning or not.
So what happened next? Willy would disappear completely after a few months and even the mighty OiNK megastar Pete would follow suit about six months after the merge (although he did cross over into regular character Thunderclap’s strip). As I said I don’t know if many Buster readers would’ve appreciated him as much as pig pals did. Tom was another story altogether though. He became one of Buster’s most popular characters and would remain in the comic all the way until its ultimate cancellation in 2000.
Lew created brand new weekly instalments for Tom all the way until 1996, over 400 strips in total for the brainless bully over ten years. He even made the cover on occasion, taking the place of title character Buster himself, proving Tom’s popularity with readers of both the 80s and the 90s. Even to this day, anyone who has dealt with online trolls will still get a kick out of the Tom Thug strips.
“We’ll try and make things easy for your first week, Mike!”
Buster to artist Mike Lacey
I’ll finish things off with a Buster strip from the issue with X-Ray Specs on the cover. Tom Paterson took a break for a couple of weeks (given the amount he squeezed into his pages it’s understandable!) and instead Mike Lacey drew the character. Brilliantly, this is also the basis for the plot. I love it when a comics character acknowledges they’re inside a comic and here Buster and Delbert decide to help Mike by having everyone on their best (and easiest to draw) behaviour.
This reads like a practical joke from writer Mark Bennington to Mike so I asked Mark about it. However, he wrote literally hundreds of scripts so it’s only understandable that he can’t recall a specific one, but he did tell me, “It seems to follow my slow build up to a twisted chaotic end style which I liked to do. Sometimes the editor Allen Cummings gave me a couple of sentences on subject matter to follow for the coming issue and I put up a script idea based on that.” Like all of Mark’s work for Buster it’s a brilliant piece of writing and there’s a ton of his work in the Tom Paterson book which will be getting reviewed here soon.
There we go, that’s our look at the beginning of the Buster/OiNK merge complete. The amount of brand new (to me) Tom strips still out there to read makes an attempt to collect them all very tempting. Expensive, but tempting. And that’s not including the fact Specky Hector would return with a multi-part guide to comics after his very funny one in OiNK, and Lew would also draw Vampire Brats, scripted by OiNK co-editor Mark Rodgers. There are some key moments from those years I’ll definitely be covering on the blog though so keep your eyes peeled for those further down the line. Beyond that, you never know…
Don’t forget Pete, Tom and Willy star in the second OiNK! Book and you’ll see if they’re included in the highlights on Christmas Day 2023.
This was the day back in 1988 when the 68th edition of OiNK was due on the shelves, but it didn’t appear. It would be a full week late for me, finally appearing the following Saturday, 22nd October. This was potentially deliberate according to co-editor Patrick Gallagher and I’ll talk about that in the issue’s review. However a week before it arrived, behind this innocuous Tom Paterson cover of Buster, was some terrible news for any pig pals who happened to read OiNK’s sister comic.
Images taken from previous OiNK strips drawn by Lew Stringer and Mike Green
Describing Pete Throb, Weedy Willy and especially Tom Thug as “funsters” doesn’t give me much confidence that the editor of Buster understood these characters or the sense of humour OiNK readers had. Indeed, Lew Stringer has told me about how he changed some popular aspects of his strips for the merge. Will they still be recognisable as the characters we’ve grown to love for two-and-a-half years? Will they still be just as funny when translated to the pages of a more traditional comic, the likes of which OiNK was created to counter and would often ridicule?
You’ll find out in one week. On the same day as the review of OiNK#68 I’ll be taking a look at the first four issues of Buster to contain these favourites. They were the only issues to feature the name of the comic they came from on the cover and at the time I only ever bought the first of them. Why? You’ll find out in seven days on Sunday 22nd October 2023.
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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