Tag Archives: Patrick Gallagher

Christmas, Pig Pals

THE GRUNTS CELEBRiTiES SPECiAL

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In 2026 I’ll be starting a new regular series for OiNK’s pig pals, specifically those pig pals who wrote in to Uncle Pigg and had the thrill of seeing their name in the comic. Grunts was the letters page which had everything except letters on it! Drawings, celebrity spoofs, newspaper clippings (about OiNK or anything pig-related really), jokes for Nasty Laffs & Specs… you name it and the young readers had thought about it and sent it in.

To kick things off, here’s something special for the holidays: The Grunts Celebrity Special! Whether it was a reader spotting one of their favourite 80s celebs name-checking their favourite comic, a bonafide celeb pig pal themselves getting in touch, celebs partaking in an OiNK photo shoot voted for by readers or a politician meeting one of the editors. These appearances kind of went over my head as a kid, however as an adult it’s fun to see the waves this very different comic was making in the world of 80s entertainment.

As I sit here enjoying my glass of Red, Red Schloer we begin with #10’s Grunts, back when readers were lining up to send their problems in to be laughed at by their porcine pal, and the first celebrity appearance is UB40 frontman Ali Campbell! It’s a quote from another magazine spotted by Rupert French from Congleton in Cheshire and Uncle Pigg uses it to request readers let him know of any stars who Can’t Help Falling In Love With OiNK.

The next big musical name to grace the pages was Ian Astbury of The Cult who really was a true fan of the comic. Ian even bought OiNK mugs and t-shirts before he was interviewed by co-editor Tony Husband in the guise of Janet Street Porker, OiNK’s resident entertainment reporter. A quick preview of this appeared on the Grunts page of #15, below. 

As I noted in the review for #16 this was quite the scoop for a children’s comic and a very surreal moment for Tony, seeing as how he was a fan of The Cult too. The MADchester music and cultural scene in 80s Manchester is well documented and has been the subject of many a documentary. It was a centre of talent, innovation and creativity, and OiNK was right there at the centre of it. Not only physically (given the office’s proximity to those in the scene) but also in its popularity with bands, singers, writers and more. You can read a little bit more about this in the issue’s review and in the post about my phone chats with Tony.

Below The Cult interview you can see the newsagent reservation coupon and a band called The 3 Johns, who I’d never heard of before this. This was actually another band of Jon Langford’s. Jon’s art can be seen in a few issues of OiNK after he was brought on by Tony and he and his band The Mekons starred in a couple of photo stories too! Also in #16 was a rather original competition, in which one lucky (depending on your point of view) reader could win a pop concert in their home. Le Lu Lus (or ‘Lelu Lu’s’) contacted OiNK as fans themselves and became the prize.

It’s time to Say Hello… to the next celebrity guest on the Grunts page of #22. Where this photo came from is anyone’s guess. Was it in a magazine like above? Is the excellently-name Ferny Bubble of Wandsworth, Southwest London a friend of Marc Almond’s? Or just a very keen pig pal? Marc of course was best known for being one half of Soft Cell, whose Tainted Love is still a floor filler (at least in my living room) to this day.

Not even celebrities were immune from Uncle Pigg’s jibes! As we …Wave Goodbye to Marc check out that Read All About It box next to him. This was the first time a press clipping about OiNK appeared in the comic as the wider printed media started to sit up and take notice. You can read all of the many clippings the editors loved showing off in their own blog post.

Half a year after their pop music special the OiNK team put together another musically-themed issue with #29 and it contained a few links back to the previous one, the biggest one being a full-page strip to announce the winner of the concert-in-your-home competition. Martin Benster was lucky he lived in Prestwich. Prestwich is a part of Greater Manchester and the OiNK guys couldn’t afford to send the band further afield so they were always going to choose someone local!

If you head off to #29’s review (don’t forget to come back) you’ll also see one of those great Mekons photo stories.

Two weeks later came the results of the OiNK Awards, in which readers had been given the chance to vote for their favourite (and least favourite) celebrities in a variety of daft categories. Biggest Wally, Worst Pop Song and Unfunniest Comedian were just some of the awards the kids had their say in choosing. While most of the winners were represented as Spitting Image Workshop puppets, BBC Radio DJ Steve Wright was game for a laugh and appeared in person to be presented with his Most Irritating DJ award by fellow DJ John Peel.

There’s one more special appearance in OiNK by a well-known public figure and it’s back to the Grunts page itself. Unlike most other comics OiNK included reader contributions in its specials and annuals, and in the pages of the second OiNK Holiday Special up popped the then-Health Minister Edwina Currie alongside Frank Sidebottom and co-editor Patrick Gallagher… not that Uncle Pigg appreciated this description!

This was part of the big anti-smoking push that OiNK was also a part of with its free Smokebuster Special given away to schools in the north of England. At a special event involving a bunch of lucky pig pals the press were in attendance including the South Manchester Reporter, which appears to have been Patrick’s old stomping ground.

There’s a rather funny story (infamous in the history of OiNK) related to just after this photograph was taken. The three editors (Patrick, Mark Rodgers and Tony) and Frank (Chris Sievey) saw all of the children back to the railway station and got them onto their respective trains home. Then all four of them lit up! The thing is, the press hadn’t left yet. But hey, this was all about stopping the kids from starting and they were out of sight, so you can’t fault the team’s ultimate goal. You can read highlights from the special Smokebuster edition of OiNK and its clear message in its own full review.  

That’s our quick tour through the celebrity cameos from OiNK’s run. If you remember having something printed in the pages of the world’s funniest comic please get in touch via the contact form on the blog, or through social media (links in the main menu) or email at OiNK.Blog@iCloud.com. The new Grunts series is due to begin next September and will be updated quarterly with all of the reader submissions from the issues released over that time, and it’d be great to speak to some of those featured. Have you still got your Piggy Pink Prize?

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CHRiSTMAS 2025

Creating OiNK

THE OiNK SCRAPBOOK

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These days we can document our lives as much (or as little) as we like thanks to the phones that never leave our vicinity. In fact, now I’ve a cat living with me it’s become my camera that just so happens to have a phone built in. Back in the 80s the process of getting our hands on the photos we’d taken was a more involved process, for me it required trips to the local chemist and at least a 24 hour wait and everything! So we were a lot more selective with our documenting back then.

Over the last several years some of the OiNK team have either very generously sent me photos or shared them on the Facebook group which I’ve then saved. This has endied up becoming a little collection of its own. So I thought the festive season, when we’re taking lots of photos to capture new memories with each other as well as thinking back to our own younger days, would be the perfect time to show these off in a kind of random scrapbook-like post. And here we are.

Let’s kick off with Jeremy Banx (Burp, Mr. Big Nose).

“So this is me posing in front of some pictures I’d drawn of Supercar when I was about 4”, Jeremy tells me. “I’m looking dubious because my dad or my gran or maybe both had told me by taking the photo it would make my drawings come to life just like on TV. This of course did not happen and I’ve never trusted anyone since.”

Jeremy’s photo reminds me of the comics my friend Roger and I created as kids. Roger created The Battle-oids, The School Busters and The Wally, while I created WarBots, The Real Smoke Busters and The Idiot. (Hey, he inspired me!) Also, together with our friend Bruce we made a monthly comic for our primary school classroom called The Moo! But anyway, back to the OiNK team and David Leach (Psycho Gran, Dudley DJ) 

“Reading that article again after all this time is funny”, said David when I asked him about it. “The strip I’m working on in that picture is the birthday strip for the OiNK anniversary issue, where Psycho emerges from a birthday cake. The story about me working for Bob Godfrey is true, he was the first person I worked for as a cartoonist, I did that for a year drawing Henry’s Cat. I was Bob Godfrey’s ghost artist.”

At the end of the article a potential new OiNK character who never made it into the comic is revealed. “Brian Damage was something I was noodling with back then, but never got beyond the planning stage, although he did become a female character called Maxine Damage: Hit Girl for Hire, that was drawn by Jim Cheung and scheduled to appear in a Marvel UK comic magazine I developed called HYPER. It was to be a frenzied monthly anthology based on the style of Japanese Manga and would have featured a strip called B.O.B about a sentient walking bomb walking through a battlefield in search of his target written by Banx.”

Co-editor Patrick Gallagher has shared a plethora of old photographs both online and over our email exchanges, often jazzing them up with graphics and behind-the-scenes insights, such as these example. Below, you can see OiNK photographer John Barry with a rather familiar looking crocodile in front of him, but it’s the unfinished sculpture in the background that caught my eye, hence the superimposed OiNK Book 1989.

As described by Patrick, “John also helped out when we were pitching the TV show Round the Bend. Here he’s sculpting a model of Doc Croc in clay and on the desk in the background is a cast from a previous sculpt based on the butcher on the cover of The OiNK Book 1989. Also on the desk is a junior hacksaw he moulded from Play Doh.” Typical Patrick!

You’ll also see in the background Ian Jackson’s cardboard cutout of Mary Lighthouse from the first OiNK Holiday Special casting a beady eye over John’s work. Speaking of Round the Bend, it was co-created by OiNK’s three editors, Patrick, Tony Husband and Mark Rodgers and was nominated for a Royal Television Award. Tony shared these photographs from the night of the awards event, the first showing (from left-to-right) Patrick, Mark and Tony, while the second also includes Mark’s partner and friend of the blog Helen Jones, and rather randomly Rory McGrath!

“Patrick, Mark and me at the Royal Television Awards with Round the Bend,” said Tony. “Where we came runners up so we got pissed, and me and Rory McGrath were nearly thrown out for shouting abuse at Richard Stilgoe, who was doing a set and we thought he was smug and shit.” (Stilgoe is a songwriter, musician and broadcaster and has contributed lyrics to Cats, Starlight Express and The Phantom of the Opera, in case you didn’t know.)

These weren’t the only photos in Tony’s archive. Next up is a wonderful collection of polaroids and snaps by OiNK photographer Ian Tilton that Tony scanned in, mainly of #30’s OiNK Awards when they worked with the Spitting Image Workshop to produce an apparently star-studded event. You’ll also see one of the actual celebrities, John Peel amongst the chaos, a photograph taken of Marc Riley as a disguised Snatcher Sam and Tony’s son, Paul Husband who you’ll also see in the next photo posing with some of his dad’s creations.

Today, Paul is a renowned commercial photographer and OiNK had its very own renowned snapper in the guise of Ian Tilton. That last photo in the collage was taken during the making of The Bully Who Went Bald in #2 and according to Tony, “With Marc all hunched over dressed like this, passers-by and car drivers were stunned and puzzled.” As for Ian, he has worked with such icons as Kurt Cobain, Iggy Pop and The Stone Roses, and has been praised by Q Magazine for “one of the six best rock photographs of all time”.

He also photographed the equally iconic (in my eyes anyway) cover to The OiNK! Book 1988 and there’s a special post about that cover and Ian’s other OiNK work which went up on the blog earlier this Christmas season. Something less plasticine based and more liquid based is next. Ian first met the OiNK guys at its launch party in some nice, plush pub in Manchester when he’d been asked to come along and take a portrait of the three editors for some pre-publicity. Family and friends were all watching as Ian attempted the photo session. “Attempted” being the operative word.

As told to me by Ian, trying to find Patrick, Mark and Tony had been difficult with the crowds in attendance, never mind trying to organise the three of them under his studio lights now that they were so drunk! Ian says it was great fun and the shots of them grinning and gurning were worth it. (I think we can all agree on that.) Not that they hung around though, they immediately ran back off to get even more drunk.

The next horrifying image is of Hunchback Boar of Scare Boars fame from #13, the last surviving member of the terrifying trio… or the only one we know the whereabouts of! According to Patrick he found him lurking under the lid of his scanner in the lead up to Halloween 2021, just in time for the review of 1986’s spooky spectacular. Check it out and you’ll even see a video of Patrick and the Scare Boar together again after two-and-a-half decades.

The next photos will be rather small when you click on them because that’s the size they were when shared by Patrick. First up is a photo of him and Marc Riley (of The Fall and BBC 6Music and creator of Harry the Head, Doctor Looney and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth) on holiday, followed by a shot of some lucky pig pals getting to sit in on the recording of the OiNK 45 record. Not only did they get to meet Patrick and Marc (fresh back from that holiday and rather tanned), they also hung out with Frank Sidebottom himself, Chris Sievey. Then, a photo of Patrick with someone who didn’t work on OiNK but who you just might recognise.

Patrick met David Bowie when he was tasked with looking after him for half an hour before the Mark and Lard radio show (Mark Radcliffe and our own Marc). The photo was taken by David’s manager and you can tell Patrick’s just a little bit happy, can’t you? While there were no mentions or clippings on the Grunts pages mentioning this particular celebrity, Patrick tells me David Bowie confirmed he was a bona fide OiNK reader!

I’m going to wrap up our OiNK Scrapbook with some of my own photographs. The first time I met Patrick was during the days of the old blog. He was on a family vacation in Donegal and took the rather long drive to Belfast (across the island!) to see me in my old house to discuss some future projects. Not long after that I then got to meet Lew Stringer (Tom Thug, Pete and his Pimple, Pigswilla) and Davy Francis (Cowpat County, Greedy Gorb, Doctor Madstarkraving) at the Enniskillen Comic Fest.

I’ve spoken with Patrick and Lew ever since and count them as true friends. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Davy a few times over coffee or a Greggs sausage roll, and I’m glad to say he’s an absolute gent and a really funny guy to hang out with. In the photo with Davy is the fantastic Jenika Ioffreda (Vampire Free Style) and the last photo was taken during what ended up being a simply hilarious chat in a local bar after the comic con with Lew, Ian Richardson (Sinister Dexter, Captain America, Judge Dredd) and the man who had us in stitches most of the night, Yanick Paquette (Wonder Woman, Batman Incorporated, Swamp Thing).

Yes, these last few aren’t from the time of OiNK but they’re most definitely memorable moments from the time of the OiNK Blog. Maybe one day I should share more of the behind-the-scenes of this site and the work (and fun) that goes into it, but for now we’ll close the OiNK Scrapbook. These photos are just the smallest of hints at what it must’ve been like to put our favourite anarchic comic together.

Wouldn’t it be great to know more…?

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CHRiSTMAS 2025

OiNK Comic Reviews

OiNK! SUMMER COLLECTiON!: THE FiNAL FiNALE

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Five months ago I spoke about the surprise of finding the OiNK Winter Special waiting for me in the newsagent when I went to pick up my comics back in 1989. With no mention of it in the previous edition it felt extra special to get one final issue of my favourite (and first) comic, but I believed that was the end. So I was extremely happy when, in April 1990, a whole year-and-a-half after OiNK‘s cancellation I was proven wrong.

It’s a weighty volume at 64 pages so it’s a lot thicker than the previous holiday specials, but my teenage enthusiasm was tempered somewhat when I read the strapline along the bottom of the cover. The “Summer Collection” title referred to the fact this was a collection of reprint strips I’d read before, with only one new four-page strip in the middle of the comic featuring cameos from favourite characters rather than new individual stories.

As such, I knew this must definitely be the last OiNK there was ever going to be. Since I hadn’t read any of my issues in a long time, 13-year-old me did sit down and read the whole thing, and I really enjoyed revisiting a lot of the strips that had made me laugh so much previously. So how does it hold up today? The new strip is by co-editor Patrick Gallagher and in a neat, funny twist he takes the name of the special and turns it into the plot of his final tale.

It’s a simple story and all of these fan favourite characters are reduced to one gag each as the aliens examine them, which was a shame when the arrival of a new issue of OiNK was such an event after it ended. However, I do like Dead Fred‘s ever-so-polite response and I genuinely laughed out loud at the plummeting spaceship making such an anti-climatic crash landing! Uncle Pigg is the real star here and is always entertaining, although as a kid I was gutted to see him back on the sand and raking in the cash like we’ve seen him before but with no mention of any future OiNKs.

Before you disregard this final ever edition as “just a bunch of reprints”, think of it in the context of today. For any pig pal who has been enjoying the blog and would love to read some of their favourites again but can’t decide which memorable issues to buy, and perhaps worry about spending a lot of money in the process, the Summer Collection could be the answer. Here’s just a small selection of the classic treats included.

Tom Thug by Lew Stringer
Uncle Pigg by Mark Rodgers and Ian Jackson
Vernon the Vet by Wilkie
Sammy the Steam Engine by Ralph Shephard
Greedy Gorb by Davy Francis
How Radio Sound Effects Are Produced
by Patrick Gallagher and Marc Riley

I’ve featured all of these on the blog before and for good reason. In fact, that’s a good point to make about this collection, that it feels properly curated for the most part. It’s not a random selection of reprints to fill a quota of pages. The strips are pulled from throughout OiNK’s run and the selections for each character are some of their best. So yes, if you no longer own any OiNKs this is a great place to start.

Unfortunately, some of those who had left OiNK before the end aren’t present (perhaps something to do with reprint rights) so don’t expect anything from the likes of Jeremy Banx’s Burp or Mr. Big Nose, but there’s still plenty to go around and loads of Ian Jackson, someone we missed during those monthly issues. There’s also one new contributor. Despite this being a reprint collection and Patrick’s strip being the only one given publicity, there are two new ones hidden away inside.

I can’t seem to find any information online about Steven Smith, if that is indeed his actual name. As you can see, one of their strips is dated so these were clearly created long after OiNK had been cancelled. Unfortunately, Patrick can’t recall any details about them or how their strips came to be randomly included, and extensive searching online doesn’t produce any results either.

The style is reminiscent of some Viz artists and the bad taste comics that flooded the UK market around the time but speaking with Lew Stringer and Davey Jones (both Viz contributors over the years) Steven wasn’t in that comic either. In fact, it comes across like they’re trying too hard to copy styles from those comics. Personally speaking, the strips feel quite stiff too, despite what actually happens in both. They’re not bad, but after 79 other OiNK reviews they’re not setting the sty alight.

This final panel from a Sekret Diary ov Hadrian Vile – Aged 8 5/8 (yearƨ) written by co-editor Mark Rodgers and drawn as ever by Ian Jackson could’ve given a little bit of false hope at the time, mentioning a “neckst issyoo” as it does. But even as a kid I concluded this was just an unfortunate choice of reprint rather than anything else. And with that, we’ve reached the end of OiNK’s real time read through on the blog, a whole four years after it began!

It’s only after reading the whole run as an adult that, as I close over the last page of the OiNK Summer Collection, I see it couldn’t have ended on a better and more personal note. The back cover is the same back cover as #14, the very first issue of OiNK (and the very first comic) I ever bought. Written and drawn by the wonderful team of Mark and Ian, it’s one hell of a coincidence. OiNK ends by bringing me full circle back to that fateful day in November 1986 when I discovered it in the first place. 

With 80 real time reviews now up on the blog and a wealth of extras there’s tons of content available for pig pals. I’m not ending things here, though. I’ve a wealth of special posts planned for the next few years at the very least and other exciting OiNK-related projects you’ll find out about soon. This is called the OiNK Blog after all, and just as the promo for the Holiday Special ’89 said, “It hasn’t got the chop, it hasn’t had its bacon”, the OiNK Blog continues.

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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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Christmas, OiNK Merchandise, Pig Pals

PRiME PORKY PRODUCTS: PiG PALS & THEiR MERCH

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Merry Christmas everyone!

A few Christmases ago now I received a shoebox in the post in shiny wrapping paper with strict instructions not to open it until Christmas Day. It was from Helen Jones, partner of the late OiNK co-editor Mark Rodgers. I remember my mum was also eager to know what she’d sent me and when I finally got to open it she laughed while I grinned from ear-to-ear. After decades I was the owner of an OiNK mug once more!

Helen knew of how I’d accidentally left my own OiNK mug at a previous workplace in my late teens and that I’d been hunting for a replacement for years. She still had Mark’s mug in a display cabinet and very kindly sent me it for Christmas! That and the OiNK 45 record were the only pieces of piggy pink merchandise I owned as a kid and the latter was warped by the hot sun very soon after I got it. Thankfully I was able to buy a mint condition replacement for the latter on eBay a couple of years back and there’s a blog post in which you can listen to all three of its songs.

Reading the comics again as an adult I’m surprised I never had more of Uncle Pigg’s bits and pieces. If it were today I’d definitely be lapping up everything I could get my trotters on (and there’s an exciting Christmas update further below!), but perhaps having to go through parents curbed that somewhat and then OiNK’s cancellation put paid to any more collecting. But earlier on this year I got to thinking about other pig pals who had been luckier. What if they’d held on to it all?

I reached out to some OiNK fans through social media and asked them if they’d like to show off their merch on the blog. It was a silly question! Who wouldn’t like to boast about having some of this stuff? First to reply was Neil Clarke who has kept a wealth of OiNK pieces in mint condition for three decades. This could be down to the fact that he was a bit older than the rest of us careless kids.

“I got into OiNK as I was a big fan of The Fall and Marc Riley played with them,” Neil told me. “I was into punk music when I was 12 or 13 and OiNK came out when I was 20ish!” Not only that but his brother was a bit of a pig pal too. “My brother Ian won a drawing competition in OiNK and received this bag (like you, I’m jealous of it), so I got him rummaging up in his loft.”

To make you just as jealous as me, here are some photos of Neil’s collection including said bag, his Pig Pack membership club pack (including the letter from Uncle Pigg) and even a photo of the time he met the creator of Harry the Head, Marc himself.

Not only that, as you can see from his not-at-all-smug photo he’s wearing the one-and-only OiNK sweatshirt! That’s the holy grail of OiNK merch right there. Who can forget the “Get sweaty! Get shirty! Get this sweaty-shirty!” advert? Looking back, I really can’t fathom why I didn’t ask my parents (or Santa) for the t-shirt. I’d have loved that! I still would. Hence my daily email from eBay updating me on anything in their clothing selection with the word “oink” included these past several years.

Neil wasn’t the only person to show off the latter piece of pig apparel. When Jackie McCree got back in touch with me she told me she had the t-shirt but during recent renovations it had been put into storage… somewhere! Bless you for going to all the trouble Jackie. Saying that, you can just tell she’s got a huge grin behind this t-shirt, can’t you? Show off!

“I was a big supporter of OiNK,” Jackie told me as a way of curbing my jealousy. “Bought the merchandise, joined the pig pals, and bought extra comics to give to people and leave in doctor/dentist waiting rooms. If I remember correctly my friend Aly Fell submitted a comic strip to OiNK and they used it. I didn’t know Aly at the time but we’ve been friends for decades.” Might have to look into that!

It’s at this point I’ve got that special Christmas Day update!! Jackie very (very, very) kindly packaged up her never-worn OiNK t-shirt and offered to send it to me! I couldn’t believe it! It even came gift wrapped. Naturally, given how much I love both OiNK and this time of year, I didn’t open it until today.

As a kid we received our presents from Santa first thing in the morning but presents under the tree never got opened until after Christmas dinner, and that traditional carries on to this day. So it’s been a long wait but after three-and-a-half-decades a few hours more were nothing. I can’t believe I’ve finally got it! I never, ever thought this would happen so thank you so much Jackie and Merry Christmas to you!

Okay, so I can’t exactly wear it (it’s a child’s small) but I’ll be sourcing a frame and getting this up in my writing room after the holidays, that’s for sure!

Next up is camera shy Steve Finch who has the mug, the pig pack paraphernalia and also a rare piece of OiNK memorabilia in the shape of the promotional folder used by IPC Magazines around the time of the comic’s launch. In fact, it was Steve’s folder that he kindly let me use in one of several posts on the blog detailing the pre-pig days.

Steve also has an original copy of the piece of OiNK gear that’s received the most coverage on the blog to date. Still in its box is his OiNK computer game from CRL. It’s even for the best computer of the 80s, the Commodore 64! (Even though I didn’t get my C64 until 1991. I’ve apparently always been a retro head, even when I was retro.) Now for any young readers that thing sitting in front of the box is called a ‘cassette’.

If there’s one OiNK-themed item even trickier, nay impossible, to get our hands on today it must surely be the bubblegum. What? OiNK had bubblegum? It did indeed. It was only ever seen in one issue as a competition prize in #62, the final weekly before the big revamp. This was a sticky treat with a use by date so you’re not exactly going to see any on eBay, but that’s not to say there isn’t a remnant of this particular piece of comic history somewhere…

That somewhere is the house of OiNK co-editor Patrick Gallagher. Thanks so much for taking part Patrick, I just hope all of the actual gum is long gone and there isn’t anything too scary growing inside that thing. Bright pink (of course) bubblegum and only 2p each? I know I’ve turned 47 four days ago but now I feel old.

“I need to find my Weedy Willy hat.” That’s what pig pal Sue Hall told me when she was rooting around her house looking for her Pig Pack membership goodies and her old school folder covered in one or two OiNK stickers. Sue’s handiwork has appeared on the blog before, when she somehow built the impossible-to-build cut-out Street-Hogs Road-Hogg from #11!

Kevin Tuson is a man who not only has a large OiNK collection to show off, he’s a man who knows exactly how to show it off. I asked everyone if they could supply a photo of them with their merchandise and Kevin certainly agreed! I’m not saying there’s a smugness to his pose but, well, there’s a smugness to his pose. With the complete comics collection, the free gifts, the Pig Pack membership goodies and more, including several letter correspondence from OiNK (which we’ll take a look at some point in the future), I can’t blame him.

That last photo is of Kevin’s son, Sacha. Taken about ten years ago when Kevin quickly needed someone who would actually fit inside the child-sized t-shirt for a photo, I’m sure the now-22-years-of-age Sacha will be ecstatic that his dad sent in this photo for publication on the OiNK Blog.

To round things off we move from OiNKtown to Beanotown with Danny Pearson, current writer for the legendary comic who reached out to me a while back to tell me he’d found a piece of merchandise for OiNK’s spiritual sequel, something I’d been trawling the auction site for to no avail. Created by OiNK’s Mark Rodgers, Patrick Gallagher and Tony Husband, TV show Round the Bend also had a one-off comic special. This is like hen’s teeth on eBay today, so cue a bit of well-deserved smugness from Danny. (Love the background too, bonus points for that.)

That’s us, folks. I thought having a little look at some of these items with fellow pig pals would make for a nice Christmas Day treat, given how some of us may have received these as gifts when we were children (or after I turned 40 in my case). I’d like to thank everyone who took part for showing us their OiNK merchandise and thereby sharing their personal memories.

I hope everyone reading has been having (or have had) a lovely day so far, that you’ll go heavy on the turkey and roasties, polish off at least three bottles of Schloer and enjoy your afternoon nap before your turkey sandwiches for tea. Come back in a few days for more Christmas-like feels when I take a look at the toys and games (real ones) advertised in OiNK. More 80s fondness to come!

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CHRiSTMAS 2024