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!
As is traditional on the blog the first festive post after the Christmasintroduction is the next volume in the Big Comic Book series from Fleetway, collecting together more classic strips from their flagship title Buster, as well as Whizzer and Chips and Whoopee, the latter of which had already ceased publication by the time this series began. This hardback 256-page whopper pretty much keeps to the same formula as before, which is no bad thing.
With all eight books on the shelf behind me as I read, it feels like a real event to finally be able to crack open another and see what’s been included this time. Of course, I grin from ear-to-ear as I flick through it and spot a certain toothless great white shark on several pages, once again drawn by John Geering from the pages of Buster. He may not have been the original artist but for me he was the first whose undersea world I saw and this strip is written by OiNK’s very own Graham Exton.
I just laugh so hard at how expressive John’s version of the character is. Despite a shark being somewhat limited in details, John’s expert way with Gums’ eyes can convey everything from sadistic humour to intrigued, self-importance or even fear! I adore his drawing of the white whale too. As for what appears to be some kind of distant, abandoned underwater city and a briefcase or petrol can in the first panel, I’ve no idea. I’ve even asked some experts and we’re none the wiser. It just seems too specifically drawn to be some random background detail. Perhaps it refers to something from a previous Gums strip.
This isn’t the last you’ll hear of Gums or the only highlight of his you’ll see this Christmas. If you’re a fan of the Jaws wannabe you’ll want to come back here on Wednesday 4th December 2024 to read a full review of Rebellion’s first Gums book! It collects together all of the original Monster Fun strips and I’m hoping it’ll prove to be one of the highlights of the holiday season on the blog this year (I haven’t read it yet).
This is the first I’ve seen Boy Boss., written by OiNK co-editor Mark Rodgers. According to Graham, “His experience of Big Business were working in a betting ship in Whitby, tending bar at his dad’s British Legion in Redcar, and packing tampons for the Christmas rush at Lewis’s department store in Leeds. So he was very much winging it.” (Thanks for commenting on the post with this, Graham!)
Originating in Wow! and merging into Whoopee, Boy Boss is the owner of a huge multi-national corporation but he’d rather be out playing with his mates. That’s the basic premise. He also has a put-upon assistant by the name of Jasper who tries to keep him on the straight and narrow and ultimately boring life that would serve the company’s bottom line the best. While there are funny moments, I can’t help but notice two of his strips make jokes of things we rightly scorn today, namely getting employees to work through the breaks and insisting they’re reachable on days off or even on holiday (which at the time of writing is a hot topic on social media).
I’m not for one moment suggesting artist Frank Diarmid (Roger the Dodger, Kid Kong, Frankie Stein) would’ve supported such things, it’s just a silly comic strip and they’re genuinely funny, especially the endings of both where Boy Boss is actually on the receiving end of his own ideas. I’m just making the point that these are examples of some the contents of these books showing their age a bit.
They were already classic strips from older editions of the three weeklies when this was published in 1988, never mind now. However, having read three of these mammoth books so far it’s comforting that they still read so well decades later. Although, there may be one character who could be seen as somewhat problematic today, who I’ll get to further on.
Just how big does a VCR need to be?!
I had to check on the artists for the next two strips with those friends of the blog, Lew Stringer and John Freeman. For (deep breath) Ivor Lott and Tony Broke with Milly O’Naire and Penny Less (phew!) I was quick to assume it was Sid Burgon but there’s no signature. While it was rare for cartoonists to be allowed to do so back then (OiNK very much broke that mould), Sid always did and his strips elsewhere in this book have his name written on them.
Originally appearing in Cor!, the original strip with just the two boys continued all the way through to Buster’s final issue. The girls had been stars of Jackpot and when it too merged with Buster they came along and the strips also joined together, although the girls’ names were dropped from 1985 despite continuing to appear.
[Speaking about a friend of mine], the similarities to Benny Bones couldn’t be ignored
Every week Ivor and Milly would boast about some material possessions they owned, usually things that were bigger and grander than those owned or coveted by Tony and Penny. Inevitably, in the end their boastful ways would land them in trouble and the two “poor” characters would have the last laugh. There’s a not-very-subtle lesson in there for us all, and I enjoyed seeing the imaginative ways the strip would lead to its predictable conclusion. Although, just how big does a VCR need to be?! Surely more expensive technology is meant to be smaller and sleeker, even in the 70s and 80s?
I haven’t forgotten about the issue of the artist responsible and below is the other strip I wanted to bring up. Whizzer and Chips star, Benny Bones was the ultimate in lazy children and would often put more mental effort into how to get out of doing something than it would take to do it, often falling asleep in the process.
On the day I read this strip my friend Vicki and I were watching the same TV show in our two separate houses. Over a text she asked me what time it was over at and I told her she could just press the button on her remote to find out. Her response was that she was watching it in bed and was too lazy to do that… despite the effort it took to ask me via text! The similarities to Benny couldn’t be ignored, but the fact this very strip contains a similar moment was such a coincidence it had to be included in this review!
So anyway, I found out Colin Whittock drew Lazy Bones until 1986 but there’s no information on who took over. This strip is likely to have been drawn before then but it’s somewhat looser in style than normal. As for Ivor et all, the same conclusion was drawn by the experts. Perhaps Sid was on holiday, for example, and someone had to ghost his style. We’ve no way of finding out so for now I’ll say they’re most likely by Sid and Colin respectively, but there’s a chance some unknown cartoonists were responsible.
Originally in Cheeky Weekly then Whoopee, the Paddywack mini-strips by Jack Clayton were basically about an idiot who made stupid mistakes. While it was never confirmed, there was an assumption he was Irish, back at a time when Irish people could be the butt of jokes in the playground. In these more enlightened times we simply wouldn’t do that anymore. Name aside, there’s nothing in any of the strips of his I’ve read that I’d have a problem with, and I live in Belfast.
I do remember as a teenager telling one of those Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman jokes to an English friend who had told many of them to us. But of course we changed it so the Englishman was the butt of the joke. He was greatly offended! He completely missed the point we were trying to make and continued telling us there was nothing wrong with the way he told those jokes, but ours was wrong. Take from that what you will.
Drawn by the always brilliant Mike Lacey, Kids’ Court only ran for a few years in Whoopee in the 1970s, but it was so memorable when I originally read it in these books and Big Comic Fortnightly. At its core it’s a basic role reversal strip but it’s done so brilliantly and so chaotically it feels highly original. In this world the kids are the cops, the judges and the juries punishing misbehaving adults. I particularly like the way the captured park warden is still in the letterbox when he gets his court date! That made me laugh.
On the very next page from Kids’ Court comes one of the double-page spreads for Jim Watson’s Store Wars, a strip of two halves for me. Originally in Whizzer and Chips, it was basically another version of Ivor Lott and Tony Broke, with Mr. Superstore and his mega-store constantly trying to put the tiny, local Bloggs and Son shop out of business but constantly failing to do so, often spending huge amounts of cash in the attempt.
Having deleted my Amazon account last year I’m enjoying using smaller businesses online and across Belfast so this strip felt particularly relevant upon reading it, if in a highly exaggerated way of course. Why is it a strip of two halves? Because in every example in this book there’s a very funny outcome but there’s always a somewhat patronising statement from Mr. Superstore explaining the joke. They’d be much funnier without these.
Every year I’m trying to show you different strips than those I’ve shown you in previous Big Comic Books (apart from Gums, of course) and lastly for this year is a character I have no recollection of whatsoever from childhood, which is a shame because his pages are great. I did enjoy his inclusion in The Tom Paterson Collection though. From the pages of Whizzer and Chips and drawn by the hilarious Tom, here’s Guy Gorilla.
Transforming into a giant gorilla whenever he eats peanuts, he retains a modicum of awareness of who he is and doesn’t cause any real harm, just a lot of panic and mess. I think it’s a really fun set up and the more episodes I read in this book the funnier it got that no one knows it’s him! Everyone is very aware that there’s a random gorilla hanging around somewhere and Guy’s excuses about why he’s never there at the same time can be so silly, but they take his word for it every time. A great little strip that unfortunately only ran for about a year in total.
And that’s us for another year, folks! As you can see below there’s still a ways to go. With five more Big Comic Books (and two Funny Fortnightly/Monthly volumes) you can expect more classic highlights from some of the most renowned UK cartoonists of all time up until Christmas 2029 at least! That’s if you don’t all get bored of me in the meantime.
This year you can also expect reviews of Rebellion’s Gums collection on Wednesday 4th December and the Buster Book1990 (released in 1989), the first to feature fan favourite OiNK characters after the merge, which you can check out from Thursday 19th December. It’s already shaping up to be the best Christmas on the OiNK Blog yet!
The name Tom Paterson is synonymous with British humour comics, his madcap style appearing in an eclectic array of titles such as Beano, Shiver and Shake, Buster and many more. The most famous characters he has drawn include the fondly remembered Sweeney Toddler, Calamity James, Bananaman and Buster himself. There’s one other that will most likely have been forgotten by many though, namely The Wet Blanket.
By the time I started collecting OiNK I’d missed this strip but I’d already been introduced to Tom’s work. While I’d found my brother’s Beano wasn’t really to my taste at the time (I was the perfect target audience for OiNK), there was one strip which most definitely was. I remember pouring over all of the funny background details in Calamity James, the incidental randomness in the visual gags often being funnier than the story itself. This was the genius of Tom’s style and now here’s The Tom Paterson Collection, a hardback collection full of his work available from Rebellion and their Treasury of British Comics range.
This is just one of several chapter title pages showing which comics the following strips were pulled from and as you can see our favourite comic is represented here too. In fact, upon its release this book was the first time OiNK reprints had been made available for purchase ever since its final special in 1990. Included here are two double-page spreads from early issues, Testing Time and The Wet Blanket himself, who even makes an appearance on that fantastic cover drawn by Tom.
A kind of super villain, Wet Blanket was a “miserable so-and-so” whose sole job was to ruin everyone else’s fun. He would’ve made for a brilliant regular character but alas that wasn’t to be and this was his sole appearance. This makes it all the more surprising that he’d appear on the front cover but I think he deserves a place there, the strip is that good! Clearly Tom still has a soft spot for him after all these years.
OiNK co-creator Patrick Gallagher told me they would’ve loved to have had Tom on board as a regular but his work load was just too large to accommodate them. With spreads such as Testing Time above, taken from #1 of OiNK it’s such a shame he couldn’t have let his imagination run wild on a regular basis for Uncle Pigg. So the question is, with only four pages from OiNK in here, will this 200-page book appeal to pig pals? The answer is a resounding yes!
On one of the opening pages is the list of writers including Tom, Mark Bennington whose Buster strips I’ve covered before on the blog and most excitedly regular OiNK contributor Graham Exton and OiNK co-creator/co-editor Mark Rodgers. With these names you know you’re in for a treat. The comics featured alongside OiNK are Buster, School Fun, Nipper, Jackpot, Shiver & Shake, Whizzer and Chips, Whoopee, Wow! and Cor!, as well as some of Tom’s own personal strips and unpublished works.
Also included are little pieces by professional fans of Tom’s including Lew Stringer and Graham and friend of the blog Jamie Smart (Bunny Vs Monkey, Looshkin, Wubble) who has always said OiNK was a big inspiration to him, as was Tom.
Picking out highlights for this review was never going to be easy!
A strip riffing on James Bond and featuring a comical shark was always going to be put to the top of the list for me, as was this Captain Crucial strip, a character I’d never heard of before. That “The Craziest Characters Are Always in Buster Comic” banner along the top is proving true here and it’s used several times for different strips, namely Lucy Lastic, Sportsfright, Thingummy-blob, Coronation Stream, Monty’s Mutant Mutt, Teenage Mutant Turnips and more.
My favourite Buster strips in this book are dated around 1989 onwards and they’re enough to make me regret not placing a regular order when OiNK merged into the comic. If only I’d stuck with it after that first and only issue I bought back in 1988 I’d have been treated to a bloody funny comic if these strips by Tom are anything to go by. Oh well, that just makes this book all the better as I’m getting a snapshot of the very best from that comic in one volume.
Just one look at the contents page will back that up. As well as those already mentioned there’s Crowjack, Felix the Pussycat, Grimly Fiendish, School Belle, Watford Gapp who is another new one to me as well as being a brilliantly funny rapping strip, and many more including a favourite of mine from the days of the Big Comic Books, Strange Hill. I found the Ghost Train here particularly funny and there’s that old staple which I think Tom and Lew drew better than anyone: the slap-up feed! Classic.
It wouldn’t be a Tom Paterson book without a certain little baby boy causing all manner of hell for his poor parents, so I’m very happy to say there’s a sizeable chunk of Sweeny Toddler here. Including content from both Whoopee and Whizzer & Chips, a total of 30 pages are given over to the miniature terror and every single one of them is a classic. Of course, if you know me you’ll know I’m a sucker for a Christmas comic so naturally I was overjoyed to see this full-page panel when I turned a page.
I also laughed out loud (genuinely) when I saw a certain trademark of Tom’s used as a substitute for a Christmas stocking. In fact, I wonder just how many smelly socks there are in this book? These 30 pages of Sweeny Toddler are worth the price of admission alone. Reading them now I’m beginning to think the same could’ve been said of those other 80s comics too. Even though OiNK was the only one that seemed to speak to my sense of humour, these strips by Tom were all hidden gems to me, and I’d happily have spent more of my pocket money on some of those comics at the time if I’d known just how good his contributions were.
Of course Rebellion would include this classic spoof Judge Dredd cover and strip and that wasn’t the only time Sweeny took on a different persona for a good ol’ parody. However, changing the entire cover Whoopee logo included for that 2000AD riff was inspired! I said it was difficult to pick highlights but that’s definitely one of them and there are 200 pages of that sort of thing in total. UPDATE: Check out the comment OiNK writer Graham Exton left on this post for a little more info on this piece of comics history!
The book is £14.99 and worth every single penny. In fact, it feels like a bargain to me at that price. There’s also an exclusive cover based on that Whoppee one when purchased through the Treasury of British Comics online shop. Not since The OiNK! Book 1988 have I enjoyed, and laughed as hard with, a humour comics book this much and since that OiNK tome remains my very favourite to this day, I hope that shows how much high regard I have for The Tom Paterson Collection.
Available pretty much everywhere, this would make a fantastic Christmas present for any humour comics fan, pig pals included.
To see one more mini-strip by Tom from that aforementioned OiNK! Book 1988 you can check out its review.
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.
No, the OiNK real time read through hasn’t merged into Buster already. On this day back in 1988 another of OiNK’s sister publications (with its Tom Paterson cover) ran a special promotional crossover strip featuring one of our favourite characters. Two weeks previous Tom Thugappeared in Whizzer and Chips trying to force himself into the gangs of either Sid or Shiner to no success. The story continued into OiNK itself and now, while that was still ongoing, another of Lew Stringer’s creations was meeting Buster.
Pete Throb of Pete and his Pimple fame ‘popped’ in to help push OiNK to younger readers. Again, I never knew about this strip at the time. In fact, the first Buster I ever read was the issue when OiNK merged into it, taking Pete, Tom and Weedy Willy with it. That was also the last one I read until all these years later when writing the blog, so this is rather exciting because for me it’s my first brand new Pete strip after 35 years!
On his own blog Lew seems surprised he was asked to contribute. “Not only did they let a then-relative-newcomer like me loose in the pages of this fine, well-established comic,” he says. “But I even got to co-star Buster himself in the story – although as you can see, I didn’t show him a lot of respect!” Of course by this stage our piggy publication was no longer called ‘OiNK Weekly’, having fully settled into its new frequency. Also, I think Pete saying he partakes in lots of pimply pranks sounds like he enjoys having the huge zit to cause chaos with, which as we know isn’t the case. But it’s a fun little strip nevertheless.
Fleetway knew OiNK was already performing better than the others and had real potential
I’ve had it confirmed by OiNK co-editor Patrick Gallagher that the comic was by no means failing at this stage. Yes, sales had declined since it went weekly but sales were down across the industry. These crossover strips were a well-intentioned promotion by Fleetway Publications who could easily have cancelled OiNK before now but decided to keep it running.
As I’ve explained before, when Fleetway bought IPC Magazines’ comics they organised them into different sales groups, for example Buster and Whizzer and Chips were in one, OiNK was in another alongside Nipper and others. If the combined sales of a group didn’t perform as well as Fleetway wanted then all of the comics in that group would be canned. All of OiNK’s group were cancelled by now except OiNK itself, showing they knew it was already performing better than the others and had real potential. So instead they turned it weekly to try to increase sales. Perhaps if it had remained in its fortnightly guise with more pages, its themes and all of its characters present (all things that really set it apart) perhaps sales wouldn’t have fallen as much and these promotions could’ve helped more. We’ll never know.
This isn’t the first time Buster has featured on the blog. While the edition which contained the free preview issue of our own comic didn’t exactly promote OiNK within its pages (unlike Whizzer and Chips), the week before it did contain this advert for the craziness to come and a little promo for it on the cover.
Interestingly, that Ricky Rainbow character above is from Nipper comic, one of OiNK’s group mates who had already merged into Buster. Apparently Ricky, drawn by James Hansen, could change colour at will as well as being prone to changing colour based on his mood. I’d like to see more of his strips as I like the idea but inside this issue he doesn’t do any of those things, so yes, I’d like to see more. On the back page of this particular issue is an advert I remember very well, seeing as how completely obsessed I was with this particular franchise and those toys.
I’d just like to say a huge thank you to fellow pig pal Stephen Hyde for sending me the issues used in these two crossover posts. Previously I’d been using Lew’s images with his kind permission, and when Stephen read my posts he got in touch because he just happened to have spare copies of both! So now the two posts are made up of photos and scans of my own issues, so thanks again Stephen.
On this day 35 years ago in 1988 this comic with its Sid Burgon cover appeared in shops across the land but little was I to know, as I went into my local newsagent’s to collect OiNK, that a special additional Tom Thug strip by Lew Stringer was hiding inside Whizzer and Chips just a little way down the shelf. Back when OiNK was fortnightly and it had just started to open my eyes to the world of comics, if the family were going anywhere and an OiNK wasn’t due Whizzer and Chips would usually be my second choice. The set up, pretending to be two separate comics (16 pages of Chips in the middle), seemed just different enough to appeal to me.
I’ll admit it wouldn’t have had me laughing out loud like the piggy publication that introduced me to the medium but it did make me smile and I’d have the occasional chortle to myself. It felt like it had tried something different years previous when first created but without rocking the boat too much, whereas OiNK was tipping the boat upside down and daring the waves to crash into it. This particular Whizzer and Chips came with a free gift, always enticing for new readers, and inside they’d be met with a special crossover strip as a promotion for its sister title, itself having recently turned into a weekly.
The stars you see here are Sid of Sid’s Snake fame from the Whizzer half and in the stripped top is Shiner, a classic character from Chips (which was my favourite half by the way), plus Odd-Ball of course. Found on page 30 of the issue this was in the Whizzer half of the comic. Interestingly, the end of this strip led directly into a mini-series for Tom which began in OiNK #54 the following Thursday. #53 had gone on sale one day before this, so the “on sale now” is actually incorrect but I’m guessing this was more of an error on the part of editorial planning rather than Lew’s.
IPC had been very happy with OiNK’s average of 100,000 copies sold every fortnight but Fleetway wanted to increase its numbers
Tom was one of the few OiNK characters that could be mistaken for a more traditional comic star, although obviously the humour was much more original; the fact a bully was the star of the strip for example, although he was never the hero and always got his comeuppance. Tom was one of three OiNK stars to transfer to Buster comic when OiNK folded and would continue to appear in that title until it ended over a decade later!
The intention with this strip (and a Pete and his Pimple one to come in Buster in a couple of weeks) was to increase OiNK’s sales. As mentioned before, IPC Magazines had been very happy with its average of 100,000 copies sold every fortnight but when Fleetway Publications took over they changed it a weekly to increase its numbers. These crossover promotions would’ve been a part of that push.
The Tom Thug crossover was Lew’s sole contribution to this legendary comic (a title which itself would fold into Buster a few years later) and you can read about him being asked to contribute to it in a post on his Lew Stringer Comics blog. Of course, this wasn’t actually the first time an OiNK character had featured in Whizzer and Chips. Sort of. I say “sort of” because I think it’s safe to say Uncle Pigg didn’t really co-star on a Tom Paterson cover to the issue published on 26th April 1986, making Tom’s the first true crossover as far as I’m concerned.
The issue above came in a piggy pink bag also containing the full-sized preview issue of Mark Rodgers’, Tony Husband’s and Patrick Gallagher’s masterpiece. Buster also came in the same bag but didn’t mention OiNK in any way on its cover, once again proving to me Whizzer and Chips and OiNK were kindred spirits of a kind, the former having tried something different but eventually failed to move with the times. It’s still a fondly remembered comic to this day though and rightly so.
As mentioned above Pete Throb would also get the chance to promote OiNK in Buster which you’ll see on Sunday 19th March 2023. With these two chosen it’s already clear which characters Fleetway would deem most suitable for the merger to come, although of course at this time no one knew OiNK would no longer be a regular comic by the end of the year.
I’d just like to say a huge thank you to fellow pig pal Stephen Hyde for sending me the issues used in these two crossover posts. Previously I’d been using Lew’s images with his kind permission, and when Stephen read my posts he got in touch because he just happened to have spare copies of both! So now the two posts are made up of photos and scans of my own issues, so thanks again Stephen.
How many of you can remember coming downstairs on Christmas morning and seeing this cheery face staring back at you? I’d been giddy at getting my hands on this ever since I saw it in my local newsagents a few months previous. It really stood out with its glossy soft cover in the sea of cardboard hardbacks. Inside, all 80 interior pages are made of a thick, high quality stock, giving the book a heavy, expensive feel. Co-editor Patrick Gallagher tells me, “The higher-quality paper stock of the book was the idea of Bob Paynter at Fleetway. Bob was completely on our wavelength and knew it would appeal. The floppy glossy cover and back also seemed to really suit the enlarged shots of the plasticine pig face and bottom models Ian Jackson made by capturing the detail so well.”
UPDATE: I’ve since spoken with Ian (some three years later) and the cover wasn’t made by him! You can read more about this and see the original rear cover in a special post of when I chatted to photographer Ian Tilton.
Before this I’d read some of my brother’s Beano annuals but to my young mind they felt just like regular stories but with bigger panels to fill more pages. But The OiNK! Book 1988 was, as ever, different. This first book packed in as much as it possibly could to every single page. As a result, it may have had roughly 30 pages less than its contemporaries but it had so much more in there to read and enjoy. It all began with that famous cover, especially when you flipped it over but we’ll get to that later. While it didn’t really sink in as a kid, that claim on the bottom right is bold and of course completely correct. Inside, a special bookend of Uncle Pigg and Mary Lighthouse introduced that team to readers.
This was innovative for a time when signatures in humour comics were rare, but OiNK’s young readers knew the names of their favourite cartoonists thanks to its creators Patrick Gallagher, Mark Rodgers and Tony Husband and their wish to shakes things up. As an adult I can’t help but look at this page in wonderment at the list of talent involved. It really was a selection of Britain’s best and it was all for us kids. We were spoiled. I also love how the chiselled words work their way around the characters and speech balloons, which makes zero sense to the chiseler!
It’s a wonderfully varied read, containing strips from our favourite regulars, some returning stars of early issues, spoofs of those other annuals I mentioned, puzzles (not filler here but typical OiNK-style funnies) and even letters and drawings from readers, something annuals just never included. So how on Earth am I going to choose a few highlights? There’s just too much brilliance on offer. It’s been painstaking but I hope I can do it justice with this selection.
This is one of my most memorable pages, with Marc Riley as the not-at-all inconspicuous burglar, Snatcher Sam in GBH’s Book Club, a take on those book and video clubs that were so popular in the 80s and 90s. Magazines and comics were filled with them, promising cheap titles to begin with as you sign yourself up to buying a certain amount at full price over a year. I was a member of the Britannia Video Club, remember them? That’s why I loved this so much, along with the usual over-the-top nature of the GBH madverts and just look at all those book covers they’ve created for the photograph. Now, 35 years later it’s the effort put into these daft pages that I really appreciate.
Released for Christmas 1987, this was the year I would turn ten-years-old in the festive season and I was hearing a lot of rumours in the playground about Santa Claus. Thankfully I soon found out they were just rumours when he left my book under my parents’ wardrobe before Christmas because demand for it was so high and he didn’t want to disappoint me. The rumours of his existence were conclusively put to bed with a script by Lew Stringer that’s spectacularly brought to the page by 2000AD stalwart Kevin O’Neill, who we sadly said goodbye to earlier this year. There’s more to The Truth About Santa than we probably wanted to know as ten-year-olds.
There’s an image that’ll stay with you. Or haunt you. I remember this being the strip any friends who read this book at the time seemed to laugh at the most. I may have been the only one of my closest friends who collected OiNK but they all enjoyed reading my issues and in particular this book. In fact, in the year 2000 when I decided to return to college at the age of 23 the book ended up shared around that class too. I can’t remember how it came up in conversation originally, but I dug it out from my cupboard and it made its way around most of my fellow media students, each one of which found it just as hilarious as I had.
To this day it’s still one of my favourite books (of any type) of all time and definitely my favourite from childhood. In fact this is my original copy from back then, only one of three OiNKs that survived various clear-outs (by my dad) and moving out years later. Its timeless comedy is a testament to the talent it boasted about on the cover. Just like the regular comic it sets itself apart from other annuals. While they’d have had huge multi-page versions of their regular strips, here for the most part OiNK kept them to the size they’d normally be, meaning there was a hell of a lot more of them packed in.
Annuals are created far in advance of their release dates so when this one was being put together the ever fantastic Tom Paterson was still a contributor to the comic. Written by the pun-tastic Graham Exton, Eric Knicker the Whacky Vicar may only have been a tiny quarter-page strip but it left a lasting impression on little me during Christmas 1987 as I tittered and giggled and shared the joke with friends and family. A lot better than any cracker joke.
So yes, the annual kept to the format of the comic, only more so. It’s a delight to see the creative team took the opportunity to simply cram much more in of what made OiNK so great in the first place. For a child of ten there was just so much to enjoy. We even got a short Ham Dare strip. His two-page story is a hoot and is followed by this even funnier, wonderful cutaway of his and Pigby’s ship.
Written by Lew Stringer and drawn by the incredible talent that was J.T. Dogg (Malcolm Douglas) it’s chock full of little details that my young eyes really enjoyed pouring over. My favourite parts are the comfy chair and its very dangerous sidestool, and the middle of the spacecraft showing the difference between our heroes, with Ham’s gym next door to Pigby’s very full pantry.
A quick note about the title box at the top of the spread. It makes a great point! My Transformers and Real Ghostbusters annuals would have had “pin-ups” and “mini posters” and I always wondered if anyone actually cut up their fantastic annuals, losing whatever was on the backs of those pages to the walls of their room. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one at the time who thought this was a ridiculous idea.
Hadrian Vile’s usual diary entries take a back seat to a selection of pages chronicling his Interleckshual guide toe Nacheral Histry
A quick glance over some other highlights now. Ron Dibney’s Dumb Ol’ Duck reveals another side to himself, Police Vet makes his debut (he’d return in the monthlies the following year) many years before Jim Carrey took on a similar role and Star Truck makes a very welcome return. Just as in #3 the crew make their presence felt throughout the book in between chapters of their own strip. Here, Mark Rodgers literally pops up as Captain Slog in one of Horace (Ugly Face) Watkins‘ pages.
Dumb Ol’ Duck written by Mark Rodgers, drawn by Swoffs Police Vet written by Mark Rodgers, drawn by Wilkie Horace Watkins by Tony Husband
Pigswilla only appeared in seven issues of OiNK altogether but he was still a firm fan favourite, so naturally he had to appear in the annual, with Specky Hector Comics Collector (with added surname) making a funny cameo I’d forgotten all about. Early in the book Frank Sidebottom found out Little Frank had used up all his felt tips and gave him until page 69 to fix the situation, which he does, sort of. It appears young me at least started to lend them both a hand.
Pigswilla by Lew Stringer Frank Sidebottom by Chris Sievey Hadrian Vile written by Mark Rodgers, drawn by Ian Jackson
Hadrian Vile’s usual diary entries take a back seat to a selection of pages chronicling his Interleckshual guide toe Nacheral Histry, although he does take some short cuts to get from the evolution of life to the 1980s. His usual know-it-all persona is, as always, hilariously wrong in almost every way. In his fortnightly diary he was the most intelligent person in any room. Well, in his own mind anyway and here his guide to everything from dinosaurs (the hilarious looking Tyrannosaurus rex above is a highlight) to Ford Sierras.
In fact, after spending the first two parts of his guide covering prehistoric Earth he only has one page left to finish up and so this third page makes the leap from the ice age to the aforementioned car in the blink of an eye, clearly skipping millions of years as completely uninteresting. It’s all as hilarious as you’d expect from Mark Rodgers, made all the more special with full colour Ian Jackson art. In fact, so good is it that when the weekly comic itself gets going the diary will eventually be replaced with a series of similar guides.
1987 also saw the 50th anniversary of The Dandy (with Beano’s to come in 1988) hence why OiNK took aim at DC Thomson’s comics with regular digs about how old the characters would really be, such as #38’s Deano. In fact, I received the commemorative 50th anniversary book alongside my OiNK! Book (and The Big Comic Book 1988), although in hindsight I think it was originally for my brother but he stopped reading comics not long before Christmas. Oh well, his loss was my gain.
Returning to that spoof comic name, here the OiNK team take it to even greater heights (although this was probably created first) with a mini-comic inside the annual featuring such characters as Dennis the Pensioner and his dog Flasher, Desperate Old Man and the The Lash St. Old People. All are very funny and then we get a double-page spread of no less than five spoof strips which as a kid were funny, but as an adult are hugely surprising because four are drawn by none other than John Geering!
John was a regular artist for DC Thomson, in fact that’s the publisher he’s most closely associated with, most famously for Bananaman and Puss’n’Boots. To see him take on some of DCT’s characters in OiNK just makes these even funnier than they already were in my opinion. I do remember showing these to my friends who were huge fans of The Beano at the time. Can you blame me?
Unfortunately, I simply don’t know who ‘Philip’ is at the time of writing. His work only appeared in two OiNKs (this and #9), here with Boffo the Bore and two other like-minded strips called Georgie & Zip’s Party and Postman Fat and his Slightly Flat Cat. He’s not mentioned on the intro page either, but needless to say I’m always on the hunt for more information on OiNK’s creation so when I find out I’ll let you know. After The Deano and a ‘Fun-Hour’ pre-school comic we get another special section for adventure fans.
Eagle-eyed blog readers may recognise the brilliant caricature of Roger Moore on the first page from a previous issue (although I didn’t spot this first time around). If you go and take a look at the TV listings page in OiNK #17 you’ll see a tiny part of this image was used the previous Christmas. In it you can even see the OiNK logo behind Roger’s face so it just goes to show how far in advance this was created. This is something that continues to this day. If you follow the likes of Lew Stringer on social media or his own blog he’ll often show us snippets of annuals he’s working on over a year before their release, for example.
I’ve been a huge James Bond fan since all the Goldeneye hype hooked me in the mid-90s and I started renting out whatever films I could from the local video shop. It was discovering Timothy Dalton as Bond that sold me on the whole franchise, whose first film had only just been released the same year as this book, so the previous 007 (and his films) was still the target of this fun, frantic strip written by Mark Rodgers and drawn by Tim Thackery.
This was Tim’s sole contribution to OiNK. An illustrator and graphic designer he actually went on to work on CBBC animated series Minuscule Milton with Ian Jackson. Tim told me how he sees this James Bong strip now looking back: “A long time ago, but yes, that was me. Not my best work, but I was a bit pushed for time on it and had to knock it out at a fairly rough level.” Personally I love the art style here as it matches the nature of the strip and brings a real sense of pacing and chaos to the proceedings. You can check out Tim’s official website here.
“She eats pickled herrings in bed and I saw her kissing the window cleaner!”
Keith Disease
The Adventure Section also contains that Police Vet strip I mentioned above, a GBH madvertisement for their ‘Personal Hand-Glider’ capable of speeds of up to 100mph (downwards) and another strip, Ena Blighty’s Five Go Adventuring Yet Again. An annual will never have a theme in the same way as the regular comic did at the time, although the festive season does come up a lot for obvious reasons. These dedicated sections feel like mini themes, three for the price of one in fact, and are some of the best pages in the whole book.
One character (or rather two) I always found incredibly funny were Hector Vector and his Talking T-shirt. Unfortunately, Jeremy Banx’s strip made its last appearance in #35, disappearing when the comic changed publishers and gave itself a bit of a face lift. With new characters and cartoonists and the very best issues the team ever produced, I hadn’t even noticed these two weren’t in amongst the madness until they popped up here in this brilliant, larger strip.
As pig pals knew, this wasn’t a strip where the brat got his comeuppance at the end of each story; we never knew who’d come out on top between the pair. For their very final appearance I have to admit I was happy to see it was Keith Disease (the t-shirt) who had the last laugh as those stories were the best examples of Jeremy’s creation. There were plenty of laughs to be had in this particular strip but it was always that very final panel that had me in creases. It still does.
It’s with a heavy heart but a smile on my face that we come to the end (almost) of the review of the very best edition of OiNK the team created. This has been both the most fun and yet hardest thing to write so far on this whole blog. It’s been great fun to finally get the chance to reread this book and to tell you all about it, but incredibly difficult to pluck out just a few highlights to try and sum it up. I hope I’ve been able to do that. Two more chuckles to go though. First up, the opposite page to that great opener drawn by Ian Jackson.
A couple of puns, funny art and a grinning Uncle Pigg reminding us (and telling those who were introduced to OiNK with the book) of his fortnightly comic, even if it wouldn’t be fortnightly for much longer. It’s a perfect end to a perfect book. It’s such a treasured item for me these days that it came with me to a comic con where Lew Stringer and Davy Francis signed it for me, and when Patrick Gallagher visited me at my home a few years back he added his. I intend to get the inside covers covered with as many squiggles as possible.
With that, I’m going to close the back page over now and here’s why ten-year-old me pestered my parents, my siblings and any visitors to our house over the holidays that year to have a look at my new book.
The plasticine cover was a step up from Ian’s already brilliant one for the first OiNK! Holiday Special and is probably the most iconic OiNK cover of all, with a story to match. “When we sent in the transparencies of the pig face and bottom with the artwork for the printer to process, Bob Paynter at IPC didn’t spot that the pig’s star-shaped bum was partly exposed and not completely hidden by the pig’s curly tail,” explains Patrick. “It was only when the proofs came back from the printer that Bob spotted it and deemed it too rude to be published. So we had to get photographer Ian Tilton to retake the shot with the pig’s tail completely obscuring the star-shaped bottom.” (You can read all about that and actually see those original transparencies in my chat with Ian.)
It’s still a cheeky cover and perfectly encapsulates OiNK’s unique, naughty yet innocent sense of humour.
From showing off its covers and hearing the raucous laughter of anyone I could grab over that festive season, to rereading it in my 20s, 30s and now 40s, and lending it to friends many years after OiNK was a distant memory… this book will never, ever get old. It’s OiNK in its purest, most concentrated form. Every page feels fresh and new, like it was written this year, not 35 of them ago. Receiving my favourite issue of the regular comic, the Christmassy #43 and this back-to-back made my Christmas in 1987, and reliving them has done it again in 2022. If you’re reading this post on the day of publication I hope you have a wonderful day and a very Merry Christmas!
As a child one of my regular orders at the newsagents was for Fleetway’s Big Comic Fortnightly, which I collected from #1 for a couple of years after receiving a giant book the previous Christmas (the 1988 volume). Only when deciding to collect the books for the blog did I discover there’d actually been another the year before; when it had hit the shelves originally I hadn’t even discovered OiNK (my first comic) yet. Now I’ve been able to complete the collection of eight huge tomes that make up the Big Comic Book series, released between 1986 and 1993.
While they’d have been available since the end of the summer, it was Christmas Day when most of us would’ve received these so I’m going to cover one each festive season. (At least you know the blog will be about for a bit now.) While OiNK was more in tune with my sense of humour than more traditional humour comics, that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of smiles and a few chortles to be had here. With 256 pages it’s a cliché to say it but there’s something for everyone. Here are a few of my own highlights.
I can’t remember these first characters from the fortnightly or books as a kid, but that’s probably more a lack of memory on my part. Happy Families is drawn here by Dick Millington and I’m sure it can resonate with many of us around this time of year. The Happies are made up of Mum, Dad, Grandad, Sharon and the twins Vicki and Dicky and the scenario is much like the rest of the book’s comic strips, a simple but effective one; a small disagreement over something very unimportant would escalate until the whole family was at war with each other.
As with much of the contents in the book this is only one of several Happy Families strips, although most of the others end up so rowdy the police get involved. The stories can vary from them all being at each others’ throats by the end, all of them being punished in some way, or one or two of them getting sweet revenge on the rest of the family. Yet at the start of each new strip they’re back to loving one another again. Families, eh? These strips may even have been somewhat cathartic for some readers’ parents or older siblings on Christmas Day.
Regular blog readers will know I’m a sucker for a comical shark in the pages of OiNK due to my obsession with the creatures. This stems from my favourite movie of all time, Jaws, which inspired teenage me to read up on the real fish and decades later I’m still fascinated. In fact, my favourite ever page of OiNK was a parody of Jaws in #4 but even the top comic of all time has to take a bow to the following star of Monster Fun.
When I started collecting Big Comic it would still be a couple of years before I’d see the best film ever made but I always loved Gums. I was reading this funny strip very obviously inspired by that movie before I saw it. After I did eventually watch Jaws I just enjoyed this toothless version even more so as a result. Gums was originally created by writer Roy Davis and artist Robert Nixon. The above strip is taken from Buster after Monster Fun folded and is drawn by John Geering (who also contributed to a handful of OiNKs).
To me he was always a Geering character. John gives such fantastic, expressive gestures to Gums who thought he was a terrifying monster of the deep, but the cast of recurring characters who lived with him weren’t exactly quaking in the depths. The best thing was that Gums would sometimes triumph in his schemes which kept things fresh. With quite a few strips in this one book, it’s clear he was a fan favourite. Our next character also originated in Monster Fun.
Kid Kong’s original artist was also Robert Nixon, although this Buster strip is drawn by Rob Lee and alongside Gums he lives on today in Rebellion’s new Monster Fun in new stories by new artists. Originally an escapee from a zoo and much larger, he was shrunk down to make it easier to write stories in a family home setting, although still having to stoop down to fit inside Granny Smith’s house. Granny was chronically short-sighted and hard of hearing, mistaking Kong as her own.
As enjoyable as these have been so far, not all of the contents hit the spot as much as these examples. Some haven’t aged well, in fact some hadn’t even aged well by the late 80s. But whether it was the latest book or the fortnightly comic there was enough content to ensure plenty of enjoyment and the odd chortle from a favourite character. The sheer size of Big Comic meant every reader would have some favourites and get a lot from each volume. Just don’t be expecting OiNK levels of guffaws. Unless you’re reading Gums, of course.
In recent years Ken Reid’s Faceache has had something of a resurgence, from a gorgeous hardback collection to new strips alongside the two stars above. Created for Jet comic but (yet again) a later star of Buster, Ken’s style is instantly recognisable and upon first glance may seem very traditional, very DC Thomson-esque to the uninitiated. But you soon realise these are very different to pretty much everything else in this book.
Ken’s work really pops, really stands out, which is no small feat in such a huge book
The humour has a different feel to it, not least thanks to the creative ‘scrunges’ Faceache pulls off. This juxtaposition works, the strips feel fresh even today with a unique art style. Ken’s work really pops, really stands out, which is no small feat in such a huge book where everything is black and white on cheap paper stock. However, if you’re scanning through a Big Comic Book these really do stop you in your tracks.
I’ve happy memories of the following family from my time with the fortnightly comic and they’d often be the first strip I’d read, the endings almost always guaranteed to raise a laugh. The Bumpkin Billionaires originated in Whoopee and told the tale of a family of Beverly Hillbilly types who had won billions of pounds on the pools (the family-friendly weekly sports betting which predated the lottery, kids – Phil) but who hated the lifestyle changes the money brought. Every story would show us another hare-brained scheme of Ma, Pa, Billy and Daisy‘s to get rid of all their cash, much to the disgruntlement of their bank manager.
Mike Lacey brought these loveable rogues to life and the physical comedy of the main characters was always funny. Most of the time the family’s plan would fall apart in the final frame or two and they’d somehow end up with even more money than they started with. I’ve included the one above because it was one of those rare occasions when things actually worked out in their favour. Well, I’m assuming these were rare occasions, I certainly can’t remember this happening regularly and I’ve fond memories of trying to work out what was about to go wrong for them.
Do you remember CBBC programme Grange Hill? My siblings watched it but I never did, although the theme tune is still seared into my mind. Whizzer & Chips came along with its own interpretation, Strange Hill, which as a name I absolutely love. Teech was the poor sap trying to educate the wee monsters who in this case actually were little monsters; a class full of spooks, ghouls and tiny versions of famous Hollywood creatures. I thought this particular example would be a good one to include on this blog, can you tell why?
Tom Paterson, who brought us a few ingenious early OiNK strips is the perfect choice for these manic pages with such a varied ensemble cast and his trademark smelly socks, little squigly creatures and descriptive word bombs are all evident by the bucketload. These little extras always made his strips classics for me and his were the only ones I read in my brother’s Beanos. I’ve always said it’s unfortunate he was too busy to contribute more to OiNK where surely his work was a perfect fit.
Drawn by Sid Burgon, Lolly Pop was an entrepreneur with an endless range of businesses and an equally endless supply of money. However, while his businesses thrived the same couldn’t be said of his relationship with his son Archie, who was a regular kid after a regular life, who just wanted to play and spend time with his dad. With his dad being so preoccupied with his factories, Archie’s unsupervised attempts of leading a normal life and wanting to win his father’s attention would inevitably lead to a variety of disasters.
It also didn’t help that despite being an obvious millionaire Lolly Pop was rather miserly to say the least, preoccupied with saving his wealth, leading to Archie being somewhat neglected. Although to be fair it was only attention that Archie felt starved of. Originally in Whoopee, Lolly Pop is one of the stronger series in this book and there are stories involving Lolly Pop Toffees Ltd, Lolly Pop Movie Studios, Lolly Pop’s Garage, Pop’s Tyres, Lolly Pop Wood Products and Lolly Pop’s Record Company over five 2-page strips.
“Ha! No playpen can hold Sweeny!”
Sweeny Toddler
To finish the review there’s one perennial favourite surely everyone loves no matter which generation they’re from. Another character appearing in new strips today, even illustrated by one of his original artists, Sweeny Toddler was the tearaway baby who would cause havoc in not only his own home but all across town, with his ever faithful canine friend Henry by his side. Sweeney was originally created for Shiver and Shake comic and drawn by Leo Baxendale, then through mergers he’d go on to star in Whoopee, Whizzer and Chips and (of course) Buster.
There’s a reason Sweeney lasted as long as he did. Quite early on the brilliant Tom Paterson took over drawing duties and OiNK’s very own Graham Exton became Sweeney’s writer in the early 80s. They made the perfect team and during that time the strip rose to ever greater heights. The strip below is drawn by Tom but is before Graham’s time with the character. When Graham joined Tom’s style had developed to include all those lovely little sight gags he became synonymous with, like those in Strange Hill.
Overall, the first Big Comic Book is a success. Financially it was a huge success! It (and its fortnightly spin-off) cost next to nothing to produce since Fleetway owned the rights to all of the contents (we would never have seen any OiNK material as a result since most of it was creator-owned) and used cheaper paper stock, enabling the books to be much thicker with a retail price similar to a regular annual.
While some of the strips haven’t stood the test of time as well as others, there’s not really any that won’t at least raise a smile, making it a very pleasant reading experience. Needless to say, if you see this on eBay or in a second-hand charity store snap it up. With this amount of silly comics stuffed inside you should find plenty to keep you amused no matter your tastes.
It appears I jumped on to the OiNK train at the right moment back in 1986. Last time I shared the memories of my first issue and just one week later came a kind of soft relaunch as the theme. OiNK had established itself, publishers IPCMagazines were happy, the readers were happy and it was proving to be a success, so the team decided to celebrate by bringing in a whole bunch of brand new characters.
Let’s not forget the fantastic free gift, the first of three Ian Jackson posters which combined into one giant calendar for 1987 featuring The 8th Wonder of the World: Mount Rushboar. I can remember pouring over all the little details in the swarm of people running across Harry the Head and Burp the Smelly Alien carved into the rock face and even the little bits of rubbish left behind on this apparently reverential site. How typical of us humans and a funny swipe at British tourists in particular.
On page two we find out how this glossy comic could afford such extravagances, with staff reduced to working naked, cartoonists and accountants alike shivering in the cold as Uncle Pigg looks on, wearing his Hawaiian shirt to boot. Christmas was coming early for him with all the money OiNK was raking in, and it was coming early for us too because the calendar poster freebies would continue up to the first festive issue.
Mary Lighthouse(critic) is back with her strip on page three. Normally this would be a way of introducing the subject matter of the issue but here it’s quite clear it has a bigger job to do. It’s introducing new readers to the character and the overall irreverence of the comic. Thanks to writer Mark Rodgers and artist Ian Jackson it’s genuinely funny while also reinforcing the way the comic is reintroducing itself now that its readership is growing.
Coming on board just before this issue is probably the reason why I always assumed certain characters were in OiNK right from the beginning, when in reality this was their first appearance. Two such examples are Davy Francis‘ Greedy Gorb (He’d Eat Anything) and Jeremy Banx‘s wonderfully surreal and often very rude Hector Vector and his Talking T-shirt. The latter actually gets a proper origin story when a magical genie appears from Keith Disease‘s (I never remembered him having an actual name!) packet of crisps, but Keith is rude to him because his snack is gone. Poor Hector happens to be passing and Keith is forever confined to be a “tasteless print” on his t-shirt.
I remember his strip being one of my favourites so expect to see them at some point. The only reason I’m not including them here is because there’s just too much I could include that I had to leave some real classics out. But I was always going to show you the beginning of OiNK’s second spoof adventure story. Hot on the tails of The Street-Hogs comes Ham Dare: Pig of the Future, also stunningly illustrated by J.T. Dogg and this time the multi-part serial is written by Lew Stringer. IPC’s very own Eagle and 2000AD hero Dan Dare was the subject of OiNK’s style of parody, complete with sidekick Pigby and arch nemesis The Weakun‘!
This was my first exposure to J.T.’s artwork and it looked like nothing I’d ever seen before. Possibly because of this, as much as I love The Street-Hogs now, Ham Dare remains my favourite of all the OiNK serials. Lew’s script is fast-paced and packed full of gags, both for fans of the original space adventurer or those like me who weren’t that familiar. I especially love how Sir Hogbert has to show our heroes such a basic drawing to describe Earth being pulled out of orbit. Ham Dare may not be the sharpest pork scratching in the packet but he looked dashing as the hero and that’s what was important to him (and we loved him for it).
Elsewhere this issue Horace (Ugly Face) Watkins‘ own serial continues and a lot of the humour comes from the narrative by Tony Husband. Fan favourite Pete and his Pimple makes his debut after being the footer gag to a Tom Thug strip in #6. Hyperactive Harriet is the fastest girl in the world and a not-so-subtle take on The Beano‘s Billy Whizz. Then Billy Buzz gets the same ‘New Character’ treatment as the rest, but his saccharine personality annoys Uncle Pigg so much he swats him by the end of the strip and that’s the last we’d ever see of him!
Horace Watkins by Tony Husband Pete and his Pimple by Lew Stringer Hyperactive Harriet written by Mark Rodgers, drawn by Lezz Billy Buzz by Philip (not me)
Billy might not have made the grade but the next new addition certainly did. She quickly became a childhood favourite, so much so that I was certain she appeared in almost every issue I had as a kid. But surprisingly Psycho Gran was only in 20 editions of OiNK altogether including specials and annuals. Despite this, she became a true OiNK legend.
Created by David Leach (Brain Damage, Toxic Crusaders, Spongebob Squarepants) she was originally submitted as a one-off strip, so when OiNK’s editors introduced her as a new regular character in this issue it was a bit of a surprise for David. This explains why she doesn’t reappear until #21 because he hadn’t made any more! David tells me the guys would send him a list of upcoming issue subjects and he’d submit Psycho Gran strips for whichever ones he had an idea for. He never had a Psycho strip turned down and as a fan I can see why.
This one might look familiar to anyone who has purchased the new comic series from David in recent years because he reproduced this as a full colour strip for the cover of the first issue. In fact, between contributions to Aces Weekly and Psycho’s own comics, David has now produced more work for the little old dear in the years since OiNK than during her time in her debut comic.
There are certain Psycho Gran strips, as well as individual jokes and images that stayed with me long after childhood was a distant memory. Whether she’s randomly throwing people into the ocean, making military preparations to pick her pension up at the Post Office or adorning a Wild West Wanted poster, she could terrify many in her little world but she was adored by pig pals.
“‘Sammy is getting old and worn out! I’ll have to replace him with a new engine,’ said the Controller.”
Sammy the Steam Engine
Two new characters are up on the next page together, namely Sally Scowl (Her Temper’s Foul!) and Fatty Farmer (He’s A Whole Lot Calmer). Their titles may have rhymed like so many traditional humour strips of the time but that’s where the similarities end. Both were written by Mark Rodgers (of course) and drawn by Dave Follows and Weedy Willy‘s Mike Green respectively.
Both are enjoyable, even if we do already have a bad tempered youth in the shape of Billy Bang. But unlike Billy, Sally’s temper builds until she uses it to her advantage at just the right moment. She’s a lovable character and after that hilarious first panel I can’t blame her for being in a bad mood all day! She was also that rare occurrence indeed, a black character in one of our childhood comics. So why does Sally disappear after #16, totalling only two appearances? So much for a new regular character! What a shame and a waste of a great idea.
The message was clear, don’t let the bullies get to you
Fatty Farmer was a larger than life country man who’d often come up against bullies and small-minded individuals making fun of his weight. However, he’d remain chilled out and deal with them calmly, often proudly using the very thing they were laughing at to get his own back or to ignore them. The message was clear, don’t let the bullies get to you. He’d go on to be a bit more successful than Sally with 11 strips in total, appearing in every issue for the first few months and then on and off during the rest of the fortnightlies.
Back in #3 artist Ralph Shepherd drew OiNK’s brilliant take on The Transformers. As I said at the time, the comic would often take the hand out of the things we readers loved and for me there was nothing I loved more than the subject of this next strip. It was so funny to see this as a kid. This was really the first many fans of the show would’ve seen a spoof of it (and it was even several months before the official comic finally launched). Over the course of the two weeks I had to wait for my next OiNK I reread this several times, laughing and loving the fact OiNK had its own version of Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends.
Looking at this issue as a whole I can see I was clearly spoiled as a kid with this as only the second comic I ever bought. Whether I realised that at the time is another matter. I got to experience the gorgeous work of J.T. Dogg for the first time, got to meet lots of new characters including many who would become lifelong favourites, the subject of my top book series and TV show was given that unique OiNK makeover and then on top of all that was one of only five Tom Paterson OiNK strips, Mister Cheese! It even came complete with his trademark smelly sock and funny descriptions of other characters that have no bearing on the story whatsoever.
What a lovely surprise it was to come across this page when reading the issue for this review. Written by Mark Rodgers it’s already a funny script, but when it’s in the hands of Tom you just know there are going to be many more laughs added before he’s done with it. This would unfortunately be Tom’s final full page story for OiNK. After this his work would only pop up once more in a tiny quarter-page strip in The OiNK Book 1988, which I won’t be reviewing for another 13 months! Just as well this is so jam-packed with Tom’s trademark sight gags to keep us going. Tom was just too busy to be a regular contributor and that’s such a shame because I believe he and OiNK were the perfect fit, perhaps more so than any other comic he contributed to.
Before we wrap up with the back page, here’s a little bit of news about the next issue. While this edition may have introduced a wealth of new characters, #16 brings with it a true superstar, a megastar, a “fantastic” new addition to OiNK who I remember waking up to every Saturday morning on No.73. His creator sadly died back in 2010 and it was the news of his passing that brought me back into the sty after decades away. Next issue sees the start of his contributions which really have to be seen to be believed.
I’m definitely looking forward to the next issue. For now, I’m going to finish off with this full colour back cover from Lew Stringer. We got a glimpse on the Grunts page (at the top of this review) of what it was like to work in the OiNK offices. Uncle Pigg may have had all the right words to say to the readers but the reality behind them was somewhat different. Here’s Lew’s inside scoop on the real behind-the-scenes of creating the funniest comic ever produced!
According to Lew, the writer and artist in panel two getting whipped by Uncle Pigg are based on Mark Rodgers and Lew himself!
For a much younger me these two issues were a strong start. How could it possibly get any better? Be here on Monday 29th November 2021 to find out.
OiNK Blog 