Kidzone (1983)

"Hey kids! Look! The FIRST ISSUE of a Brand New Comic just for you - DON'T MISS IT!!" boasts the front cover of this comic in a fashion typical for the launch of a new title. Indeed, these days it's not often I come across a comic I haven't heard of before, but on a recent trip down south to Dunedin I was lucky enough to come across a couple of issue of Kidzone, a bit of a mysterious New Zealand comic from the early 1980s that is as brand new to me as it would have been to its original young readers in 1983. 

Issue one is dated Friday, August 12, 1983, and for 50c readers got a modest 16 pages, all black and white except the front cover and the back which also had some red, and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, no adverts. For comparison, an issue of Whizzer and Chips dated 24th September 1983 cost 55c in New Zealand and was twice as thick (I don't have any 1980s Beanos to hand as I write this but if memory serves they were slightly thinner and less expensive than their IPC competitors), but the draw of Kidzone is that it is distinctly and unmistakably a 'kiwi' comic. The front cover character is Mickey's Moa, and a friendly kiwi smiles next to the comic's title just above the price tag. Perhaps something of a New Zealand Big Eggo, Mickey's Moa follows the adventures of Mickey, a young boy who befriends the giant bird after finding him hiding in a cave in the bush. Here's the second page of that strip, illustrated by Robert 'Bob' McMahon. McMahon was clearly Kidzone's main artist and was in fact the driving force behind the comic. In this first issue alone he drew 4 different strips of which all but one were at least a full page.

Although inspired by the comics D C Thomson produced (McMahon acknowledges this in an interview, more on that in a minute) the kiwi theme continues inside, another example being the strip Code-'O': Otago's Special Branch of the N.Z. Coastal Patrol (for those who don't know, Otago is a region in NZ's South Island). Although I don't know the artist, a signature does seem to appear in a few of the panels (nos. 4, 6, 7, 10 & 11). 

Here's a name that might be familiar to some of you, Vid Kid. Except not the Vid Kid who graced the pages of Buster from 30th May 1987 through to its final issue, rather this Vid Kid is simply a fan of video games. I believe the artist's last name to be Grundy due to a signature on a later Vid Kid strip in issue #3 but sadly I don't know their full name.

My favourite strip in the comic is certainly this one, Greenslade The Frog - illustrated by the same artist as Vid Kid, the mysterious 'Grundy'. It certainly made me chuckle. 

As far as I know, only three issues of Kidzone were produced and judging by the 9th September cover date of issue #3 was a biweekly publication. I own issues #1 and #3, and interestingly the National Library holds the same copies, also missing the second issue. According to a 2012 interview with McMahon, the print run consisted of just over 1000 copies and used artists from The Otago Daily Times, where McMahon also worked. It was put together in Dunedin and printed in Gore by Gore Publishing but was only distributed as far north as Christchurch, so it certainly had a very limited reach. McMahon was bankrolling the comic himself and was struggling to get a sponsor, and his printers would often push him aside for bigger jobs meaning he would have to run around chasing it up. Despite receiving a positive response in the form of "a lot of letters from kids", it sadly failed to last, McMahon deciding that "nah, I don't need this". Elaborating, he says "it was just barely feeling its way after about a couple of weeks, it was burning me out so I flagged it, I realised that because I was doing the whole thing. I was doing the colourations, chasing people up for their work, going down to Gore and literally printing it, printing it the way I wanted. All this sort of thing and it was too much". It's a shame things didn't work out for Kidzone as I believe, by marketing itself as a uniquely New Zealand comic, it could have had some potential had it been able to give itself time to become a bit more of a finely polished product. New Zealand made comics are few and far between so it is always nice to come across one and, in my experience at least, people always like to support local New Zealand artists.

The cover of issue #3, this time with
a green kiwi

For those interested you can read the full interview with Bob McMahon on the Pikitia Press blog here:

http://pikitiapress.blogspot.com/2012/06/bob-mcmahon.html