Despite being a primarily adventure strip comic Valiant featured a good number of humour strips as well. We'll head back to the issue that was on sale fifty years ago this week to see what humour strips were on offer in its pages. The first appears on page five under the title The Nutts, about a family that lived up to their name. The artist is Angel Nadal Quirch.
The next character needs no introduction. He first appeared in 1908 and was still popular all in the 60's and even as late as the 90's. For Valiant he was illustrated by Reg Parlett - I speak of course of Billy Bunter.
Next up is a half-page Sporty strip, which is credited to Reg Wootton.
Next up is The Crows, which works out to be roughly a half-page strip but actually goes around the edge of the page, around an advertisement for the Royal Navy. This is another page by Reg Parlett.
The final humour strip is called It's A Dog's Life and it appears in full colour on the back page. This is a reprinted Belgium originally entitled Boule et Bill, illustrated by Roba.
4 comments:
Hi George,
You have your credits mixed up a little. The artist of The Nutts was Nadal, and the artist of The Crows was the great Reg Parlett.
'It's a Dog's Life' was a reprint of a popular Belgian strip, 'Boule et Bill' by Roba. I did a blog post about it a few years ago which you can see here:
http://lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/boule-bill-billy-buddy-or-pete-larry.html
Thanks, Lew, I was going to post about Nadal and Reg too!
The only thing I want to add is that unless you know better (quite probably) I think Bunter had been absent from British comics for quite a few years before he appeared in the relaunched and awful shadow of its former self that was the 1990 version of Whizzer and Chips, and that run of reprints ended when it merged with Buster later that year. It was of course the Valiant stories that were reprinted, but not this one.
Yes, they revived Bunter as a reprint strip after a gap of several years. Not sure how long that gap was as I wasn't buying everything. I would guess that Billy Bunter ended when Valiant merged into Battle in 1976?
Oh yes - of course The Crows is Reg Parlett - don't know what I was thinking there!
Come to think of it, I don't think he was in anything else between 1976 and 1990.
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