Shiver and Shake Annual 1986

Today I thought I’d share a few pages from the 1986 Shiver and Shake annual. Other than being the last S+S annual to hit the shelves, there’s nothing particularly significant about it. But I thought I’d share some pages because it is simply a fantastic and beautiful comic, really showcasing the talent of the day. Artists inside included Martin Baxendale, Tom Paterson, Terry Bave, Sid Burgon, Jack Edward Oliver — I could go on.

The full colour pages were also stunning, and among the best full colour I’ve ever seen in a Fleetway comic. Here are the front and rear endpapers, illustrated by Roy Mitchell who signed his pages as ‘Mitch’. 

For a comic from 1986, quite a few pages were printed in full colour. For their £2.50, readers were given 96 pages (counting the covers), 16 of which were in full colour. A good number more had either blue or red ink.

One of the more bizarre inside pages was this Jumbo Jesters page, featuring various photos of an elephant — elephants of course being the ‘Shake’ part of the comic. I have so many questions. Is it a real elephant? Where did they get a real elephant? How did they get a real elephant on a bus?

Another good page is this Desert Fox puzzle board game. Elsewhere in the book the Desert Fox strip is illustrated by Terry Bave, but this spread is instead by Jack Edward Oliver.

Trevor Metcalfe also had a few pages. Here’s a nice Ghoul Getters Ltd strip. Metcalfe was an expert at motion - just look at the slamming doors or the man spinning around at top speed! It makes me dizzy just looking…

As I said, there’s no shortage of great pages to share and I could easily go on, but I’ll wrap things up with this Lolly Pop strip by Sid Burgon. The Fleetway annuals from this time are relatively common and usually pretty cheap, so I would definitely recommend picking them up if you come across any.

Oink! No. 13 (1986)

Oink! is one title I've thus far neglected to cover much on this blog, but hey - better late than never! So let's amend that with a dive into what is probably my favourite issue of one of the weirder comics published by IPC - lucky number #13. Launched in May 1986, Oink was still a fortnightly comic at this point (it would later go to monthly). Many people actually seem to consider Oink as "a Viz for children", indeed that is a phrase I have seen thrown around a lot, but it is simply not a true statement. I asked Tony Husband, one of the creators of Oink!, some years ago for something I was writing (and never finished) about whether the creation of a "Viz for children" was the intention of Oink, and this is what he had to say:

"No that was never our intention. The three of us, Pat Gallagher, Mark Rodgers and myself all wrote for the IPC comics and we just wanted to take the piss out of the formulated but enjoyable mainstream comics. We spoke to Bob Paynter who was the head of children's comics and he gave us money for a dummy. Years later John Brown publishing and the Donalds came to us about doing a kids Viz bit it never happened."

Oink! certainly is a comic unlike anything else put out by mainstream British comic publishers before. Those of you who've read Terry Bave's 2012 autobiography 'Cartoons and Comic Strips' may recall him discussing Krazy as, well, a "really crazy comic", where "a number of artists and writers had been invited to submit 'crazy' ideas, many turned out to be too crazy for consideration", and by Oink's standards Krazy would be considered somewhat traditional! (Krazy is another comic a little overlooked on this blog too, that may have to be amended soon as well.) To illustrate my point, here's a bizarre photo strip entitled Snatcher Sam meets Young Frankenstein. I can only imagine how much fun this would have been to produce. 

Issue thirteen is of course an unlucky number, well known to the Oink creators, and furthermore this issue was the very first Oink halloween issue - what a coincidence! For 30p readers got 32 pages, printed on nice glossy paper, 9 of those pages in full colour and a further 6 in partial colour with either a pink or yellow ink. That full-colour page count includes the poster on the centre spread, which is an absolutely stunning piece of artwork by the aforementioned Tony Husband featuring his popular character Horace (Ugly Face) Watkins, drawn in the style of a 1950s US horror comic cover. If it didn't mean taking apart an old comic I would definitely have this up on my wall. Perhaps a photocopy is needed...

Another interesting addition to this issue is this 3/4 page text piece Dennis Nifford's History of Horrors. Obviously, this is the pig alter-ego of famed comic historian Denis Gifford. I can only assume it was he who put this piece together, for as well as being a fan of comics he was very much involved with them. 

-- UPDATE! Thanks to Lew Stringer and other good ol' piggin' pals over at the Oink comic fan page on Facebook for informing me that actually this page is NOT by Denis Gifford as he was not a fan of Oink. In fact being an old school guy he didn't like any comics that didn't seem to follow the traditional style, such as 2000AD. I was very surprised to hear this, to say the least! The artwork is actually by Steve Gibson and potentially written by Steve as well, although if not it may have been Mark Rodgers. --

So what are some more of these weird and wacky strips I keep going on about? Well, what about this one entitled Billy's Brain. About a young boy called Billy and his uncle, who exists only as a brain, it's certainly not a strip I could see appearing in Buster or The Beano. It's unsigned but I think this is drawn by David Haldane.

Monster Mash is perhaps the funniest story in this issue. Illustrated by Lew Stringer and written by Mark Rodgers, it is a short story filled with brilliant gags - my favourite is the "school dinner disposal unit" wearing hazmat suits as they dump the toxic dinners into the "hidden dump". This is the first appearance of Pigswilla, a character who would appear a few times throughout Oink's run, and Lew talked about the character's creation in a post on his art blog. Here's what he had to say:

"Mark had originally sent me an idea for a story called The School Dinner Monster and asked if I had any ideas to add to it. I added a few bits and bobs to the plot and dialogue, and thought that the title Monster Mash was catchier. I gave the name 'Pigzilla' to the giant robot pig, although Mark changed that to the much more inspired Pigswilla."

Anyway, here's the two-pager. I really wish this had been given full colour treatment, as I feel it would really have made use of some disgusting school dinner colours to add some extra effect! In fact, another copy of Oink (#66) I happen to have to hand contains a full-colour, nine (!) page Pigswilla comic which I might have to share in a post here sometime soon, just for fun, and you'll see what I mean.

The last strip I'll share is a silly page that is perhaps a bit more 'normal' as far as IPC comics go, emphasis on a bit - The Curse of the Mummy, illustrated by Jeremy Banx. I say this one is a bit more normal only because it reminds me of a strip from the early days of Whizzer and Chips called The Mummy's Curse, in which two unlucky explorers are chased around the world by an angry mummy whose tomb they disturbed. I've also shared an example of that strip, taken from Whizzer and Chips #2 (25th October 1969) and illustrated by Reg Parlett.

Oink ran for about two and a half years before folding in October 1988. Sadly its unique appearance also made it somewhat controversial and some newsagents allocated it to the top shelf, above the eyes of children, and sales ultimately slumped and the plug was pulled (although I'm sure this wasn't the only reason). For those who want to read more about Oink I highly recommend Phil Boyce's excellent Oink blog, which has moved to a new home on Wordpress and can be found here: 

https://oink.blog

Big Comic Fortnightly Holiday Special 1994

Big Comic Fortnightly had begun in June 1988, and the first special came out that same year, although as Big Comic Fortnightly was similar to a holiday special anyway it's tricky to spot the difference at first glance - even the covers were similar. The only real difference was the page count and price; the first one had 135 pages for 95p, quite an increase from 52 pages for 35p. The covers improved with the 1992 special when Terry Bave was given the cover, and he produced some lovely full-page illustrations. The last one, the one I'm looking at here, came out in 1994. Big Comic Fortnightly was in its final months by now; it would fold in January 1995 under the name Big Comic Monthly. This special was £1.35 for 104 pages, and with exception to the front cover it was entirely reprints. It had come out in May 1994 and was in the stores for several months, here's the first advert for it, from a May edition of Buster:

The following year Big Comic Fortnightly, along with the Best of Monthly comics, were all merged together to produce The BVC, or The Big Value Comic, to give it its full name. That meant that instead of another Big Comic Fortnightly special it was replaced by a BVC special in the summer of 1995, of which only one was produced, as BVC was a failure. Oddly enough, the BVC special was more expensive and had fewer pages - £1.45 for 100 pages. I don't own the BVC special, in fact I've never actually seen an issue of BVC for sale (and I have been looking), so here's the cover taken from the ComicsUK cover gallery:

Of course, despite being entirely reprints there is still some good stuff in this special, and here's a few pages to round the post off.

Four New Whizz-Kids and Chip-Ites!

I've covered the issue of Whizzer and Chips dated 21st February 1970 on this blog before, when I wrote about the free gift it was presented with (see this post here). It is time now to return to it once again, not for the free novelty but the strips inside it, for this issue gave birth to not one, not two but four new characters! Two of these characters appeared in Whizzer and the other two in Chips, and since Whizzer is the first half of Whizzer and Chips we'll look at those characters first.

And first up is Monkey Nutts, a half pager that followed Kings of the Castle. I'm unsure of the artist on this one, it may perhaps be Graham Allen but I'm not so sure.

The next new Whizz-Kid appeared on the other side of Chips, and was Jimmy Jeckle Master Hide. Illustrated by Terry Bave, I think the title is rather self-explanatory - it's about a kid called Jimmy who develops the potion and (for some reason) drinks it, which turns him into Master Hide.

The Chip-ites retaliated to the new Whizzer characters with two new full-page characters. The first would go on to be a very popular and long running strip - Super Dad. "The Kid" looks very much the same at the start of this run as he did at the end of it, but Dad changes considerably when Mike Brown illustrates the strip later on. This first strip doesn't look like Mike's work though, the background characters suggest it was drawn by Norman Mansbridge.

The other new Chip-ite(s) would endure an even longer initial run than Super Dad; The Scareys Of St. Mary's would last all the way until 1977. Illustrated by Terry Bave, the Scareys are a group of Witches that attend St. Mary's, a school of witchcraft - something like an early Harry Potter, in a way.

Wow! It's Christmas (1982)

It's about time to kick-start the festive fun this year so let's do so with none other than the one and only Wow Christmas issue. The front cover was illustrated by Mike Lacey and linked with the two-page Shipwreck School story inside, also illustrated by Mike. Mike is one of my favourite artists so seeing a front cover like this one by him is always a joy to behold.

I've already shown a few Creepy Comix pages and this issue also has one, but with a festive twist. Colin Whittock was the artist for this page.

The Bill and Coo page is absolutely amazing to look at; artist Trevor Metcalfe has done a superb job on it! Trevor is a brilliant artist who is still working today, though sadly not on comic strips but more on basic cartoons for colour in books etc. You can see more of his work at his website: http://www.trevortoons.com.

Nigel Edwards is another fantastic artist and for this special issue produced a lovely festive "When He Was Young" strip. And who better to put in the spotlight this week than Santa Claus himself!

As much as I would love to show you the entire comic here I won't so instead I'll wrap up the post with this full colour Barney's Badges strip illustrated by Terry Bave.

This Week In: 1984 - Whoopee!

Time to head back to the 1980's, a period when the Fleetway comics (at least, the ones that were around or starting) were at their greatest! Today we'll be looking at the issue of Whoopee and Wow that went on sale this week in 1984 - almost 30 years ago! The cover character is Sweeny Toddler and this particular episode (illustrated by Tom Paterson) will have you laughing out loud! It did with me anyway... (look at the wanted poster on the fifth panel on the second page).

Moving inside and let's take a look at Creepy Comix. This strip was illustrated by Reg Parlett and I've always enjoyed the thought of the creepy characters coming to life from Davie's comics so the strip always had a lot of appeal to me. One thing I can't help but noticing though, is that the ghost looks an awful lot like Harry from Harry's Haunted House. Maybe the landlord finally kicked him out and he found refuge in a Creepy Comic?

Next up is The Bumpkin Billionaires, illustrated by Mike Lacey. As always, they think they are losing money so they can go back and live the simple country life, but in natural comic style it doesn't all go to plan.

A particularly strange strip is Animalad. Illustrated by Roy Mitchell, this strip follows the adventures of Andy who can turn into any animal he wants at will! Definitely amongst the crazier strips in British comics!

Always enjoyable, but crazy just like Animalad, is Calculator Kid, illustrated by Terry Bave and the comic strip that is home to the finest moustache in comics! Or is it a caterpillar? Find it, and decide for yourself!

And finally, here's the Quick Strips from inside the back cover, featuring Bleep!, Cheeky, Here is the News and the try-it-yourself Calculator Corner. Go on - try it yourself!

This Week In: 1979 - Cheeky

One good thing about many of Fleetway's comics was the fact that they came out on a Monday. Monday is the worst day of the week as it's the day everybody has to go back to work or, more suitably for a comic, school, so the arrival of a new comic on a Monday was very welcome, the perfect way to beat those "Monday Blues"! Cheeky was another of the comics that came out on a Monday, a cheery and cheeky way to start the week!

I'll start with none other than Cheeky himself. If you've ever read an issue of Cheeky you'll know that Cheeky's strip is split up into seven parts and each part appears separately throughout the comic. There is one part for every day, starting on Sunday and finishing on Saturday, but for sakes of space I'll only show the 'Sunday' page here. Frank McDiarmid had a heavy workload as he drew all of Cheeky's pages week in week out!

Next up is Charlie, who you will know as Calculator Kid! Charlie is very lucky in that he has a talking calculator for a friend (and yes, he had real friends as well) that could predict the future - a very useful tool in Charlie's life that almost always led him to collecting a nice cash reward! Terry Bave was the illustrator here, and the strip would continue for a very long run continuing for several years after Cheeky in Whoopee.

My favourite strip in this issue has to go to The Gang. Although it doesn't have the most creative name in the world, this is a very well written strip, and it's well illustrated as well although I'm afraid I can't say who the artist is. The Cheeky Weekly blog tells me that The Gang is in fact a (poorly retitled) reprint of the Double Deckers from Whizzer and Chips.

Next up is Elephant On The Run, a strip about a man in a plastic mac who, for some unknown reason, is trying to capture our friendly elephant, who has lost his memory and has no idea why he's wanted! Bob Nixon is the artist.

The fantastic Mustapha Million, a great and extremely popular strip illustrated by Joe McCaffrey, took up the centre spread. Obviously the title of this strip is supposed to sound like "must have a million", but really the young lad must be a multi billionaire at least!

And finally, here's a queer advertisement for 'Mr. Bellamy's', showing all the (ahem) fun you can have with liquorice!