Here's a really bad comic for you to endure - Fizz. Although no date appeared on the cover or inside, I would date the comic in the early months of 1995 as it was illegally produced to compete with Fizog. The contents were reprinted from Acne without the editor of Acne (Dean Wilkinson) giving permission to the dubious editor of Fizz, so Fizz was immediately stopped. This 99p comic came with a free gift - one of those classic nail-through-finger pranks.
The comic strips in these Viz spin-offs are very different compared to the much more popular humour comics such as the Beano and Dandy both in the artwork and stories. The stories are much more graphic and violent and the artwork never seems as smooth as in other titles.
The first strip I'll be showing comics from Gary Whitlock, who also drew Dasher in the Beano.
In my opinion the best-drawn strips in this comic are Jonathan Woss and Fireman Stan. Both strips are by the same artist, but who that is I don't know.
Grandad Pat is by Mark Rodgers and Ian Jackson, who also worked on Oink a few years earlier.
Once page had a selection of mini-strips three - five panels long, with one artist I recognise called Dicky Howett, who illustrated Supermum in Whoopee.
Dicky Howett had a full-page strip inside as well, called Bloody Ages Ago.
I'm glad Dean Wilkinson managed to stop Fizz so quickly. Nobody wanted to work for the unnamed editor of Fizz anymore so he stole material without permission and created the comic as cheaply as possible (although probably got fined a decent amount for doing so). This is a dubious part of comics' history that should never be repeated, and hopefully this will serve as a reminder that when tried it doesn't work.
A great new comic blog dedicated to Oink! was launched earlier in the year, and will be covering each individual issue of Oink to the day that it went on sale!
The blog is so far up to issue three, and will hopefully have many more exciting posts and cover some interesting topics as it progresses.
Be sure to check out the site at:
http://the-oink-blog.blogspot.com
David Sutherland is an inspirational artist to me, as I'm sure he is to many other readers of The Beano. Over his 50+ years of working in comics he has illustrated countless pages, most significantly The Bash Street Kids, which he has drawn almost every week since 1962, well over 2000 pages in total.
He started working for D.C Thomson in 1960, and his first strip was the successful Danny on A Dolphin. Danny had three series in The Beano, one from June to October 1960, the second from March to October 1962 and the last from February to December 1968. This was accompanied by Dave's other adventure strip The Great Flood Of London, which ran from 1960 - 1961.
In 1962 Leo Baxendale left Thomson to go and work with Fleetway and go on to create Odhams' new "super-beano" Wham. Baxendale's departure meant that another artist had to take over his work on the Bash Street Kids, and the honour was,of course, given to David.
He is also well known as a key artist on Dennis the Menace. He drew Dennis, along with his trusty sidekick Gnasher, from 1970 all the way up until 1998 - a whopping twenty-eight years!
Over 50 years on and David is still drawing the Bash Street Kids every week in the Beano, as well as illustrating other pages in the annuals. There's no room to go through and show every character he ever drew, but a few of David's other strips are Biffo the Bear, General Jumbo, Billy the Cat, Korky the Cat and more recently he drew Fred's Bed up until last year. The self-portrait of him at the top of this post is from the 2010 Beano annual, and the photo below is a recent one of him standing next to a model of Gromit covered in drawings of Beano characters!
Let's dive straight into action and take a look at the first summer special of the year. We head back to the summer of '79 for this one, and I present the Frankie Stein holiday special. At 40p this comic was by no means a cheap summer special, the Beano and Dandy specials cost 25p each and Whoopee, the comic this special was a spin-off from, cost 10p less at 30p (although interestingly Whizzer and Chips and Buster specials did cost 40p each).
For your money you got 64 "Freaky Fun Pages", eight of which were in full colour, including a fantastic poster on the centre spread by Frankie's second major artist Bob Nixon.
The rest of the Frankie Stein strips weren't by Nixon though (presumably he was too busy drawing other pages at the time), and instead Brian Walker (of Scream Inn fame) picked up the pen, and did a cracking job of it too.
Brian's Frankie strip was called Frankie Stein Time Traveller, and is the tale of Professor Cube trying to get rid of Frankie in a time machine, which was inspired after watching an episode of Doctor Who. Naturally it failed, but only thanks to the professor's own ignorance. After abandoning Frankie in the Stone Age he comes back to the present day. But after building the time machine he has no money left so decides to use his invention to make some cash, and takes some museum executives to, you guessed it, the stone age, and reappears right in front of Frankie! The strip was split into four parts throughout the comic, and put together it was 26 pages long!
The jokes and puzzles aside, I'm fairly certain the rest of the comic is filled up with reprints. A few other strips in the comic are Ghoul Guides, Gook - TV Spook and Tell Tale Tess. Yet despite this being a holiday special not a single strip is based at the seaside - Blackpool is something that should be appearing in every holiday and summer special!
Here's an episode of Monkey Nuts, by Graham Allen.
Gook - TV Spook appeared in full colour on every strip in this special, and is a reprint from Whoopee.
And here's a Ghoul Guides strip by Murray Ball, which is a reprint from Knockout.
Inside the back cover was an advertisement for three of IPC's comics - Cheeky, Whizzer and Chips and Whoopee. Cheeky didn't have long left after this unfortunately, and folded in February 1980.
There were eight Frankie Stein specials in total, the first being released in 1975 and the last in 1982. Frankie must have been a really popular character to have such a successful series of holiday specials produced; very few other characters have experienced such fame.
I know it's nowhere near Christmas at the moment but I have just come across a PDF of some old festive Beano strips uploaded to the Beano website, and since I'll probably have long forgotten about it by December I thought it would be best to share them with you now.
There's six strips in total, a front cover starring Biffo, a Three Bears strip, a Little Plum strip, a Billy Whizz strip and two Bash Street Kids adventures, from the pen of Leo Baxendale!
You can read them by clicking the below! The description says it will download the strips, but it actually just opens them in another tab on your internet browser. You can save the strips by clicking this icon, which pops up when the PDF opens:
Anyway, enough talk - click below for festive fun!
http://www.beano.com/characters/bash-street-kids/downloads/classic-christmas-comic-stories!
