Treasure: Wee Willie Winkie visits Fleetway

[Richard S.]

The sort-of alternative to purchasing lots of back issues is to look for the 4 titles shown here and in the message below under the 'Purnell Picture Classics' banner.

Yes, it's 4 edited highlights of Blasco's work. You also get an Embleton cover to one book, a Blasco cover and a Don Lawrence cover.


(more scans to follow in next posting)

[Richard S.]

one more book and a scan of one of the Alice pages

[Peter Gray]

I love Katie Country mouse it is so sweet..

found loads of artwork at Look and Learn website of the artist..

Heres the original art

[Peter Gray]

What a great find and new discovery..





illustration art gallery website

[matrix]

As mentioned, Nursery Ryme themes featured regularly in younger reader comics.

This strip 'Walter Hottle Bottle' about a hot water bottle that comes to life when young Charles falls asleep is no different, these scans show the young lad off to 'Nursey Ryme Land' where many of them come together with some lovely artwork by Walter Langhammer.

As previously mentioned, once a favourite of some on here!

[klakadak-ploobadoof]

Browsing the web for info on Nadir Quinto I bumped into these images at Bookpalace.com:







Description says they are pictures of Quinto‘s original artwork for a children's illustrated edition of The Wind in the Willows published in 1993. I searched the web for more details about the book so that I could try and get in on eBay or Amazon, but found nothing. There were a few editions published in 1993 but none looks like having Quinto’s illustrations. Perhaps the description on the website has the wrong year? Would anyone know when was the book published and maybe the publisher‘s name? I contacted BookPalace but they are not bothering to reply. Steve Holland told me he had no knowledge of an edition with Quinto‘s art...

[philcom55]

Apart from its Ron Embleton cover this 1970 Playhour Story Book seems to be filled with Quinto illustrations - presumably reprinted from Treasure.





- Phil R.

[Peter Gray]

What brilliant pictures...hope you find the Wind in the Willows book...

hope you put that super cover up at the comicsuk gallery..

[klakadak-ploobadoof]

I received my joblot of Once Upon a Time magazines and I think they are brilliant. I am particularly fascinated by those full-page paintings of Town Mouse and Country Mouse by Mendoza. They have some sort of serene magic about them… Have they ever been put in a book as they so much deserve?

[Peter Gray]

I love his work...

I've done a blog post advert for this forum post...don't want people to miss this..maybe
klakadak-ploobadoof you can do a blog post yourself on nursery comics...like whjen you did a football theme for a bit...just an idea?

[klakadak-ploobadoof]

you can do a blog post yourself on nursery comics...like whjen you did a football theme for a bit...just an idea?

I was considering this as a break from by Shiver ans Shake posts...

[philcom55]

Great stuff Irmantas - Here's my tuppenceworth! (sorry about the duplication)

Following Leonard Matthews' retirement as Editorial Director of the IPC Juveniles Group in the late 1960s it must have come as a shock to his old colleagues when he immediately began putting together a brand new children's weekly for one of their main rivals: City Magazines Ltd., the publishers of TV Century 21.

During his time at AP/Fleetway/IPC Matthews had been a major innovator who introduced a brand new form of streamlined adventure strip to the pages of Knockout, as well as launching some of their most successful titles, including the Thriller Picture Library, Jack and Jill, Playhour, Princess, look & Learn and Treasure (not to mention a smaller number of brilliant failures such as Top Spot and Ranger). And in order to fill these ground breaking publications he spent much of his time recruiting a team of established artists from outside the world of comics - many of them already famous as top book illustrators. Because of the care he took over the look of his titles he quickly became known as 'the Artist's Editor' - inspiring intense loyalty in many of his own protégés as he repayed them with a paternalistic concern for their own welfare (though he could be less than generous with artists like the troubled Frank Hampson who came from outside his own stable).

As a result of these connections it's no surprise that Matthews’ new creation Once Upon A Time attracted a stellar line-up of contributors which easily outshone city's flagship TV21 - a comic that was by then entering into a period of serious decline after its own glory days of the mid-sixties. The early issues became a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of artistic talent which included Phillip Mendoza, Nadir Quinto, John Millar Watt, Jesus Blasco, Don Lawrence, Ron and Gerry Embleton, Angus McBride, H.M. Brock, Derek Eyles, Mike Hubbard, José Ortiz and many others - all of them turning out exquisite pages that were printed on the best full-colour photogravure presses available.



What’s more, the timeless nature of most fairy tales meant that Matthews and his editor (who also happened to be his wife) were free to re-adapt many of the familiar stories they’d previously used in Fleetway’s nursery titles without worrying about copyright. Thus, alongside Nadir Quinto’s ‘Cinderella’, Ron Embleton’s ‘Aladdin’ and Don Lawrence’s ‘Pinocchio’, the first issue also reunited Phillip Mendoza with the continuing adventures of the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse (along with a note that their story dates from antiquity and didn’t begin with Fleetway’s ‘Katie Country Mouse’!). However, as Katie herself was still appearing in Jack & Jill every week in tales drawn by Harold Tamblyn-Watts, this new version of an old character was duly renamed Winifred or ‘Winnie’ for short, while her town-dwelling cousin was now called Stephanie or ‘Steve’.





Apart from the changed names, the most obvious difference between Mendoza’s old ‘Katie’ stories and this new series was the fact that it used full-page illustrations accompanied by text instead of a picture strip format. Mendoza himself was now in his seventies and, according to some accounts, more often than not the worse for drink - all of which was reflected in his work. Gone were the delicate miniature watercolours and intricate penmanship of his earlier days; instead he now favoured bold, impressionistic landscapes painted in broad, opaque strokes with thick poster paint. Apparently it became necessary to ‘finish off’ his paintings at the office as he lost patience with niceties like panel borders and perspective, while messengers frequently had to be despatched to his flat in order to collect overdue artwork. But though the aging artist had undoubtedly lost some of his old skill and professionalism he had also gained something even more valuable.

To my mind Mendoza’s late paintings (many of which have a surprisingly dark, autumnal feeling) come closer than almost anything else I’ve ever seen in a popular comic to the condition of Fine Art. I confess that my initial reaction to ‘The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse’ was that its accompanying illustrations looked disappointingly crude when compared to the superficial brilliance of Ron Embleton or Don Lawrence, but the more I looked at those full-page images of mice situated in murky landscapes of giant puffballs and forests of grass the more I began to appreciate their sheer emotional power. And in addition to that I began to see the way in which the very paint had a physical quality comparable to canvases by Van Gogh or Turner - making me feel that it belonged alongside them in an art gallery rather than in the pages of a children’s publication.









This is the way all old artists should end their lives: not trying (and inevitably failing) to recapture past glories, but forever striving with all their might to conquer brand new vistas of artistic achievement.

As far as I can tell ‘The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse’ appeared in every issue of Once Upon A Time until it finally ceased publication in 1972. Phillip Mendoza died the following year.

(Meanwhile, the errant Leonard Matthews had settled his differences with IPC in order to launch an entirely new series of nursery titles for them - but that’s a story for another day...!)

- Phil Rushton

[klakadak-ploobadoof]

Brilliant post, Phil, thank you very much! If you had time to update Things That Grip regularly, I know what my favourite blog would be!

[philcom55]

You're very kind Irmantas. Unfortunately I'm no longer able to access Blogger with my old operating system so I've had to put 'Things That Grip' on hold for the time being.

As a postscript to our selection of Mendoza paintings I thought it'd be interesting to compare them with this full-page illustration that appeared in the 1969 Jack & Jill Annual by his successor on 'Katie Country Mouse', Harold Tamblyn-Watts.



Tamblyn-Watts was, in many ways, a fine artist in his own right who drew some of the earliest 'Supercar' strips for TV Comic as well as specializing for many years in realistic wildlife subjects. While his version of Katie has all the 'busyness', the professional finish and the attention to detail that Mendoza's later work often lacked, however, it seems to me that the above scene remains curiously empty and devoid of interest compared to the world of her alter ego Winnie...a classic case of more being less and less being more!

By contrast, here's 'A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Mouse' - as only Mendoza himself could visualize it:



- Phil R.

[Peter Gray]

I can see what you mean...the animals are a bit frozen..But nicely drawn..