Comics UK

I had a shufti at the page this afternoon - the buzz of a new Jim Petrie page arriving fair took me back. It's rather fab, btw. Lovely stuff.

My favourite newspaper strip was Roger Kettle and Andy Christine's The Devils. It didn't last long but it never failed to get me giggling. Ratbag the Cat was a particular favourite. Happy memories. Still a huge fan of Roger and Andy's work.

The reason i didnt like that strip was: Why have a strip about the Bash Street Kids fancying a girl? Of all the storie-lines they could have picked, it was the most sickening, ridiculous, hateful and perverted strip i have ever seen in my life. They seemed too broken-hearted when they found out she...

A couple of things... higher-price issues invariably sell more copies than regular priced ones. That's why so many publishers do it. The Beano's increase in pages has nothing to do with the Dandy and I have heard absolutely no discussion on merging the comics. And this bit is purely my opinion - I d...

I know this comment is neither about The Three Dinahs, The Dandy or the merits of a good whacking at the end of a strip, but, for me, Ken Harrison's Minnie is also 'my' Minnie. I just think Iain's writing and Ken's drawing are a partnership perfect, she's a little girl who gets into mischief. A pro...

Minnie's the same. She adores her Dad. He's a bit of a useless lump, but she adores him anyway - because he sometimes joins in her schemes. He knows he shouldn't; he knows he's the nominal authority figure... but Minnie's antics are much more fun, so he joins in. When it comes to female comic charac...

Staying on topic, I think Beryl was quite similar to Dinah Mo when she was drawn by Karl Dixon and John Dallas (in that the strip focussed on her relationship with her dad), but less so in the Bob Nixon era. I wrote most of the Beryl scripts for Karl Dixon and focussing on the dad-daughter relation...

We ran Mo and Beryl in the same comic for a few years. Beryl tended to be larger scale in her mischief than Mo, who I usually kept very domestic. It was nearly always Mo and her Dad. That helped to put some distance between Mo and Beryl in terms of their schtick. We tried a few artists with Mo after...

I wrote Dinah Mo from 1993-1996. Pete Moonie was the artist on it until he became ill and sadly passed away very quickly after. We later tried out a couple of artists on the story, but I certainly struggled to get my heart into it. It just didn't feel right to be writing it for anyone else. Pete was...

I'm a bit late to this thread but I have to comment on my sadness at Nick's passing. My memory of him is from a convention in Swansea a few years ago. He was strolling along a corridor in the hotel, heading towards the bar. The way he greeted everyone at the convention like an old friend, with warmt...

I loved it. And I very much like that the show's producers are trusting the viewers by leaving so many questions left unanswered. Given that Steven Moffatt does like to build a load of different threads and then bring them all together in the end, I think we're in for something extraordinary this ye...

In the days of letterpress and letterflex printing, colour was marked up on photocopies (usually using coloured pencils) and applied at process stage. The Fun Sizes used this process all through their run. It was a very limited colour palette. It was very rare for artists to deliver coloured artwork...

All the Bob Nixon artwork I have seen was submitted in line only, then coloured in-house. Same here. Bob's comic strips were all sent in black and white. I think he did one or two pieces for posters or promotion in colour but pretty much everything else was in black and white. Bob drew very quickly...

Very, very sad news. Lis Sladen was a lovely lady. I only met her briefly a few times at conventions but she was fab. She's irreplacable and she will be sadly missed. Thoughts and prayers to her family and friends, and thanks to Lis for always being brilliant.

We get a lot of phone calls into the office (well, a couple a month, maybe) from people who think they have hit the jackpot and have a copy of ish number 1. Sadly, every one so far has been a reproduction - usually the one given away with the Sunday Post a few years back. It's horribly disappointing...