Talk here about just about anything associated with British comics or story papers and the industry that does not fit in any other forum.
There are separate fora open to registered members for discussing specific comics, artists, websites etc.
Kashgar wrote:
Lew, both 'Kings of the Castle' and 'Rudolf the Redcoat Mountie' are definitely the work of Ken Harrison. I'll happily send you a couple of photocopies to check them out for yourself if you'd like.
Very kind, but no need. I've got some old Sparky comics but they're at the bottom of a pile of comics in the corner of the room stuffed with comics and books I laughingly call my archive. I'm just to lazy to bother digging them out at present.
Trevor Metcalfe emailled me with info on his first work.....it wasn't Buster first....
I read a fairly recent post of yours on the comics UK forum where you
started a topic about artist's first published work. You mentioned that
mine was Our Great Grandpa. Not quite correct, Peter, that strip was my
first for Fleetway/IPC. My very first published strip in a UK comic was
for the Dandy and it was called The Babes 'n' Bullies, characters I
'invented' myself and submitted to D.C.Thomsons in 1962. It was
accepted by the then editor Albert Barnes. I drew about 18 strips for the weekly Dandy comic and
several annual pages that were published in the 1964 book. During the
same period I wrote and drew 2 or perhaps 3 Smasher strips that were
accepted and published, though I was never paid extra for the
self-written script!
My full-time job was in the printing trade as a litho artist, so comics
was only a part time activity. Wishing to go full-time, I thought I'd
dream up another comic character and try to get it published too. That
character was Our Great Grandpa which I duly sent to Albert at the
Beano. He declined it but thanked me politely for letting him see it.
So I sent it to the only other big publisher of UK comics, Fleetway/IPC
and it was accepted. It was published as a half page strip in Buster
comic, within a few short weeks.
any other other comic cartoonsits firsts.......
Was Hunts first work the vulture club in the Dandy. early 2000.
Was Tam Patersons first work Sweeny Toddler taking over Leo Baxendale in Shiver and Shake...
Peter Gray wrote:What was the characters and name of the comic Hunt worked in....
Hunt has worked on numerous strips over the last 30 years. Two of his most regular being Firkin the Cat in Fiesta and a page for Fortean Times. He's also produced an adaptation of the Ancient Mariner for Knockabout Comics Ltd and tons of material.
I think Hunt startinghis comix (as opposed to "comics") career self puBlishing vi alarge Cow comix and via the Art- Zak (or something like that) cooperative - He works a lot for Knockabout comic and has the odd strip printed in USA (check out Harvey Pekars "American Splendor" comic) - As Lew says "rhyme of the ancient Marine", "Lady Chaterlays lover" and "Casanova " are among some of his "book" work and are all excellent ) Firkin the cat is fun but very mature- well rude really and if ypu like music strps check out his Jazz Funnies) One classic that folk forget about was Thunderdogs a fantastic one off (in th emould of the DC comics Blackhawks books) briloiant stuff and if you see it snap up his self published Dog-Man the art is surreal - the lad can draw his Beano work is good but he excels in the underground/mature market to me.
stevezodiac wrote:I think Tom Paterson drew Snooper in the Buster, can't be sure on dates but it mightn have been before his Sweeny Toddler in S&S. 71/72?
It's likely his very first work would have been ghosting another artist's style, not necessarily Baxendale's.
(BTW my very first IPC strip was ghosting Tom Paterson's style for a Scooper strip in a Jackpot Annual.)
Having at that time just started my series in DISC, I still sent samples of my children's strips to D.C. Thomson in Dundee.
I had a meeting with the editors in their Fleet Street office and they offered me the chance of a short stay in Dundee to see what I could do.
I had to draw the strips in my bed and breakfast room.
To be honest, I wasn't too keen. They had very strict rules: for example, anyone walking had to be moving from left to right!
The lettering was all done by machine. They changed my dialogue and even the title of the strip, from "Lazy Hound" to "My Woozy Dog Snoozy".
I was later told that I had been a victim of office politics. The former editor of The Beano was the one who was keen on my stuff.
This editor had been promoted over his rival, Albert Barnes, the editor of The Dandy. And this Dandy editor resented being ordered to use my work.
Apparently the staff, with whom I'd got on very well, sneaked in the attached strips to the weekly comic while the editor was away.
I think my drawing got a lot better later on! Jack.
Here are my cartoons that appeared in The Dandy,
issues dated 3 April 71 and 10 April 71. The jpegs have come out very yellowy!
this is from the website I did for Jack see the strip there...
Albert Barnes seems to be quite a strong character...
Re Trevor Metcalfe's first published work ' The Babes and the Bullies'. This strip first appeared in the 1964 Dandy Book as mentioned and therefore predated the publication of 'Our Great Grandpa' in Buster (5/6/65)-(25/9/65), but the series of 'Babes 'n' the Bullies' (note the slight change in the title) didn't appear in the weekly Dandy until 1969 where it ran for 9 issues 1452(20/9/69) - 1460(15/11/69). From the info given by Trevor it actually seems that his first published work, in a weekly comic title, was an episode of 'The Smasher' which was published in Dandy No 1152 (21/12/63) in which Smasher creates havoc trying to assemble the bits and bobs to make up a pirate costume for a fancy dress party.
As I've said in this strand before it is a pretty impossible task to track down an artists first published work without some sort of input from the artist themselves as we've had here in Trevor's case.
Kashgar wrote:
As I've said in this strand before it is a pretty impossible task to track down an artists first published work without some sort of input from the artist themselves as we've had here in Trevor's case.
It's good to see some of Robert Nixon's early Roger the Dodger strips reprinted in Classics from the Comics at the moment. (The current issue has the first (?) appearance of Roger's rival, Winnie the Wangler.)
The usual practice is for artists to ghost existing strips before they're given their own so, like Ray says, it's impossible to tell where some artists started if their ghosting technique was good. Moving off at a tangent slightly, does anyone know who drew some of the later Jonah strips? Some of them look ghosted.
Hi Lew, Re the later Jonah strips and who drew them. The answer is Ken Reid did, sort of! In 1961 Ken Reid, who was never in the most robust of health, fell ill and found that he couldn't keep up with his weekly strip schedule, at least not without some help. Therefore what happened with some of his work, and Jonah in particular, was that he just supplied the simplest pencil sketches to be inked in and finished off in the Thomson offices by one of the staff artists. A system that they continued with until Jonah's cancellation in June 1963. In fact possibly the most iconic of all Jonah images, that for the cover of the 1962 Beano Book, was done in this way and is not 100% Ken Reid.
