The All-rounders.

[tony ingram]

Well, you learn something new every day. I know he was a bodger on Buster and I knew he did a couple of cartoons for Cor!! but in all the pub talk I had with him at comic marts in the Eighties he never mentioned he drew strips for the other comics.

Lew

I rather got the impression he wasn't fond of them. He apparently asked to be allowed to work on 2000AD specifically in order to avoid being transferred back to Whizzer & Chips after Monster Fun was canceled.

As I understood it that was purely in the capacity of being on the art department though, (design work, paste ups, etc) not actually drawing strips at the time. If he did do any strips for W&C they'd have just been fill-ins presumably?

Lew

Yes, I talked to him fairly recently about his time at IPC and he mentioned he did Odd Ball, Sid's Snake and various others, but in the style of their regular artists. He worked on W&C for quite awhile I believe, then Monster Fun for much of its run.

[Jonny Whizz]

Barrie Appleby and Wayne Thompson - who are both better known as humour strip artists - both drew series of Billy the Cat for The Beano. Richard Elson also drew Billy in the comic (and in the 2004 annual), as well as drawing Tim Traveller for the previous year's annual, and a small amount of other Beano work, alongside his regular work for Sonic the Comic and others.

[Kashgar]

When I used the term 'all-rounder' I was using it in the cricketing sense of the word i.e. someone who would be as likely to give a decent display with either bat or ball. Therefore the fact that some artists renowned for their skills in one dept did the odd dodgy try-out in the other, usually early in their careers, hardly counts. People like Eric Bradbury would count as an all-rounder if that was the case and I don't think he does.
Other artists from the DCT stable who were skilful in this regard would include Bill and Albert Holroyd and Ken Hunter. All, like Charlie Grigg, blessed with a style they could shift from one genre to the other. Ron Smith on the other hand had a very accomplished looking comic style that was somewhat at odds with his straight work.
Then you have artists who I would term serial all-rounders in that they spent some of their career drawing in one style only to adopt a different style later on which they rarely left thereafter. Two examples of this would be George Parlett, who had a very pleasing comic strip style that he used in the earlier part of his career which he then replaced with a slightly wishy-washy straight style, presumably because it got him more work, in later years, and secondly James Malcolm who spent a decade and more as a straight artist before totally changing to comic mode.