Comics UK

Having seen black and white reprints of Ali Ha Ha in Hotspur I somehow assumed that Ken’s original sets weren’t in colour. A mate recently sent me a picture of an original that he owns and it turned out I was wrong. The sad thing is that DC Thomson actually used students to sit in the art room bleaching the colours out of some Ali Ha Ha artwork pages, presumably for reprinting ease!..

....As a horrified mariner might say while observing a seaweed-covered Jonah clambering into his lifeboat:

"AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!"

Phil R.

thanks phil for the scans and your thoughts..

Its a bit easier to see the difference between Ken and Frank on this strip now..just look at the other characters..

Having just acquired some late issues of Comic Cuts from forum member 'booksandcomics' I was pleased to discover that they contained these early Ken Reid strips ('Super Sam' and 'Foxy' have, of course, already been seen thanks to klakadak-ploobadoof but 'Billy Boffin' is entirely new to me). Though a million miles away from the comic brilliance of Jonah and Frankie Stein it's interesting to see that some aspects of his unique style were already beginning to shine through: Billy's mushroom-infested house and Foxy's boxing glove 'surprise' for example. AP must have kicked themselves for letting him be poached by DC Thomson when Comic Cuts ceased publication later that same year!







At first sight Super Sam might seem to have been AP's answer to Desperate Dan, though in my opinion it probably owed more to American characters such as Joe Palooka and L'il Abner. Either way it clearly wasn't Ken's cup of tea and one suspects that he was only too happy when that particular strip came to an end.

- Phil Rushton

Excellent, Phil. Thanks for showing those. I'd never seen those Ken strips before.

Brilliant stuff. There's a kind of weight and fury behind his comic violence that makes it funnier than similar slapstick by other artists.

That wolf in the last panel looked real mean!!

Wolf? It's a fox, the strip is called Foxy!

Ken proving a success at Thomsons can't have been the only thing leaving a bad taste in AP's mouth. They also nicked the Foxy idea.

Just for everyone's information an editor from Thomson told me that almost a third of the Ali Ha Ha strips were destroyed by the bleaching process despite Mike Barratt's best efforts, who was assigned to try and clean up the worst of the pages after the students had finished with them!

Ken's time with AP was pretty short Phil. About six to seven months before he left to start work on Roger the Dodger in the Beano.