Early Ken Reid Book

[philcom55]

Nice find on the market stall this morning: 'The Adventures of Fudge', written and illustrated by a twenty-year-old Ken Reid in 1939 (the cover features a 'Fudge the Elf' doll that was produced to tie in with Reid's popular cartoon character from the Manchester Evening News ). As far as I'm aware this original tale of Fudge and Speck's encounter with the sinister Pearl King was the first book in the series and is now surprisingly rare. Not bad for £2! The frontispiece shown below the cover is the only colour illustration contained inside, but there are lots of black & white drawings interspersed in the text. It's all tremendous fun but I doubt if anyone would recognize this as Reid's work if they only knew him by later strips such as Jonah; instead the influence of Disney and Heath-Robinson is noticeable everywhere (I nearly included 'Noddy' artist Van der Beek as well until I realised that Enid Blyton's famous character didn't appear for another 10 years - so it's at least conceivable that the influence was the other way round! ). Looking on with hindsight, however, it is just about possible to spot some slight touches of the grotesque which hint at what was to come...

- Phil Rushton

[Digifiend]

Wow. Wouldn't have guessed it was a Ken Reid one if you hadn't said. Sometimes you just don't know an artists full range of abilities.

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

WOW! a real find there, Phil.....probably worth a few bob as well. Apparantly KEN was a big film fan in his pre-published days and beyond, and much of the FUDGE the ELF artwork was inspired by characters from Disney's SILLY SYMPHONIES series, which were ambitious one-off short cartoons [which ran from 1929 onwards] where much experimental work leading up to feature production was done------sorry, I can't pinpoint the exact chararacter[s] out of these Disney films that directly influenced FUDGE, ----there were literally hundreds of these characters overall in these films, but even a cartoonist of KEN'S calibre must surely have been impressed by the DISNEY work of the 30s and 40s.


The REID panels of FUDGE that I have seen are still recognizably the work of KEN and very fantasy-bound, though the work is restrained by the standards of his later excesses.

[Jonny Whizz]

Now, that's something of a far cry from some of his other later work! Maybe as he became older he started to have stranger and darker ideas? I think these examples show that he was always interested in fantasy, something which became a huge part of his later stuff, especially for IPC. The pictures are lovely, extremely well done and Ken Reid was without doubt one of the greatest comic artists. What a brilliant find!

[Jim Medway]

Savoy Books of Manchester reprinted a couple of volumes of Fudge the Elf in the 80's.