Comics UK

George Shiers wrote:Whereas his earlier style in Smash and Wham was absolutely fantastic I think his later Faceache strips were also brilliant. His later pages are an awful lot calmer than his earlier ones (this could be because editors started to notice what he was hiding in the background, and instructed him not to ), but I think this calmer Ken suited Buster very well. Buster was aimed at a different, perhaps slightly younger audience than the Power comics mentioned above, and his style evolved to suit that.

He definitely did not decline, as you say in the title.

Raven wrote:I don't quite agree, either. I don't think it would have been possible for Reid to continue in the heavily detailed, hyper style of his '60s work, fifty two weeks a years, for decades; it's a very taxing business and you can only keep that up for a certain amount of time, and Reid did start to suffer quite seriously, at one point, didn't he? Similar happened with Leo Baxendale who had to employ a looser, more shorthand style as a survival mechanism, but making that work for him, creating an energetic, cartoony new look for comic strips.

That kind of frenzied vitality Reid is known for also wasn't suitable for all strips, anyway, and he'd had often done relatively calmer strips, too; people often forget his football comic strips, for example. I think his Martha's Monster Make-Up in Monster Fun, for example, is as good as anything he's done, and was perhaps more child reader-friendly than some earlier work; same for much of Faceache.

So I think his style changed as comics changed (they certainly grew tamer in the '80s as ideas about what was appropriate for children seemed to change), and because it would have been impossible to continue at that hyper pitch indefinitely, but the stories were just as well told, and not always especially toned down in terms of his outlandish/ 'grotesque' elements.

philcom55 wrote:I think the decline in Ken's strips can be dated to that point in the 1970s when IPC stopped him from writing his own scripts and 'banned' the more gruesome style he'd employed on Wham!, Pow! and Smash!

philcom55 wrote:A few may have been but most of the file copies I've seen show Ken being paid for art and script.

- Phil R.

philcom55 wrote:A few may have been but most of the file copies I've seen show Ken being paid for art and script. I think the chance to write his own work (and be paid for it) was one of the main things that attracted him to Odhams in the first place. He had, of course, always written his Fudge strips.

- Phil R.

philcom55 wrote:I think the decline in Ken's strips can be dated to that point in the 1970s when IPC stopped him from writing his own scripts and 'banned' the more gruesome style he'd employed on Wham!, Pow! and Smash! From then on it's clear that he didn't have the same personal investment in the stories - though the continuing brilliance of his back cover illustrations for World-Wide Weirdies, etc. showed that he was still capable of great things.

Incidentally Kid, if you haven't already come across it this old thread included some interesting examples of earlier work produced during what might be thought of as 'The Rise of Ken Reid':

http://comicsuk.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=127&t=5017

- Phil Rushton

Mr McScotty wrote:I think some of Ken Reid's Faceache sets in the Buster in the mid - late 70s were really good and on par with some (not all) of his 60s work at Odhams -- but there is no doubt that whilst he was still a great artist right to the very end some of his Faceache (and "Martha" and "Tom Horrors" ) sets in the 80s were starting to look a bit "stiff" and as a result (imho) a bit dated - and a lot (not all) of his latter sets consisted of a too many head (profile) shots - but even then he managed to get a few panels in that made your jaw drop.