Buster by Baxendale
The excellent Kazoop! blog is always worth a visit for fans of British comics and today is a perfect example of that. Blogmaster Irmantas has found the six Buster's Diary strips for the covers of Buster that Leo Baxendale did as fill-ins in 1967 and has posted four of them on his blog today. I was aware of them as they were listed in the Buster Index by Steve Holland and Ray Moore 20 years ago, but I don't think I'd seen them before.
Usually back then, a fill-in artist would be asked to 'ghost' the regular style but clearly Leo was allowed to do them in his own way with the distinctive style he was using at that time. Great stuff!
Head over to the Kazoop! blog here to see the four covers:
http://kazoop.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/buster-covers-by-leo-baxendale.html
Thanks for the plug, Lew. One small point - there was a total of six covers, not four, it's just that I've shown only four in the post. I think I will add the two remaining ones tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteThanks Irmantas. I'll amend that, and will look forward to seeing the other two. It's fascinating stuff, and quite unusual to see Buster having a kind of Wham! aspect to it. I'd heard years ago that he'd drawn those fill-ins but had forgotten all about it so it never occurred to me to try and track them down. Good find!
ReplyDeleteThe only time other than the last time by Jack you see Buster's full head of hair...unless tom Paterson did one...one time?
ReplyDeleteNot as I recall. Buster kept his cap firmly in place, like his dad Andy Capp. That Leo Baxendale panel is quite unusual in that it shows him cap less.
ReplyDeleteI never knew he'd ever been seen capless, except for in the final issue - more Tom Thug than Dennis the Menace there (though it predates Tom of course).
ReplyDelete