The artwork was by the superb Albert Pease, who had previously been known for his splendid Casey Court illustrations on the back of Chips for many years. The drawings are fantastic examples of top class cartooning, although the racial caricatures are uncomfortable to see today. Nevertheless, here was Fleetway giving a character plenty of room for a decent story. A pity that these sort of longer stories didn't become the norm in British humour comics, instead of the single page / double page (or less) format that most strips still have to this day.
This example from Knockout dated 9th September 1961.
Dennis and the gang have a 4 pager each week in The Beano which does lead to surreal stories...so that is good...
ReplyDeleteYes, but the norm is still for the rest of the comic to have shorter strips. Imagine a humour comic in the format of 2000AD, with six stories of five pages each. It'd allow for more characterisation and richer plots than the short slapstick themes that have been the norm since the days when strips has to be short because the comics themselves only had eight pages.
ReplyDeleteWe have the Danger Mouse comic that has a long story (8 pages I think), but it'd be nice to see a humour comic with several longer stories in it.
Being a big fan of all things connected with Billy Bunter this is an amazing read. The big fat bunter book must have only scratched the surface. Surely time for volume 2!
ReplyDeleteNo chance of a volume 2 I'm afraid. At least not from the same people who did the first book.
ReplyDeletelove the trail of rice pudding...
ReplyDeletecomic libraries are a the long stories...they were good...
True, but most didn't develop the characters as such, but were a series of slapstick events until they reached their conclusion. Basically a long version of a single page. Still, they were popular enough for quite a while and were fun to work on.
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