Preview: KEN REID'S WORLD WIDE WEIRDIES

 

In just two week's time, Rebellion will publish their latest Ken Reid collection, and it's a real winner! World Wide Weirdies collects the first two years of full page illustrations that Ken drew for Shiver and Shake and Whoopee! back in the mid-1970s, and they're all reproduced in full colour as in the original comics. 

The "weirdies" were mostly from ideas sent in by the readers and it's clear that Ken must have relished drawing them. These detailed, comic-horror images are easily on a par with his 1960s work for Odhams. In other words, some of the best work of his career! You owe it to yourselves to treat yourselves for Christmas or ask someone to buy you this book as a present. It deserves a place on the bookshelves of everyone who enjoys great artwork! 

Hopefully Rebellion will bring us more Ken Reid classics in the years to come. There's still quite a lot to choose from; Sub and the other football strips from Scorcher, Banger and Masher from Valiant, Tom Horror's World from Whoopee! and of course more Faceache from Buster! (Personally I think Banger and Masher is a good one but it doesn't seem to be a strip that most people remember.) 

Plus it would be great if D.C. Thomson would publish a Jonah collection! 

Anyway, enough waffle from me. Here's the Press Release from Rebellion, along with a few sample pages I'm able to show you...

• CREATIVE TEAM: Ken Reid
• RELEASE DATE: 28 November 2019
• HARDCOVER, 112 pages
• PRICE: £19.99 (UK) $24.99 (US)
• ISBN: 9781781086926
• DIAMOND: SEP191942

Glorious grotesques from around the globe! Beautiful and bizarre illustration collection from the legendary British cartoonist (ir)responsible for Faceache released to coincide with the holidays! World Wide Weirdies collects the almost weekly run of Reid's beautifully bizarre illustrations from IPC's Whoopee! and Shiver and Shake. Usually displayed in color on the back cover, they are among the most striking images to have appeared in British comics!
Available in print from: book stores, Amazon, and UK comic book stores via Diamond.

Available in digital from: Treasury of British Comics webshop & apps for iPad, Android and Windows 10

Recommended Reading: LEO BAXENDALE'S SWEENY TODDLER

My thanks to Rebellion for sending me a copy of Leo Baxendale's Sweeny Toddler, a very nice 100 page hardback collection. The book covers the start of the strip from Shiver and Shake No.1 (10th March 1973) up to Whoopee! dated 7th June 1975 which I think are all the Sweeny Toddler strips that Leo drew before Tom Paterson took over. There are also six "ghosted" pages that I noticed which the book mentions. I wasn't able to identify all the "ghost" artists although I'm pretty sure at least one is by Barrie Appleby.

As well as being a very funny collection, the book is significant because it's some of Leo's last work for mainstream comics before he went independent with Willy the Kid and Baby Basil. It's interesting that Rebellion have chosen to start their Leo Baxendale books with this one, but Sweeny Toddler was such a popular character that it's the obvious choice. I hope in future we'll see collections of Clever Dick, The Swots and the Blots (from when Leo took over the strip in March 1969) and selected highlights from Wham! A Grimly Feendish collection would be good too, but as Leo only drew about 20 of those, credits would have to be shared with Stan McMurtry and others. 

For the moment though, we have the Sweeny Toddler book, and very welcome it is too. Hopefully it'll sell well enough to guarantee more Leo Baxendale books... and a few reprinting Tom Paterson's Sweeny Toddler strips too!

Leo Baxendale's Sweeny Toddler is released on 25th July and will be ready to order soon from the Treasury of British Comics shop:
https://treasuryofbritishcomics.com/catalogue/

You can read my review of the book here:
https://lewstringer.blogspot.com/2019/04/preview-leo-baxendales-sweeny-toddler.html

Which humour strips of Leo's (and other artists) from Odhams, Fleetway, and IPC would YOU like to see collected? Post your thoughts below! 

Christmas Comics: WHOOPEE! (1984)

1984 still seems very recent to me but for any younger readers out there no doubt it seems a lifetime ago, or even a time before you were born. I remember on one visit to the IPC offices at King's Reach Tower that year, Bob Paynter (Group Editor of the humour comics) gave me this copy of Whoopee! dated 29th December 1984, a few weeks before it was due to hit the shops. I was immediately impressed by Robert Nixon's excellent cover. Nixon was an aficionado of Roy Wilson's style and brought the same sense of fun and decoration to this cover as Wilson had on Christmas covers of previous decades. Robert Nixon drew everything on this cover, including the Christmas page borders, the logo, and even the price!

Whoopee!, launched in 1974, was one of IPC's most successful comics, running for 11 years before merging into Whizzer and Chips. This then, is the comic's last Christmas issue.

Inside, kicking off the 32 page comic was the lively Boy Boss drawn by the great Frank McDiarmid. Christmas pages always allow artists to go the extra mile (at no extra fee I hasten to add) and Frank decorated the borders with loads of festive stuff for this year...



Gran's Gang was a quirky idea and it needed an artist with a funny, distinct style to deliver the goods. Ian Knox was the perfect choice. Just look at the physical appearances of those characters!


Sweeny Toddler took up the centre pages of that issue and what a great job by Tom Paterson! (I'm guessing Graham Exton was the scriptwriter on this.) "Roast toddler stuffed with jelly babies and dolly mixtures" it says on the menu. Yes it's Santa about to eat a baby! Perhaps the most horrific image ever seen in an IPC comic, - and in a full page splash panel too. This is closer in tradition to the Krampus.


How could anyone top that? Well, perhaps not that issue's Frankie Stein strip. Robert Nixon was a fantastic artist and his version of Frankie was very popular indeed but I've always felt the fun-styled IPC Frankie was never a patch on Ken Reid's original for Wham!. Then again, times and tastes change, and as I was 25 when this issue of Whoopee! came out I was far older than the readership it was intended for so what do I know? Compare this page below by Bob Nixon to the one by Ken Reid from 18 years earlier and see what you think.


Plunge into the past again to see another Christmas comic with all the trimmings soon!

It's Judge Sweeny Toddler!

Back in 1985 IPC indulged in a rare moment of self-parody in the comics departments when the cover of their humour weekly Whoopee! spoofed 2000AD. For one week only the popular bad baby strip Sweeny Toddler became Judge Sweeny Toddler in a homage to Judge Dredd. Even the logo for that issue was redesigned to mimic the then-current 2000AD masthead.

Script by Graham Exton, artwork by Tom Paterson. Anyone found not laughing will be sentenced to 30 days in an iso-cube.