Thursday 18 September 2014

The Castle of King Splud

Just so there's not a massive amount of time with nothing happening while I'm preparing the next article, and in a massively desperate attempt at "topical relevance", here's a feature-length adventure from my favourite Scottish cartoonist (or maybe favourite cartoonist all round), Mr. Bob Dewar. Taken from the 1990 Beezer book (meaning it was published in 1989).











It was only after scanning these pages that I noticed my scanner appears to have hairs on it, hence, we have hairy pictures there. Sorry about that - one of the few disadvantages of living with a cat.

11 comments:

  1. As long as that hair's free, I don't think people will mind too much, THB. Lovely artwork.

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    1. Good idea, a virtual gift from me to the world, ha!

      Are you familiar with much of Bob Dewar's stuff?

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    2. I wasn't overly familiar - I knew his name and his style. Liked his Three Bears stuff.

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  2. Some excellent artwork here! I haven't heard of Bob Dewar until I read your post this afternoon... Where can I find more of his comic work? I have just checked online and saw two books on his website.

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    1. Never heard of him??? Then you're in for a treat!

      For a start, Peter Gray did a few good posts on him a few years back:
      http://petergraycartoonsandcomics.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=bob+dewar

      And if you want some actual comics, look for Beezer, Topper and the combined Beezer & Topper comics from the late-eighties to early-nineties. Also Beanos from that same era. He did stuff for the short-lived Plug comic as well.

      He also popped up in various Beano summer specials throughout the Nineties, and was in the Beezer annuals until the last one in 2003 (2002).

      I've stuck some of his things up here in the past, but not as much as I should have. Expect lots more in the future though!

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    2. Aha, so that's who illustrated the Lumpy Gibbon in Plug!

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    3. What strips did he draw in Beezer, Topper and the Beano weeklies?

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    4. Let's see, off the top of my head he did...

      Emlyn the Gremlin and a stint on the Three Bears for the Beano weekly;

      Sting and Ishtar for the Beezer & Topper;

      Various one-offs for the annuals, including many feature-length "all-star" adventures like the one above, plus characters like Splodge the gnome, the Beano Bugs, the Beano Babies, and Sidney's Zoo.

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  3. I don't have enough words of praise for Bob Dewar's artwork. I'm glad you're a big fan: even in overviews of DC Thomson artists, he quite often gets overlooked, despite having a stunning painterly pop art style that quite frankly was working on a different level to most of his peers (as brilliant as they a/were).If he'd lived in New York, he'd be a lauded Mad contributor up there or a better man's Peter Max, but sadly he's just another humble UK cartoonist creating a weekly stream of masterpieces to 0 recognition for 50 years.. crazy to think it took until this year for him to get his first exhibiton (and gutted I missed it!)

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    1. Yeah, think I only read about that exhibition AFTER it had happened, gutted!

      The same could be said about virtually ANY of the UK cartoonists - if Ken Reid or Tom Paterson or Paul Sample or David Parkins were American, you can guarantee there'd be big hardback retrospective coffee table books covering everything they'd ever done on the shelves of Forbidden Planet...

      And in the realms of "Sod it" I'm going to get more Bob Dewar stuff up here tonight!

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    2. Go for it! Btw, if anyone's interested, here's possibly Dewar's first ever interview with the press about his art, only from earlier this year: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/books/bob-dewar-on-life-as-a-cartoonist-and-illustrator-1-3357985

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