Last minute Summer Special thing

Tomorrow's the last day of August, which SORT OF means it's the last day of Summer. Again. And Summer's not Summer without a few Summer Specials, right? Well, with that in mind, and with a slightly undersized scanner meaning lots of fiddling about with MS Paint, let's be having a look at...

The Bash Street Kids Summer Special 1999!

See what I mean about the scanner? Got no problem with over-sized comics, but it doesn't help with people who're doing important things like this!

Steve Bell's Cheeky Puzzles

Everyone knows about the satirical penguin-fancier Steve Bell, don't they? Well, before he started drawing John Major as a pathetic version of Superman and David Cameron as a walking, talking condom, he did stuff for the kids. As well as a funny thing about gremlins in Jackpot, he did some puzzle pages for Cheeky. These are the two I've found so far - there may or may not be more of these (I haven't read every single issue of Cheeky ever). Also they're both mazes, but VERY WELL DRAWN mazes. Observe.

I know I haven't mentioned this yet, but if it isn't immediately obvious, ALL the pictures on this blog can be clicked on to be made bigger. And then clicked again to be made even bigger. Magic, eh? As if your own eyes have a "zoom" function!

The Hunt for the Flinklegloop

Presented here is a fun, silly story by a fun, silly man called Jimmy Glen. It concerns James, the World's Worst School Boy, and in this strip from a 1990 Dandy, James is on a nature ramble. He gets pestered by his strange "friend", Hazel the Nut, who speaks in her own odd dialect. Turns out she's hunting for something called a "flinklegloop" (which is poolgelknilf backwards, obviously!). Let's see how she does:

Ah, of course! She can't find one, because she doesn't know what they look like. Nobody's ever caught one, because nobody's ever seen one before. That's where the Dandy readers come in. Nice way to get the imagination stirring, yes?

Fast forward twelve weeks, and we get to see what several kids think a flinklegloop might look like!

They all got a prize there (I'd've given a bigger prize to Anna-Marie Knott for that nutty deer-headed mothman... thing). And they got to see their artwork in a (then) massively popular comic too! Those wonderfully weird designs were done having been given just a single nonsense word. Not a description, not a given number of limbs or eyes or whatever, just a word. And who knows how many other entries there were? Never stop a youngster from doodling is the lesson here, I suppose. Or beware of flinklegloops, because they're mad.

Les Barton's AUTOTEACH

From the 1979 Topper annual, one of the funniest comic strips ever made about a robot teacher and its class of murderous pupils. Enjoy!

For me, the funniest parts are the headmaster's reaction at Autoteach's entrance, and when Autoteach rises from the edge of the cliff with a mighty "That's what YOU think!".

Haven't read many Topper or Beezer comics, so the annuals (of which there's a plentiful amount!) always bring up nice (or hilarious) surprises such as Autoteach here. More to come in the future, obviously.

X-Ray Specs has a horrible disease

There's excessive movement lines in comics, then there's RIDICULOUSLY excessive movement lines in comics, then there's ridiculously excessive movement lines in comics that look like they were drawn after sixty-three cans of LSV. During an earthquake. And then there's this one by Mike Lacey (maybe, or perhaps Henry Davies?), from the 1985 Monster Fun annual.

When the characters are standing still, are they supposed to look like they're wobbling with excitement?

What's going on there then, eh? Nice bit of product placement too - Buster comics, a Yorkie bar, and Disney cartoons. A fun strip overall, but those lines!

A book about robots by someone who hates robots

In 1985, Wayland Publishers decided to put out another book in their Topics series of educational titles - this one would be about robots, and would introduce children to this fascinating and constantly evolving science. The man they chose for the task of writing said book was a Mr. Graham Rickard - who it turned out really didn't like robots. He just wanted to go skiing instead! But, ski poles don't pay for themselves, so the book had to be written. Graham wasn't going to go quietly though - here's an opportunity to grab the kids from an early age, and to tell them that robots are NOT a good thing. Here is that book, time to do some learning!

Max Overload! - Part 2

Here we go again, with the next comic from Dark Horse's short-lived games magazine, Max Overload! - today, it's a nice little comic about ToeJam & Earl, written by Anne Caulfield (travel writer and Lenny Henry script writer), and drawn by Woodrow Phoenix (who also did Ecco the Dolphin for Sonic The Comic and The Sumo Family for The Independent On Sunday). Let's get the funk out, or something...

Obligatory Dandy Dedication

I'm a few days late with this, clearly, but everyone's heard the news by now: The Dandy is dead. Sort of. It's still got until the 4th of December (nice of them to let it shuffle on to its 75th birthday), so that's... another fifteen issues to go? And it'll carry on in digital form after that. What that entails, I do not know. I don't have an iPad and'm not really a fan of reading comics on a computer screen, so it may as well be dead.

There's been tributes and comments all over the place this last week - nice sentimental stuff from the likes of John Wagner and Lew Stringer; "sensible" bollocks from big-heads like Charlie Brooker; a sad little satirical cartoon from Lee James Turnock; and an agreeably honest look at what went wrong from Kid Robson. So, what more can I add? Nothing much, except for a look back at happier times.

Up the Boo Aye, Shooting Pookakies

Right then! Up the Boo Aye, Shooting Pookakies, published in 1980, is a collection of poems by the Rochdale Cowboy, Mike Harding - poet, singer-songwriter, author, broadcaster, stand-up comic, travel writer, filmmaker, playwright. The only thing he hasn't done is the illustrations for this book - they were done by Rodger McPhail. Usually, he's a top-notch wildlife illustrator, but when presented with Mr. Harding's strange imagination... Oh, what results! Presented here is the majority of the book's illustrations, save for a few black-and-white ones and the odd double-page spread (no matter how many attempts I made, I couldn't get these scanned properly - but the book's cheap enough on Amazon anyway).