This Is Not Who We Were

If there's anyone still "out there" in Internetland, my apologies. It's been a long, weird Summer. They could make a film out of it, maybe. It wouldn't be a very good film, but it'd involve extreme emotional opposites - dizzying heights of happiness, nauseous lows of depression, love and heartbreak, lies and deceit, scary gangsters, threats of every kind imaginable, death, courtroom dramas, some good music, a lot of booze...

But that's not what we're here to discuss. This is a "fun" and "happy" place where fun and happy things are looked at. Normal service will resume shortly, but for now (just to "tide things over"), here's some cultural sensitivity courtesy of DC Thomson, circa 1993. Enjoy in an "Oh we're so much more enlightened twenty years later" sort of way.

The Beano Boys

Just something quick here - I was going to save it until February but odds are I'd've forgotten about it, or even lost it by then, so it's here now instead. From a 1987 issue of Escape ("The Modern Guide to Comics and More") is this obituary piece on Mr. Ken Reid, with tributes from Leo Baxendale, Pat Mills, Savage Pencil, Davy Francis, Kevin O'Neill, Robert Nixon, Alan Moore and Lew Stringer.

From the same two page spread, there's also a mini interview with Leo Baxendale, talking about taking DC Thomson to court, and a few of his other (at the time) current projects.

Just in case anyone's interested, like.

Pus-filled unwelcome blemish

Right, here we go again! A trite observation about all these sub-Viz comics is that the bad ones seem to do a lot better than the good ones. Titles like Smut can carry on for almost two decades, whereas something like Adroit might disappear after two or three issues. On a similar merciful level, utter garbage like Jockstrap seem to've been wiped from the memory of all but a handful of people, so at least there's that.

Which brings us to Zit, a comic that seems to fall somewhere in between the "good" and the "awful" definitions - mostly to do with what was going on behind the scenes. Yes, we're looking at Zit today!

Low cost school trip, Ramraid Oxfam, "Christ that sun's hot", Yes that's right sir

I'll admit - it's been too bloody hot to be sitting in scanning comics and then writing about them. And somehow I've got a more active social life than I did this time last year, so that's why there's been nothing here for the past five weeks. I am (slowly) working on a "thing" about Zit, one of the more successful (as in, long-running) Viz clones, but I couldn't let this week pass un-noted, oh no. It's been 368 days since I started this blog thing, and in that time it's gotten thirty-four more "followers" than I was expecting, and around 28,000 more "views" than I was expecting, so thanks a lot to everyone, even if you've just stumbled across here whilst looking for something else.

If we all went to the same pubs, I'd happily get a round in, happily!

Meanwhile, just to tide things over (a weird bit of news last week led a handful of people into believing I had died), here's the Beano from the week I was born, in its entirity. Once the rain makes a return, I'll get back to "archiving" all those smutty comics.

Nasty little skank

Now here's an interesting one - a race-based comic. Not as in who-can-run-fastest but as in the "race" term that separates folk by their country of origin. This one here's made by and for British folk of Jamaican descent, and it's... not that bad really. It's called Skank, by the way, and it's from 1994-ish.

It's still bad, but nowhere near the levels of badness seen in Smut or Jockstrap. The covers don't do Skank many favours, mind - seeing these in a shop (or indeed, on my bedroom floor), you'd be forgiven for thinking they were a "different" kind of publication:

So, read on for humour based around drugs, violence, sex, homophobia, xenophobia, racial supremacy, rape, wife-beating and orally-satisfying cars, if that's your thing...

Something appalling

Here we have it now - POSSIBLY the absolute worst out of all the Viz knock-offs. There's still a couple of contenders in my possession, and there's bound to be about a hundred and twelve others that I don't yet know about, but for now, this one's pretty dreadful.

From that Scotland place, claiming to be "Scotland's very own adult comic" - no acknowledgement for the superd Electric Soup there (soon to be "covered" on this very blog).

In terms of "history", Jockstrap's a fairly late arrival to the rude comics party, being from around 1998-ish (no dates are given, but frequent mention is made of the World Cup in France - helps to pay attention to football sometimes). The paper's nice and shiny, but that's about the only praise this one'll be getting. No artists are credited either (if you could really call them that), and no jokes or structure is to be found either. Just so you know all that before carrying on...

Ray Harryhausen, RIP

We're running out of heroes here...

Naughty Nigel & The Imaginatively-Titled Comic

Here's a fairly "unique" title - from the publishers of the Sunday Sport (when it was all about alien loveslime killing petunias or the Loch Ness Monster being a Nazi U-boat, rather than the softcore tabloid it is today). It's the Sunday Sport Adult Celebrity Comic!

The first issue there's from 1997, so it's fairly late to the party in terms of jumping on Viz's bandwagon, but it DOES include work from some VERY talented/famous comics-folk. Comics-folk you wouldn't usually expect to draw smutty stuff. Ignore the labels at the bottom of this post if you want a surprise. But then, if you're under eighteen or at work, maybe you should just read the labels anyway. This IS the Sport after all, so be warned...

Adroit - "Clever or skillful in using the hands or mind", apparently.

Summed up by fellow rude comic "connoisseur" Mr. Turnock thusly:

"Hell's teeth, I only ever saw this once, when I was on holiday in Lowestoft! I always used to check out local newsagent's shops when I went on holiday and the only thing I remember about this was its title, so the contents couldn't have been that memorable."

Well I've found an issue of it, and it's certainly... different?

Straight away, the cover's different to the usual Viz-a-like "bunch of characters standing around swearing at each other", so it's a start. Let's see what's inside, yes?