It puzzles me when I sometimes read comments saying that comics died in the mid-1980s because I know for a fact that the comics industry was really buzzing. (Quite often, those negative comments are from people who simply stopped buying comics when they left school in the Eighties.)
Many of us back then would meet up regularly at London Comic Marts at Central Hall (and of course the nearby Westminster Arms pub) and there was a genuine excitement about the new projects that were forging ahead. People such as Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Kevin O'Neill, Nick Landau, and more were the first wave of fans-turned-pro to enter the industry, and then those of us working for Marvel UK and Oink! were the next wave. (Of course there had been previous decades of many new creators joining the industry but by and large they hadn't come the route of fanzines and organised fandom, because it didn't really exist as such until the 1960s).
Most of us who freelanced for Oink! (and also for Marvel UK and 2000AD) were around the same age, and perhaps too raw at the time for the long established comics, but we had ideas and developing styles to do something a little different. I'm not saying we knew better than our predecessors, just that we didn't want to comply to the same traditional formula, at least not at that young age.
Anyway, I won't waffle on any further. It was a magical time in comics and I'm glad I was there. Oink! never set the world of comics alight like Watchmen or V for Vendetta did, but we worked hard and enjoyed what we did and I'm glad it's still fondly remembered 40 years on.
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